About the Project

Scientists, and historians and philosophers of science have often posited a hierarchical relationship between science and other forms of knowledge, such as popular insights, traditional knowledge, experience, and folk wisdom. Over the past two decades, scholars have scrutinised these hierarchies by analysing how they privilege science while disavowing other forms of knowledge. Historians of medicine have analysed how, during the age of exploration and empire, colonial physicians have appropriated insights from local healers and incorporated them into their own work. In North America and Australia, representatives of American Indian and Aboriginal communities have started to investigate their knowledge traditions and are collaborating in research projects focusing on today’s pressing problems. In several innovative medical and health research projects, patients and carers are invited to participate in research projects. In mental health research, research methodologies emphasising co-design and co-production are increasingly common. These new methodologies aim to diminish the power difference between researchers, professionals, and patients, thereby reducing epistemic injustice, which has traditionally privileged the scientists and professionals.

Over the past five years, I have facilitated a research project on the history of community mental health in Australia with a team consisting of two historians, one public historian, a psychologist, and psychiatrist, and four consumers of mental health care. We started by developing research practices following the principles of co-production and co-design for humanities research. We inspired recent research projects on mental health and mental health services which focused on developing innovative practices in which consumers of mental health services play significant roles. In my project at the Vossius Institute, I am to reflect on these experiences by contemplating how representatives of various “knowledges” can work together.  

About the Researcher

Hans Pols is Professor at the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. I conduct research on the history of colonial medicine in the Dutch East Indies and the transformations medical research and practice underwent after Indonesia’s independence. I analyse the role of Indonesian physicians and medical students in the Indonesian nationalist movement in my book Nurturing Indonesia: Medicine and Decolonisation in the Dutch East Indies (Cambridge University Press, 2018). After investigating the history of colonial psychiatry in the Dutch East Indies, I became much more interested in mental health in Indonesia today and in the near future. Some of these interests are reflected in an edited volume he co-edited with Mark Micale: Traumatic Pasts in Asia: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma, 1930 to the Present (Berghahn, 2021). Recently, my research has focused on the history of community mental health in Australia (for the research team website see: https://www.remindinghistories.net/).