Paper short abstract:

Boundary-work has often been analyzed as a practice by which science seeks to demarcate itself from other forms of knowledge. This paper approaches it from people’s everyday lives and bodily experiences, especially uncanny experiences, that have been pathologized in modern medical sciences.

Paper long abstract:

In modern medical sciences uncanny experiences, like visions, voices, telepathy, or encounters with the dead loved ones, have been treated as unreal, hallucinations, and pathologies of an individual mind or brain. To the subjects themselves, however, they may be very real and meaningful bodily sensations that force the subject to question common medical accounts about the human mind/body and the underlying natural-scientific worldview. The paper analyses ‘boundary-work’ (Gieryn 1999) between scientific and experiential forms of knowledge in context of ‘public engagement with science’ by drawing on written first-hand narratives of uncanny experiences that were spontaneously sent by Finnish people to the research project Mind and the Other (Academy of Finland 2013–2016). While boundary-work has often been analyzed as a practice by which science seeks to demarcate itself from other forms of knowledge, this paper approaches it from the “other side”, from people’s everyday lives, bodily experiences and “lay epistemologies”. It shows how, on one hand, scientific and experiential knowledge may be perceived as incommensurable by the experiencers. Especially medical science is imagined as a powerful discursive-material norm that restricts the possibility of human experience and ‘imposes un-negotiated meanings’ (Wynne 2006) and pathological identities on the subjects. On the other hand, fields like neuroscience are expected to hold potential to change the pathological labels and thus normalize and legitimate uncanny experiences in society. Moreover, science becomes narrated as a progressive and flexible system of knowledge that is open for people’s personal experiences, their own knowledge and expertise.