In this session, I invite colleagues to jointly reflect on how that which is bracketed everyday and trivial is omnipresent in a forensic mental health care clinic and whether or not it could ever be evidence-based.
Long abstract:
In the early days of an ethnographic collaborative study aiming to build local infrastructure able to capture different forms of knowledges, as well as store them in the clinic's long-term memory (Bowker 1997), I find myself spending even more time than usual thinking about crisps. As I move around the clinic, not without difficulty, there are conversations about food, everywhere. How it is served, who touches it, how much of it one can have, and who should decide? What sort of food should the hospital make available to patients? How much should patients be allowed to buy and how often? Why are there conflicting rules regarding what can be brought in from the local shop? Meanwhile, in the research section of the clinic the "somatic body" is relegated to the lowest rung of the knowledge ladder. When it does feature it is in terms of blood samples, stress hormone levels and BMI to establish and set apart a forensic psychiattric "patient population" and to create a baseline to assess how treatment is progressing. This and potentially problematic plans to exnovate (Mesman 2008) and evidence-base chatting will be the core ingredients in this talk.