Association of Psychosocial Studies ‘Reading’ Conference, 16-17 May, 2019

The Psychosocial – Reflections and Developments
The Association of Psychosocial Studies ‘Reading’ Conference

Birkbeck, University of London
16 – 17 May, 2019

The Waiting Times team will be contributing to this two-day conference exploring the development of the psychosocial field of studies.

The conference will have reading sessions in the morning, with groups of no more than 20 participants.  In the afternoon, delegates will come together in larger groups for discussion workshops.

For full details of the programme for the two days, including a complete list of the reading sessions, and to book tickets, please visit the conference Eventbrite page.

We’ll be taking part in the afternoon workshops on 17 May.  Hope to see you there.

Symposium: Trauma in the Contemporary World: Working-through Collective Wounds, 30 October 2018

Our research fellow Raluca is organising a symposium at Birkbeck at the end of the month, and our PI Lisa will be contributing.

The symposium is being held at the Department of Psychosocial Studies and and will take place on 30 October, 2018, 10am to 5pm.

Room 101, 30 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DT

The symposium aims to create a space for an interdisciplinary conversation on the psychic transmission of trauma, on collective trauma and social mourning. While some voices argue that the notion of ‘trauma’ is overused and overstretched, we will explore the ways in which crucial aspects of both psychic life and social life can be formulated precisely as a trauma theory. What kind of metapsychological revisions are needed for a trauma theory for the contemporary world? What is the place of psychic splitting in making sense of social trauma? Or, in other words, what is the connection between the life of psychic fragments and the life of social fragments? How can we understand scenes of reliving the trauma, which take place in the streets and in the squares? How are institutions (including the state) implicated in social mourning, or, on the contrary, in its interruption? By asking these questions, we aim to illuminate the ways in which a revised trauma theory that takes into account the collective dimension of life is also a social theory.

The second part of the symposium will be dedicated to a discussion of Raluca Soreanu’s recent book Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave, 2018). Soreanu argues for a phenomenology of psychic splitting, where we can follow, in a collective frame, what different psychic fragments ‘do’, or what becomes of their social life. Some psychic fragments are involved in the denial and the repetition of traumatic violence. Other psychic fragments are involved in the act of recognition or in a form of radical mutuality. A panel of psychoanalysts, psychosocial scholars and social theorists will discuss the implications of the ideas that Working-through Collective Wounds proposes, including notions such as: the confusion of tongues between registers of the social, memory-wounds, Orphic socialities, and traumatic voracity. Ultimately, the book brings into focus a creative and symbolising crowd, able to mourn and to preserve itself and things that matter in moments when extreme traumatic violence rips through the social body.

For more details, contact Raluca r.soreanuATbbk.ac.uk

Lisa Baraitser: ‘Saying Yes to No’ discussion in London, 27 September

Our PI Lisa will be leading a discussion in a private house in London as part of the Deptford X group’s ‘Saying Yes to No’ common study programme of events.

The discussion will be on Lisa’s recent book, Enduring Time, and will be taking place at 114 Breakspears Road, Brockley, SE4 1UD  this Thursday, 27 September from 12:00 – 15:00.

For more details about this talk, the programme of common study and the work of Deptford X, visit their website.

The Social Life of Time, 5-7th June, Edinburgh

In collaboration with the Temporal Belongings network, we’ll be holding our inaugural conference in Edinburgh, on 5th-7th June 2018.

The aim of this conference is to share current research on the social nature of time and to collaboratively reflect on key issues, problems and methodological approaches. In keeping with previous Temporal Belongings events, we will include a mixture of presentation styles, and plenty of time for discussion. We are particularly interested in playing with the traditional time of the academic conference and will include collaborative, participant-driven sessions where themes emerging from the presentations can be synthesised and explored in greater depth.  

Keynote speakers for the conference are:

Please send any queries to temporalbelongings@gmail.com

Michelle Bastian
Lisa Baraitser
Andrew Hom
Laura Salisbury
Conference Committee

For programme details and to book, please visit the conference website.


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