STS as a Third Space between Evidence-Based Medicine and the Human Sciences

• In Event: Making and Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel - I

Abstract

Michel Serres (1991) proposes that we should not seek instruction from any singular form of understanding but should occupy the spaces of transformation which lie between – neither one nor the other but the ‘third space’ (Brown 2002). This paper explores the third space of a working group of the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N) on Appraising and Including Different Knowledge (AID Knowledge) in guidelines. This working group, that I co-founded, aims at learning from and contributing to guideline practices that challenge the boundaries between ‘evidence’ and ‘judgement’. It problematizes ideas like the ‘hierarchy of evidence’ that privileges evidence from randomized controlled trials and meta-reviews on frequentist methodological grounds alone. The working group is a third space in the sense that it is neither STS nor epidemiology. This ‘neither’ could easily be misread as ‘not’ or as ‘hybrid’. I explore how my involvement in the group is not ‘not’ STS. And how it is also not a ‘hybrid’ of STS and epidemiology. Drawing on a more spiritual vocabulary, the third space is ‘neither same nor different’. It is a training ground for becoming ‘third-instructed’ (tiers-instruit), which is the name Serres (1991) gives “to him or her who is able to give up the comforts of disciplinary specialism and risk putting themselves into perpetual translation” (Brown 2002).

Author

• Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Athena Institute, VU Amsterdam