Performing Science and Medicine
Performing science and medicine is an interdisciplinary online working group
Image: Colour lithograph: “human vivisection”, published in Lustige Blatter. Berlin, c. 1910. [cropped] Illustration: Wellcome Library, London/Wellcome Images
Performing Science and Medicine
Lecture Series
Join us at: https://bard.zoom.us/j/89442837009
October 27, 6–7:30pm CET
Yelena Gluzman
The Dramaturgy of Personhood in Social Cognition Experiments
November 24, 6–7:30pm CET
Dehlia Hannah
Performative Experiments
December 15, 6–7:30pm CET
Performing Science and MedIcine meets the Medical Museion An Interdisciplinary Conversation
January 19, 6–7:30pm CET
Christopher Salter & Philippe Sormani
Design F(r)iction: Projects, Problems, and Practices
February 23, 6–7:30pm CET
Laura Forlano
Performing Type 1 Diabetes Data
March 23, 12:00–1:30pm* CET
Jonathan W. Marshall
Charcot as Dramaturg: Relations Between Charcot’s Practice & the Worlds of Performance, 1870s to the Present
April 20, 6–7:30pm CET
Stephen Scott-Bottoms
When Prophecies Produce: On the Performativity of Prediction in Experimental Psychology
May 24, 6–7:30pm CET
Hannah Star Rogers
Extending Art–Science–Technology Studies through Embodied Practice
*Note different time
October 27, 6–7:30 pm CET
The Dramaturgy of Personhood in Social Cognition Experiments
Yelena Gluzman (University of Alberta)
Do experiments on intersubjectivity, as have been conducted in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience research, attend to or bracket out the conditions that animate and situate their enactment? This talk examines the dramaturgy of laboratory experiments on non-normative or "other" minds, drawing out a distinction between those dramaturgies that rely on theater versus those that take up experimental theater, a 20th century movement characterized by theater performances that resist suspension of disbelief and the vanishing proscenium by dramatizing their own conditions of production. So, while theater is constitutive of traditional experimental design in psychology and cognitive neuroscience laboratory practice, this talk argues that social cognition experiments can resist reinscribing harmful normativities by taking up and cultivating the methodologics of experimental theater.
Yelena Gluzman is an Assistant Professor in Science, Technology and Society (STS), co-appointed between Media and Technology Studies and the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta, in Canada. She draws on her background of making experimental theater to theorize and experiment with ways of knowing at multiple sites: in the cognitive neuroscience lab, in access work and criptech, and in collaborative projects that bring together disparate disciplines, methods and worldviews. She has written extensively on research-creation, interdisciplinarity and reflexivity. Recently, her experimental ethnographic film on real-time captioning for d/Deaf and Hard-of-hearing students, Invisible Machines, received a number of awards, including the 2025 Making and Doing Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science.
Top: Karolina Sobecka, A Memory, An Ideal, and a Proposition (2017), Bottom: Image credit, Malthe Ivarsson
November 24, 6–7:30 pm CET
Performative Experiments
Dehlia Hannah
Contemporary artworks often take the form of scientific experiments. Ranging from works that borrow from laboratory aesthetics and technologies to precise reenactments of historical experiments, ‘performative experiments’ exhibit practices of scientific knowledge-making. This artistic genre forms a site of epistemological literacy that is critical to negotiating the turmoil of conflicting truth claims a rapidly changing biosphere.
Dehlia Hannah is a curator and Associate Professor of Environmental Aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University, with specializations in philosophy of science and aesthetics. Her forthcoming book Rewilding the Museum (Hatje Cantz, 2026) examines how artists and curators working with, and against, exhibition infrastructures to elaborate contemporary ideas of nature.