Playing With Clinical Jargon

In this hands-on sensory methods and writing workshop, we experiment with jargon through medical ephemera and clinical objects. Jargon shapes bodies, senses, and scenes of everyday and medical experiences of health. From patient intake processes and disease-specific lingo to mainstream “wellness” vocabularies, medical jargon materializes as online encyclopedias and popular websites like Healthline or WebMD, medical translation or AI diagnostic apps, and patient education materials like infographics, brochures, or videos. Jargon is distancing and disorientating, and at the same time felt intimately and viscerally in the body as fear, pain, confusion, or recovery. Working with a lively archive of popular and medical education media, this workshop guides participants through material cultures of jargon while asking: how does jargon feel? What worlds does it give us access to? What worlds does it obscure? How is jargon improvised, hacked, recycled, and repurposed for other uses? Through a series of guided ethnographic exercises (“implosion” and “hundreds”) from the fields of feminist science and technology studies and affect studies, participants will become public investigators, developing their writing and research skills while making sense of the material, cultural, and felt dimensions of medical jargon. Selected writings from this workshop will be edited into a chapter on “Jargon” for the book The Matter of Hospitals: An Alphabetical Investigation to be published by Maastricht University Press in October 2025.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

4926 Imperial St, 4926 Imperial Street, Burnaby, Canada