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Third Spaces: working with your own and other cultures (Core 2)

Overview

Module description

This module builds on the idea of the creation of a ‘third space’ between doctor and patient, developed in Core 1, and explores its construction and potential in other locations and contexts. Importantly, it encourages you to consider Western biomedicine in its own cultural context, and in relation to notions of the intercultural practice of medicine in both British and other geographical locations. The practicum extends your self-reflective capacities as a clinician, as well as extending the critical theoretical vocabulary you acquire in Core 1, into lived practice and experience. The facilitated reflective learning group supports you throughout this process of learning. You will be required to keep a placement diary.

The aim of this module is to focus on individuals’ standpoint and their creation of relationality between themselves and their professional ‘landscapes’, literal and emotional. In particular, it will consider the identities and purposes of interior and exterior spaces in healing and medicine; the ‘inscapes’ of individual practitioners and their negative capability; the relationship between individuals, teams and organisations, especially issues of standpoint, positioning and affect; and the negotiation of entry into traditional, indigenous, alternative and complementary medical practices, with its attendant complexities of culture and discourse.

The module will open with ideas of transitions and otherness, using these concepts to focus on creativity, the imagination and negative capability. It will continue Core 1’s exploration of the Western biomedical healing tradition. It will introduce key critical notions of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ via a range of critical theoretical frameworks, particularly feminism and post-colonialism. Alongside these readings in theory, you will consider other conceptualisations of healing, such as witchcraft and shamanic practices. These sessions will model a critical engagement with ‘other’ medical practices that neither appropriates nor repudiates them.

The distinctive epistemologies identified through this inquiry will support access to considerations of contemporary traditional, integrated and alternative healthcare practices in the UK, including British herbalism, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, and acupuncture, and their positioning in current discourses about integrated medicine. A constant theme will be your personal/professional identity, and the development of language and concepts through which you can explore and develop your understandings of your own practice and its location within your organisational culture and contexts, ideas of self and other, nomad theory and ‘researching below the surface’.

Two key components of the module will be a facilitated reflective learning group which will meet each week of the course; and a practicum in which you will seek to access either the practices of a medical tradition that is distinctively different from your own, or another Western medical specialty. In particular, the practicum will involve consideration of ideas of receptivity and inaction; of legitimate peripheral positioning; and the ethics of entry.

Indicative module syllabus

  • The Grail Myth: Thinking Transcultural Medicine
  • Difference and Otherness: Gender; Sexuality; Race; Nation
  • Practicum, supported by ongoing Facilitated Reflective Learning Group

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • understand the ways in which key concepts of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ are discursively constructed
  • understand and engage with contemporary traditional, complementary and alternative healthcare practices in the UK
  • form and sustain critically rigorous arguments
  • reflect critically on your own clinical practice both individually (in the placement diary) and in a group setting
  • write in both critical and more exploratory or experiential ways about the nature of your own clinical practice
  • identify and critique the boundaries between your own practice and that of other medical traditions
  • consider critically ideas of patient choice and improved patient care in the context of plural medicine
  • reflect and learn from the conscious and unconscious processes within the group, during the process in which group members are concerned with crossing the boundary into differing organisations within the practicum
  • reflect on gaining entry and locating yourself within your chosen organisation, particularly in relation to the 'organisation in the mind' (Armstrong 2000).