Apologies for cross-posting. --- EXPERIENCE AS EVIDENCE? A Symposium on the Sciences of Subjectivity in Healthcare, Policy and Practice St Hugh’s College, Oxford 13-14 October 2014 ‘Experience’ has long been referenced as a valuable, if ‘subjective’, resource in a variety of fields. Especially in healthcare, highly personal, embodied understandings of illness have been studied as an alternative to ‘objective’ biomedical knowledge and are often used to critique biomedical reductionism. In the wake of this critique, as well as burgeoning patient activism and health consumerism, over the last fifty years an industry has emerged that aims to capture, process and distribute the patient ‘experience’. This raises a number of questions about the nature of the knowledge generated by these ‘technologies of experience’: – What does it take to turn experience into evidence? What new methods and expertise are emerging in this field? – What promises, pitfalls and politics come with these approaches? – And what are the implications for research, policy and practice? The symposium brings together a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars and practitioners to discuss these and related questions, critically engaging with how the concept of ‘experience’ is articulated, studied, and developed within medical sociology, science and technology studies (STS), health services research, healthcare policy and practice. Speakers include: Samantha Adams, Madeleine Akrich, Susannah Fox, Havi Carel, Trisha Greenhalgh, Tiago Moreira, Jeannette Pols, Vololona Rabeharisoa, Glenn Robert, Tanja Schneider, Natasha Schüll, Paul Wicks, Alex Wilkie For more information and registration, see: http://experience-as-evidence.org/ Organizing committee: Angela Martin, Fadhila Mazanderani, Louise Locock, John Powell, Steve Woolgar, Sue Ziebland, Malte Ziewitz Hosted by the University of Oxford’s Health Experiences Research Group (HERG) and made possible with the support of NIHR and the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness. http://experience-as-evidence.org