Disciplinary BoundariesShowcase and Debates

May 20 20191.30-5.30pmMSI 00.28

PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS(in line with the presentation order on May 20)

The development of a multidisciplinary guideline for the prevention and use of seclusion and restraint in inpatient mental health care De Cuyper, K.1, Peeters, T.1, Opgenhaffen, T.2, Buyck, I.1, Put, J.2, & Van Audenhove, C.1

(1 LUCAS KU Leuven, Centre for Care Research and Consultancy; 2 Institute for Social Law, KU Leuven) kathleen.decuyper@kuleuven.be

Seclusion and restraint are controversial measures to use in health care as they imply physical and psychological risks. They compromise both the care user and caregiver, as well as their therapeutic relationship. Moreover, seclusion and restraint conflict with human rights. Physical coercion is prohibited, and can only be applied in well-regulated circumstances.We developed a scientific and legally sound multidisciplinary guideline for the prevention and use of seclusion and restraint in inpatient mental health care (MHC) in Flanders. The objective of the guideline is to support the process of quality improvement of MHC services regarding the prevention and use of seclusion and restraint.The guideline is underpinned with evidence from

1. clinical research and existing (inter-)national guidelines, 2. legal analysis of European human rights treaties, 3. expertise of MHC stakeholders in Flanders, including experts by experience.

The Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation method was adapted to integrate these sources of evidence. The guideline is the product of six steps:

a. summarizing the evidence from clinical and legal perspective, b. developing a judicial human rights framework,c. integrating clinical and legal evidence,d. inspecting the quality of the evidence,e. testing and adapting the recommendations against the values and preferences of MHC

stakeholders,f. testing the recommendations against feasibility and formulating preconditions for

implementation.

The development of this multidisciplinary guideline is a good example of inter- and transdisciplinary research in which clinical and legal perspectives on seclusion and restraint are integrated.

Postgenomic Solidarity. Living Together in European BiosocietiesIne Van Hoyweghen, Life Sciences & Society Lab, Leuven Institute for Human Genomics and Society (LIGAS), KU Leuven, ine.vanhoyweghen@kuleuven.be

Life sciences innovations in genomics and personalised medicine have generated interest in the impact this predictive health data will have on society in its contribution to new forms of human difference, discrimination and solidarity. This project looks at how solidarity is (re-)configured in European societies at a time of increasing genomic profiling, risk stratification, and differentiation. How is solidarity performed in an era of personalised medicine, genomics science, and algorithmic technologies? How will European societies enact tolerance of difference, respect for otherness, and striving to social bonding in the postgenomic era? This lecture will present how an interdisciplinary group of social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and geneticists is attempting to meet these challenges and offer a new way of understanding the conflation between biology and sociality, and between the life sciences and the social sciences. Using an innovative comparative, multi-sited research design, the project empirically follows the use of genomic information in four societal practices: biomedicine; insurance; policymaking and law; and people’s lived experiences. Based on these empirical results, the project investigates the interactive dynamics between these practices, and conflations between nature and nurture, in producing solidarity, opening up new avenues for inquiry about living together in European biosocieties.

A historical-genetic reconstruction of human extra-pair paternityMaarten Larmuseau, postdoctoral researcher, laboratory of biodiversity and evolutionary genomics, maarten.larmuseau@kuleuven.be

When the caring and official father is not the biological one, a so-called extra-pair paternity (EPP) event occurs. After decades of speculation and many false or highly biased claims, data on EPP frequencies within contemporary human populations became available in the last decade. Although highly relevant for biologists, historians, social scientists and forensic geneticists, EPP frequencies of past populations still remain controversial due to the lack of valid data, conceptual clarity, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Recently, new genetic genealogical approaches enabled the estimation of past EPP frequencies by comparing Y-chromosomal variation between assumed patrilineally related men. In this project, we combine genealogical records spanning a period of 500 years with Y-chromosomal genotyping to get insights into the spatio-temporal range of EPP frequencies in Western Europe. The combination of concepts and state-of-the-art methodology from three disciplines, namely human behavioural ecology, historical demography and forensic genetics, leads to the realisation of this objective as well as provide new insights into each discipline.

SuRP+Sam Cleymans, Ph.D. in Archaeology, Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project, Department of Archaeology, KU Leuven; sam.cleymans@kuleuven.be

Since the end of the 19th century historians and archaeologists have approached human-environment interactions through the concept of “carrying capacity” to elucidate the impact and limitations of the environment for societal development, and vice versa. The concept of carrying capacity has contributed greatly to our understanding of the relationship between population growth and resource availability. At the same time, however, the framework has serious shortcomings. Most notably, it is in essence a static concept, relying on conceptualisations of biophysical and social dynamics as tending towards stable equilibrium states and treating environmental change as exceptional ‘noise’ that is to be analytically suppressed. The concept thus deals rather poorly with change and feedback loops in

human-environment interactions. To try to overcome these problems, the interdisciplinary IdeaLabs-consortium SuRP+ (Sustainability and Resilience in Past & Present Populations) was founded.SuRP+ seeks to reassess the approach of carrying capacity by turning to concepts of resilience and sustainability to study human-environment interactions. Human societies do not exist in a vacuum but within and affected by the dynamics, cycles, and pulses of their ecological context. SuRP+ aims at developing new methodologies and conceptualizations to assess the human-environment interactions of past populations in an interdisciplinary manner. As a case study to test these new methodologies on, we decided to make use of the extensive multidisciplinary datasets of the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project. This project focuses on the archaeological site of Sagalassos (SW Turkey) and its 1200 km² study area (1st millennium BC-13th century AD).

Interdisciplinary study of the effect of plague pandemic on medieval population of Cambridge from the perspective of a geneticistProf. Toomas Kivisild, Department of Human Genetics, KU Leuven, toomas.kivisild@kuleuven.be

‘After the plague’ is a collaborative Wellcome Trust funded project that explores the historical effects of the Black Death pandemic on a medieval town population. The project studies the cultural, historical, biometric and genetic aspects of variation within medieval town population. The genetics side of the project focuses on both human and pathogen DNA variation with the overarching aim to understand the biosocial effects of the 1348-1350 bubonic plague pandemic which decimated Europe. By comparing samples from before and after the epidemic for a wide range of social and biological indicators, this research aims to reveal how a pandemic can change human well-being, activity, mobility, health and the genetic constitution of Europe. At the focus of the study are the people of medieval Cambridge, contextualized within evidence from modern British population as well as skeletal and ancient DNA evidence from pre-medieval periods from region around Cambridge. At the core of the study lies a large sample of urban poor people from the Hospital of St. John (AD 1200-1500) whose isotopic signatures of nutritional status, evidence of trauma, pathology, marks of life-style and occupation on their bone robustness, and genetic evidence of ancestry, relatedness, phenotype and disease related variation are compared against similar evidence drawn from samples from other medieval social contexts.

An interdisciplinary history of prostitutionMagaly Rodríguez García (supervisor, History Department), magaly.rodriguez@kuleuven.be(project starts on 1 May 2019)Stef Adriaenssens (co-supervisor, Research Centre for Economics)Maarten Loopmans (co-supervisor, Division of Geography and Tourism)Pieter Vanhees (PhD candidate, History Department)

This project involves an interdisciplinary historical analysis of the sex trade. It approaches prostitution from a challenging perspective that integrates subaltern history, social geography and economic sociology to situate the shifts of the trade on a double axial system: time and space; and socio-political and economic dimensions. We will study the trajectories of local and foreign women active in the sex industry, by means of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the influx dynamics, the role played by intermediaries and other information channels, career changes and contextual factors that influenced their movement into or within the (licit and illicit) sex industry. It will thus focus on the socio-economic structure and diversity of the trade in urban and (semi)peripheral landscapes, its entanglements with other economic activities and the relationship between the hegemonic centre and those situated outside or at the margins of mainstream society. Its treatment as an economic activity that involves labour arrangements which can result in both economic progress and subjugation will enable us to go beyond recent analyses and debates, that either romanticize commercial sex or define it as sexual slavery. The envisaged research will thus introduce an unconventional methodology to the historical field and to the history of prostitution in particular, and will contribute to ongoing interdisciplinary discussions on sex work and human trafficking.

Applied history Dr. Bram De Ridder, postdoctoral researcher, Modernity & Society 1800-2000, KU Leuven, bram.deridder@kuleuven.be

In 2018 the Faculty of Arts launched a new research line in the field of ‘applied history’. First, the EU-funded RETOPEA project set out to encourage debate amongst teenagers about religious toleration. It does so by compiling historical and contemporary ‘source clippings’, which are short fragments derived from, e.g., the Ashoka Edicts, the Peace of Westphalia, the Congress of Vienna, speeches in the European Parliament, clips from Game of Thrones, and education manuals. These clippings are intended to stimulate critical reflection and will help the teenagers to create so-called docutubes. A docutube is a short movie about religious tolerance produced by one or more teenagers, which will help them think about tolerance in their own life and about how they engage with religious pluralism. Secondly, in December the Faculty gained an important grant for a project about historical societal consultancy, whereby the goal is to refine the methods and tools that historians use to engage with different societal actors. This project Corvus focusses on the topics of border management, fake news and trust in public institutions, whereby in all three cases the researchers will evaluate how societal actors use the past, how they can improve this usage, and how this might help them prepare for the future. The eventual goal is to draft a ‘manual’ for historians who are interested in cooperating with societal partners, discussing the do’s and don’ts of such engagement and providing an overview of the contents, techniques and communication strategies that different sorts of partners tend to prefer.

Connectivity, Contestation and Cooperation in Global Governance (CONNECTIVITY)Dr Guillaume Van Der Loo, Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, KU Leuven, guillaume.vanderloo@kuleuven.be

CONNECTIVITY is a six-year C1 interdisciplinary research project on ‘Connectivity, Contestation and Cooperation in Global Governance’. Bringing together 15 scholars from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, the programme offers a timely assessment of how differences between prominent States’ conceptualisation of international norms impact upon cooperation in the international system. CONNECTIVITY’s ultimate ambition is to generate novel insights into how international cooperation may be best fostered amidst the crisis of the current global order. The project builds on in-depth case studies and comparative analyses of how core values, principles, and concepts underling international law and relations are conceived by seven prominent States: Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States, in comparison with the EU and its Member States.

The overall objective is to test how connectivity, as a structural condition of international relations, shapes a move from contestation to cooperation and back, to reconstituting cooperation once again. To this end, the programme identifies the multifaceted interactions among (i) differing norm conceptualisations by various international actors (contestation); (ii) their mutual interests, linkages and collective action problems (connectivity); and (iii) the joint efforts made by States to overcome these collective action problems despite, or indeed, through contestation (cooperation). The country cases are examined specifically to identify the main drivers of contestation by mapping and contrasting their norm interpretations as they appear in the respective discourses and practices at the domestic, regional, and global levels. The prism used by CONNECTIVITY is sovereignty and its conception, focusing in particular on political-normative, economic, and security aspects.

Population developments co-determine diffusional language change: a close-up view on West-Germanic languagesProf. Dr. Freek Van de Velde, Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics, KU Leuven, freek.vandevelde@kuleuven.be

This project investigates the relation between urban population developments and morphological changes in three major West-Germanic languages, English, Dutch, German, from the beginning of

Early Modernity to the end of Classical Modernity (1500-1900). The main hypothesis is that morphological simplification accelerates when urban populations grow. Put more succinctly: word structure becomes simpler when cities grow. The reason is that the growth in this period is brought about mainly by immigration involving speakers from different dialects and different languages, resulting in what linguistics call ‘koineisation’ (dialect leveling) with a decrease in morphological complexity. We take a decidedly quantitative approach, relying on linguistic databases (text corpora) as well as on demographic databases.The project ties in with the emergent branch of evolutionary linguistics: languages are considered as complex systems adapting to the niche occupied by the speech community. This adaptationist view assumes the existence of selection pressures and fitness on the part of languages. When the demographic makeup of a speakers’ communicate changes, this has a long-term impact on the language. When the proportion of adult second language learners grow, ornate morphology is at risk. This explains why Icelandic morphology is more complex in its than English morphology, why Pashto morphology is more complex than Farsi morphology, and why Latin morphology is more complex than French morphology.

Organizing committee: Brigitte Meijns (History, Faculty of Arts); Katrien Pype (Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, Faculty of Social Sciences); John Creemers (Laboratory for Biochemical Neuroendocrinology, Faculty of Biomedical Sciences)