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The infidelity of place: medical simulation labs and disjunctures in pedagogical places
Author(s) -
Bartram Robin
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
sociology of health and illness
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 97
eISSN - 1467-9566
pISSN - 0141-9889
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9566.13002
Subject(s) - scholarship , materiality (auditing) , scripting language , extant taxon , sociology , sociology of scientific knowledge , knowledge production , work (physics) , epistemology , engineering ethics , psychology , computer science , knowledge management , social science , political science , aesthetics , engineering , mechanical engineering , philosophy , evolutionary biology , law , biology , operating system
Simulations are increasingly integral to scientific and social knowledge making. While a number of social scientists study simulation, extant literature is yet to fully investigate how simulated settings are different from and similar to other scientific places. I draw on scholarship on the importance of place within knowledge making in order to study two medical simulation labs and ask what role place plays in these simulated settings. I show that effective pedagogical simulations ironically depend upon departures from ‘real’ places of medical and scientific knowledge production. I highlight the importance of divergences in the sequence of events and scripts, in the behaviour of the manikins and actors, and in the materiality and arrangement of the settings. For medical and nursing students, it is the very disjunctures between the simulated environment and the hospital environment – the infidelity of place – that allows learning to happen. Overall, this article offers an exploratory investigation into the mechanisms at work in pedagogical places of medical simulation and qualifies understandings of the relationship between place and knowledge production.