The performance installation Moral Horizons of Pain (MHP) responds to calls to centre touch, presence, and poetics in the praxis of medical care. In their account of the project, researcher-creators Pratim Sengupta, Ariel Ducey, Martina Ann Kelly, Santanu Dutta, and Erin Knox describe MHP’s critical framing in relation to negative-form counter-monuments and Third Form theatre. They describe how the project allowed the spectator-participants to recognize the moral horizons too often silenced in technocentric approaches to pain and suggest how such projects can contribute to broader social justice initiatives in the medical humanities.Read more of the research in this article in Canadian Theatre Review: https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.195.009
Dr Ariel Ducey
Dr. Ariel Ducey is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, University of Calgary. Her research centers on issues of responsibility, ethicality, knowledge, and emotions in the institutions and practices of health care and medicine. Ariel has studied how frontline care providers in New York City create meaning and opportunity at the intersection of two industries that are increasingly organized according to the logic of markets — health care and education. She has published on affect and caregiving labor in early, influential edited collections, and has led interdisciplinary, qualitative research examining values and practices in pelvic floor surgery and their impact on women’s health. Ariel led a transdisciplinary project funded by NFRF on medical ways of sensing and knowing, with Drs. Sengupta and Kelly, and graduate students from sociology, family medicine, and learning sciences, including Santanu Dutta and Megha Sanyal. The research team created a free, public, interactive modelling installation called Moral Horizons of Pain which was mounted at Canmore artsPlace (Alberta),and won a Making and Doing Award at the annual meetings of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in 2023.
An animated film on critical phenomenology of pain, as part of the public installation titled ‘Moral Horizons of Pain’