Research Workshops
and CPD

How might classical Chinese medicine reshape contemporary understandings of sound, physiology, and healing? This workshop explores how early medical texts continue to reveal overlooked relationships between the meridian system, sensory perception, environmental processes, and the body's dynamic interactions with its surroundings. Bringing these perspectives into dialogue with contemporary research in bioelectrical physiology, acoustics, and philosophy of technology, participants develop new ways of thinking about sound as both a clinical and creative medium.

The workshop draws on more than a decade of my research spanning Chinese medicine, sonic healing, and artistic practice, including the development of the Qiscapes research project and the Acupunctosonoscope. Through lectures, listening practices, discussion, and practical demonstrations, participants explore how artistic experimentation can generate new clinical questions, while medical practice opens fresh possibilities for sound art, ecological inquiry, and interdisciplinary research.

Suitable for: acupuncturists, Chinese medicine practitioners, sound artists, researchers in science and technology studies, the medical humanities, and the history and philosophy of science. No prior experience in sound art or acoustics is required.

How might Chinese medicine be understood when approached as a cosmotechnical tradition? This seminar explores how clinical practice, artistic inquiry, and technological thought emerge through shared relations between body, environment, ethics, and cosmos, offering participants new ways of navigating medicine, research, and creative practice in an increasingly technological world.

This seminar explores Chinese medicine through the lens of cosmotechnics, drawing on the work of philosopher Yuk Hui to reconsider the relationship between technology, cosmology, and healing. Rather than treating clinical practice as the application of fixed techniques, participants examine how diagnosis, perception, therapeutic tools, and practitioner cultivation emerge within a shared field of relations between body, environment, ethics, and cosmos. Classical Chinese medicine offers a rich foundation for this inquiry, where concepts such as qi, resonance, seasonal transformation, and correspondence shape not only medical theory but the conditions through which practice itself unfolds.

Through close engagement with classical medical texts, contemporary philosophy, and reflective clinical discussion, participants develop conceptual and practical frameworks for navigating clinical work in a globalised technological world. The seminar offers new ways of recognising the philosophical assumptions embedded within everyday practice, understanding how technical traditions shape forms of knowledge, and cultivating clinical judgement that remains responsive to inherited medical wisdom while engaging contemporary technological, ecological, and cultural conditions.

A distinctive feature of the seminar is its dialogue between medicine, art, and science. Clinical practice and artistic research are approached as complementary forms of inquiry, each generating techniques of perception, experimentation, and world-making that illuminate the other. Participants explore how artistic methods can expand clinical sensitivity, while Chinese medicine opens new directions for artistic and scientific research into embodiment, ecology, technology, and ethical relations. The seminar creates a shared space for clinicians, artists, researchers, and educators seeking to develop new forms of practice capable of responding to the environmental and technological challenges of the present.

Suitable for: Chinese medicine practitioners and students with an interest in research and philosophy, artist-researchers, researchers in STS, HoM, medical humanities, and decolonial studies.

What happens when the physiological activity of medicinal plants is approached through the conceptual frameworks of Chinese medicine rather than separated from them? This workshop explores experimental and theoretical research in plant bioelectricity that has been read as opening possible continuities between plant organisation and the logic of the meridian system.

In particular, studies by Hou and colleagues (1994–99) on soybean bioelectrical patterns provide a point of departure for reconsidering classical concepts such as 归经 (guī jīng, meridian affinity) and 感應 (gǎnyìng, resonance or responsive relation). Read alongside contemporary plant physiology and the philosophy of living systems, these materials open a speculative but generative space for thinking about the materia medica as a field of nonhuman agents whose availability, transformation, and disappearance actively shapes medical knowledge itself — rather than as a static pharmacological catalogue.

Case studies focus on Artemisia (mugwort) and Glycyrrhiza uralensis (licorice root), selected for their clinical significance, ecological situatedness, research histories, and the shifting conditions of their survival within contemporary ecological and pharmaceutical economies. Participants are invited to consider how such perspectives might reshape approaches to herbal practice, clinical reasoning, and the broader philosophical foundations of Chinese medicine as a living knowledge system.