London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

A central question of my work is how the body, constructed and reconfigured in space medicine and in the context of extreme environmental otherness, retains or remakes a sense of legibility. This talk explores this question through ethnography with life-science research and space medicine experiments, with an emphasis on the human heart during Zero-Gravity parabolic flights with the European Space Agency. Zero-G is a ‘world’ undone. 

This world is reconstituted first through the intimate details of the flights: its speeds, elevations, gravities, timings and parabola dynamics. These are calibrated against heart stroke-volume data, but the hidden social world of the heart in space research is more dynamic than that. The trigonometry of ECGs and stroke-volume are scanned against the massive parabolas above the ocean and the famous Bordelais vineyards, subject to the materiality of gravity and its affective capacities, the ambiguous ombudsman between emotion and physiology. Legibility is then generated through emotion, the exhilaration of free-fall, the clumsiness of the body in forces unfamiliar to its senses, and the human need to reconstruct temporal stability. I argue that the heart “supreme among the organs” in space science is a marriage of these constructs, and others.

Speaker

Aaron Parkhurst

Aaron Parkhurst is Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at UCL. His current projects include an ethnography of the human body onboard the International Space Station and in extreme medicine and life science research. He works in the intersection of health, well-being, and culture, with foci on chronic illness, bioethics, technology and the human body, and outer-space studies. He is editor of the Journal Anthropology and Medicine. 

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