Ola Söderström : « Une co-expérimentation sur le rapport entre vie urbaine et psychose »

Résumé :

Geographers like other social scientists have learnt to look at biology and medicine with diffidence and distance. Diffidence because life scientists are suspected to be biological determinists. Distance because the social sciences have historically gained their autonomy and specificity by tracing a boundary separating them from the life sciences. As a consequence, disciplinary dialogue is usually reduced to critique (regarding for instance power/knowledge relations between psychiatrists and their patients) or pure service (e.g. concerning the location of healthcare facilities). Contra this impoverished dialogue, I will argue instead, together with other authors (e.g. Rose 2013), that new alliances are possible in a context where life scientists are increasingly post-determinist and social scientists increasingly interested in bodies and affects. Rather than purely theoretical, my argument will draw on an ongoing interdisciplinary research on the relations between urban living and psychosis. I will explain how we try to explore biosocial entanglements without reducing society to biology or biology to society. This involves, on the one hand, mutual learning and a reciprocal unpacking of our analytical categories and, on the other hand, the development of forms of ‘co-experimentation’ as a radical interdisciplinary intervention (Callard & Fitzgerald 2015). In my conclusion I will reflect on what such new alliances might mean for the future of research in geography.