Transplant Imaginaries: Haunted Times, Segregated Spaces and Embodied Ethics

Contemporary biomedical innovations, particularly human organ transplantation, are championed across biomedicine, the media and the general public as successful life-saving interventions. However, interdisciplinary research has shown a rising bioethical anxiety regarding the meaning of transferring body parts from one deceased human to another. This project analyses this pressing bioethical issue through the lens of contemporary novels and films, because these media raise important concerns and anxieties often ignored in celebratory biomedical and public discourses. Through the completion of a research monograph, the organisation of UK and international events, and the creation of multi-media outputs on transplantation, this project will analyse not only the impact biotechnologies have on how we understand the human body in relation to health and illness, but also how transplantation is tied to larger issues of national belonging, social justice and bodily ethics.

While extensive research has focused on the often-problematic relation between donor and recipient, as well as on the global problems of organ donation, little attention has been given to the significance of either time or space in understanding the experiences of and social inequalities involved in organ transplantation. This project will address these gaps by examining how novels and films portray 1) haunting as central to the post-transplant experience; and 2) space as central to health care inequalities. The project offers a potentially significant contribution to post-transplant care in its consideration of how death relates to life and how absent others may feel present, and thus in offering a critical intervention into how patient narratives are heard and interpreted. In addition, it offers an important contribution to thinking how the architecture of health care may structure social hierarchies and, as a result, how segregation is produced through the very spaces of care.

This project is important because its engagement with illness and time, as well as with space and health inequalities, is central to rethinking contemporary politics, which rely on biological metaphors of exclusion. Its goal is therefore to re-examine understandings of social inequalities and social justice through the exploration of ethics in the context of the transplant body. That is, it addresses the critical issue of how life comes to be valued and why some lives are disposable or useful only for their organs. It thereby examines politics, particularly migration, hospitality and the ethics of welcoming the other, through the metaphor of bodily exchanges, always addressing the ever-pressing issue of how lives come to matter.

Transplantation is an interdisciplinary issue that is of concern to a wide public, and therefore a significant aim of this project is to make the research accessible to non-academic audiences. Medical and public fora are dominated by heroic transplant narratives and therefore this project has the goal of expanding the parameters of these discussions through a public dialogue between local and international transplant surgeons, artists and scholars, as well as through the creation of a freely available podcast series in which clinicians, artists and scholars discuss issues surrounding transplantation. The project also aims to contribute to and develop medical practice through the development of a large-scale online module, organised in collaboration with clinicians in South Africa, and through a public lecture at Edinburgh School of Medicine. These events aim to encourage public and medical engagement with knowledge often invalidated in the medical context but prevalent in public and fictional arenas. In so doing, its goal is to expand knowledge in this interdisciplinary area, which will enhance public knowledge and feed into my research, as well as provide potentially useful new approaches and new topics in the study and discussion of transplantation.

There are three primary non-academic audiences that stand to benefit from this project: clinicians, artists and the general public.

Organ transplantation is heralded as a biomedical triumph in public, media and medical discourses. Yet novels and films reveal a rising anxiety about the meaning of moving body parts from a deceased donor to a living recipient. This project will generate knowledge on and engagement with these growing ethical concerns of the relationship between the body, health and technology. This is a timely issue as life-extending technologies are increasingly normalised and expand into new terrains (e.g. womb transplants). Impact on non-academic audiences will be achieved through the following free and publicly accessible events: 1) an Interdisciplinary 'In-Conversation' with Artists, Clinicians and Scholars; 2) the Interdisciplinary Podcast Series 'Transplant Imaginaries'; 3) a Public Lecture at Edinburgh Medical School and a Cafe Scientifique; and 4) the development of a MOOC Module.

The outcomes of this project will benefit the public in three key ways:
i) by the enhancement of knowledge through a direct engagement with the general public.
By bringing together artists, medical practitioners and scholars, the public 'in-conversation' will provide a platform for panellists and the audience to consider varying perspectives on biotechnologies, and thereby to engage with and develop little discussed areas in transplantation. The podcast series will further this potential impact by engaging listeners in transplantation knowledge, expanding understanding beyond media and medical spheres, and thereby disrupting heroic narratives and influencing the landscape of transplantation knowledge.

ii) through cultural enrichment and new creative stimuli by providing new networking opportunities for medical practitioners, artists and academics, and by encouraging audiences to explore art as a form of creative knowledge production.
Working with artists will facilitate a platform for different modes of learning and engaging. The project will impact audiences by showing how art - particularly literature, film and music - plays a powerful role in our understandings and experiences of the body, health, illness and technologies. It will do this by encouraging artistic and public conversations at public events, as well as by encouraging engagement with art.

iii) the contribution to and development of medical practice through the development of a large scale online module (MOOC), a public lecture at Edinburgh Medical School and a cafe scientifique.
Clinicians and medical students are central to changing understandings of transplantation. The impact will be to facilitate means of listening to and engaging with experiences that may challenge the discipline's empirical foundation. This is not to dismiss the knowledge of transplant teams, but rather to offer an important critical intervention into how alternative transplant narratives may develop post-transplant care practices. These events have the potential to impact on the medical curriculum, especially through the rise in intercalated degrees in medical ethics and medical humanities. The MOOC will be undertaken early in the project to elicit feedback from a wider audience with the potential to influence the subsequent research in the project.

The outcomes of the project will demonstrate ways in which alternative accounts of transplantation may be heard. The project will give space to artistic expression as the means through which we may account for often pathologised experiences in the post-transplant context, and it will engage with diverse partners and audiences through multi-media platforms and public events.