While I can’t display a dynamic and interactive figure in this print, I request that you imagine the various disciplines and schools of thoughts listed to be in a lively conversation, with various voices joining in at different times.
Pedagogy
• Anthropology
• Architecture and Urban Studies
• Art History and Studio Art
• Biology
• Disability Studies
• Economics
• Ethics and Religious Studies
• Global Studies and International Relations
• Jewish Studies
• Legal Studies
• Medicine and Life Sciences
• Philosophy
• Postcolonial Studies
• Science Studies
• Translation Studies
• Women's Gender and Feminist Studies
Chapter seven which looks at art as a tool to engage with developments in RGTs and biomedicine activates the idea of an interdisciplinary conversation in a different manner. There I invite a group of people to a dinner table to have a conversation.
In 2005, I presented a paper at the European Science Foundation Conference. The conference was called “Biomedicine within the limits of Human Existence and took place in Doorn in the Netherlands.” One of the other presenters was Laurie Zoloth, who currently is the Margaret E. Burton Professor of Religion and Ethics in the Divinity School and the Senior Advisor to the Provost for Programs on Social Ethics at the University of Chicago. In the past, she acted as president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. Like so many presentations that I listened to at the time, her presentation titled “Living Under the Fallen Sky” first approaches ethical questions of what she calls “basic biomedical research” from various disciplinary directions before inserting private information, such as the memory of driving her children back from school, the color of her daughter’s hairclip, and finally the story of her family’s [23] visit to a water park. Still very insufficient as a listener to English presentations in the complex field of biomedicine, I struggled to follow her argument. In front of my inner eye were images of the snow falling in front of Zoloth’s window in Chicago, petri dishes, the color of one of Zoloth’s daughter’s hair clip forgotten in the garden, stem cells, Zoloth’s son in the back of her car when driving back from a school retreat demanding to go to a water park, and a 27- week-old baby struggling to breathe born to a devoted Hindu couple in the US, his mother wearing a yellow sari and both parents being good cooks. As I listen, my brain struggles to handle what feels like an overload of detailed information that seem unrelated to the topic addressed. In this dense mix of information and stories, I reach first a state of exhaustion and then gratefulness when towards the end of her presentation Zoloth’s mandate appears simple and manageable. She states: “We ought to remember that our neighbor, the scientist, is largely driven by the same sort of duties that any scholar learns to love – to speak the truth, and to show a new path across interesting terrain. Further, we need to work patiently to remind others that it is not rights but duties that make us human, and that the duty to heal is even prior to freedom” (Zoloth 2008: 309). Yes, it is true that my neighbor, in the sense of the person sitting next to me during ethical discussions regarding biomedical research that I attended (for example at the European Commission), would very likely have been a scientist and I agree, it did not appear that evil (a word Zoloth uses throughout her work) would have been on their mind when talking about the motivation for research conducted. Money and being at the “forefront” of research was though. My brain fails to filter information received by Zoloth. Instead, I take her story-soaked presentation as impulse to understand that biomedical research is about everything, even the color of one’s daughter’s hair clip. It is about memories and hopes for certain futures to materialize. However, if it is about everything, it is precisely also about biomedical research repeating, re-establishing and re-enforcing intersectional injustices, such as between citizens of Eastern European and Western European countries, when it comes to either be recipient of a novel treatment developed or provider of bodily substances used in research.
As a means to echo and “swing with” the notion that so much about how RGTs and biomedical practices are framed and discussed in various public spheres is about memories and hopes, I will conclude this section by having Foucault entertain the thoughts of a postdiciplinary pedagogue. Finally, I will end this section with a pedagogical voice from the past and thus with a memory. In my reading, Foucault’s idea of researchers as “the product of particular regimes of truth” relates well with notions developed by Henry Giroux, one of the founding theorist of critical pedagogy in the United States, best known for his groundbreaking work in public pedagogy. In his book, Trans(per)forming African American History and Identity, Maurice Stevens uses Giroux’s words and partly his own words to underline that we need to be [24] “advancing a pedagogical practice capable of ‘questioning the very conditions under which knowledge and identities are produced.’ […] Giroux posits that postdisciplinary pedagogy responds to the problem of ‘the relationship between knowledge and power, language and experience, ethics and authority […].’ Giroux’s postdisciplinary pedagogy, ‘examines the intersection between culture and power’” (Stevens 2003: 173 and Giroux cited in Stevens 2003: 173). When listening to lectures, such as the one referred to above by Zoloth, Foucault’s awareness of the situatedness of any research and any researcher and Giroux’s future leading work addressing necessary challenges to take on in postdiciplinary pedagogical research and practice, helped me to acknowledge that a researcher, such as Zoloth, found it important to provide the mix of information she provided. Yet, it is just as crucial for me as a pedagogy scholar to understand both the knowledge provided and ways in which I hear and think about it as situated within a net of culture and power.
One of the first pedagogues I ever learned about was Janusz Korczak.11 I believe that I did not first hear about him in an educational environment, but at home in the private sphere. Korczak is believed to have said, “children are not future people” (Korczak 1994: 4). Throughout this study it has been my training and my practice in pedagogy, but also the acquaintance of long-term “companions” such as Korczak, that continually reminded me to pay attention to what it is that diverse people experience now, instead of focusing on future promises or lives. In my pedagogical practice paying attention to what people experience now, and indeed using experiences in the here and now is a resource. For example, in the field of aesthetic education, attuning to the here and now has been a crucial tool to a pedagogy that is based on relational respect.
While Korczak’s statement is commonly read as an argument to respect children fully as persons, for me, his open and clear declaration had the capacity to remind me that first of all it is our responsibility as pedagogues to engage in the making of environments that foster societies to further human kind in performing being Mitmensch to each other and not being “more” Mitmensch to some than to others. I came across Korczak’s words again, shortly after rereading opinions on Adam Nash’s birth. Next, I came across a statement by Adam’s father who recently stated, “I think that what was the controversy, is, ‘What have we created?’” (Nash, Lisa. Quoted in Hendrickson, Molly, 2017: online source).
I suggest that in relation to Adam’s story, Korczak’s term “future people” can be read as a reminder of the peopled space of the here and now in which pedagogy acts. Every child, every person, has the right to first of all be a person in the here and now. Adam however, per my extended reading of Korczak’s concept, was a future person. He was a future person first; he was the one to [25] come into the future of his family, as discussed and planned on their family table, to save his sister’s future life. There is something unsettling about the idea of future people. And that something also has to do with the fact that there isn’t just one Adam being born after a discussion on one family table. Adam’s birth eased the path for legal frameworks outlining savior siblings to be discussed in various parliaments. Mostly, these discussions focus on PID