Waiting is an inevitable part of life, whether it’s in the waiting room of a GP surgery or waiting for lockdown to end.
As part of the Waiting Times project, Dr Michael Flexer, a publicly engaged research fellow at the University of Exeter, explores different concepts of waiting and suggests that some forms of waiting – for seeds to grow, for the curtain to rise in a theatre – can be positive. https://WhatAreYouWaitingFor.org.uk
Professor Victoria Tischler is from the European Centre for Environment & Human Health at the University of Exeter and co-investigator of the Pandemic and Beyond project. During lockdown her project Culture Box sent out packages to care home residents filled with activities: watercolour paints, seeds, guides to birdsong. She shares her thoughts on how these activities changed the recipients’ relationship to time. https://pandemicandbeyond.exeter.ac.uk/
This episode was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find a collection of episodes focused on New Research on the Free Thinking programme website on BBC Radio 3.
Swati Joshi, a Doctoral Fellow of Medical Humanities at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar will give a talk ‘Proprioceptive Care and the work of Samuel Beckett’ at the University of Exeter.
1-2pm, Monday 18th July,
Board Room, Wellcome Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Health
University of Exeter
A Conversation on “The Maternal.” Part of a recurring lecture series centered on keywords in psychosocial thought.
Join The Psychosocial Foundation and Parapraxis for a conversation on “The Maternal” with Dr. Joy James, Dr. Lisa Baraitser, and Dr. Sarah Knott. Moderated by Dr. Hannah Zeavin.
Tickets are sliding-scale. Your contributions fund our continued work at The Psychosocial Foundation, including Parapraxis Magazine. To learn more about the whole series, click here. To learn more about Parapraxis , click here.
Jenny Mitchell, award-winning writer and Artist in Association at Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality (BiGS), will facilitate a supportive 3-hour creative writing session in the morning of this day-long event, that looks at how we write about the elusive concept of freedom. What draws us to writing about freedom? What might it offer the writer and reader? Is it particularly important to think about freedom in a world so filled with subjugation, tyranny and chaos?
This is a participatory creative writing session and participants will be given examples of work by established poets to discuss; and prompts to stimulate their own writing.
This is followed by an afternoon symposium that explores questions of care and repair, reflecting on the waiting time between enslavement and emancipation from the perspective of Black British women. Jenny Mitchell offers new poems that retell the story of Jane Eyre from the perspective of a free 19th century woman of colour, questioning the role of servant or caregiver that women of colour are stereotypically forced to inhabit in relation to a dominant white culture that offers little care in return. Poets, historians and literary scholars will discuss the issues the poems raise – relations between Black and white women, freedom, and elongated modes of ‘waiting’, and poetry as a radical form of care and repair.
The symposium is a collaboration between Arts Week, Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality (BiGS), and Waiting Times, a Wellcome Trust funded research collaboration that is re-evaluating the relation between time and healthcare in the modern period. The symposium will be followed by a wine reception to celebrate Jenny Mitchell’s role as Artist-in-Association at BiGS, and her new collection of poems.
Participants can book for the whole day, or can attend just one session (either the poetry workshop or the symposium).
Poetry workshop 10am – 1pm Symposium 2pm – 5pm
Jenny Mitchell is an award-winning poet and workshop facilitator. Her second collection, Map of a Plantation, is winner of the Poetry Book Awards 2021. She won the Bedford International Poetry Prize 2021, the Ware Prize 2020, the Folklore and Aryamati Prizes, a Bread and Roses Award and several other competitions. A debut collection, Her Lost Language, is joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize and was voted One of 44 Books of 2019 (Poetry Wales). She is an Artist in Association at Birkbeck currently working on a pamphlet and third collection.
Roy McFarlane is a Poet, Playwright and former Youth & Community Worker born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage, living in Brighton. He is the National Canal Laureate and has held the role of Birmingham Poet Laureate. His debut collection, Beginning With Your Last Breath, was followed by The Healing Next Time, (Nine Arches Press 2018) nominated for the Ted Hughes award and Jhalak Prize. His third collection Living by Troubled Waters is due out October 2022. It includes a series of erasure poems drawing on narratives of the enslaved across the African diaspora, found in newspapers and posters in England and the Caribbean, post 1807.
Keith Jarrett is a writer, performer and educator whose work explores Caribbean British identity, religion and sexuality. Keith teaches at NYU London and is completing his debut novel.
S.I. Martin works with museums, archives and the education sector to bring diverse histories to wider audiences. He has published five books of historical fiction and non-fiction for adult and teenage readers.
Olivia Carpenter is Lecturer in Literature at the University of York. Her research focuses on Black Studies, Critical Race Theory and literary history. Her recent monograph on Black marriage in domestic fiction in the late 18th and early 19th century gives an account of how the politics of slavery and Abolition influenced the novel as a genre during the height of Abolition struggles in British courts, as well as Black resistance to slavery in both Britain and the colonies.
Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck. She is the Co-Principal Investigator, with Laura Salisbury, of Waiting Times, a Wellcome Trust-funded collaborative award investigating the relation between time and care in the modern period. She has written widely on motherhood, psychoanalysis, time and care.
Kelechi Anucha
Kelechi is PhD candidate on the Wellcome-funded Waiting Times project. She is an associate member of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at University of Exeter and a member of the Black Health and Humanities Network. Her project examines time and care in contemporary end-of-life narratives, exploring the relationship between untimeliness, literary form and the politics of health.
Communication about this event will be sent from messenger@bbk.ac.uk. Do check your Spam/Junk/Other inbox if you are looking for emails from this address.
Part of a broader project on Trans Healthcare and Creativity, this event will explore the past, present and ‘what might have been’ of trans healthcare provision in the UK. What is trans healthcare now, what has it been, and what could it be?
Join us for a roundtable discussion with contributions from speakers from a range of disciplines and practices, including:
Ellis J. Johnson (he/him) is a psychodynamic psychotherapeutic counsellor, supervisor, trainer, consultant and group facilitator, working mainly alongside transgender, non-binary, queer or questioning people. As a transgender man of mixed-heritage, Ellis is passionate about attending to the intersections of race, class, and coloniality in his work; he holds a particular interest in decolonising our understandings of gender, sexuality and spirituality. He delivers training in trans inclusion and anti-racist practice to organisations and therapists across the UK and internationally.
Stephen Whittle OBE is Professor of Equalities Law at Manchester Metropolitan University. In 1992, Stephen was a co-founder of Press for Change (PFC), the UK’s trans rights lobby group. PFC’s very successful campaigns have resulted in several major case law successes at the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, which have led to significant legal changes since the mid-1990s, including the Gender Recognition Act 2004, and full protection under the Equality Act 2010. Stephen has advised on transgender rights and law to the UK, Scottish, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Hong Kong, and South African governments, as well as the European Union & the Commission, and the Council of Europe. He regularly advises lawyers and writes briefs, or is an expert witness, for courts worldwide. He has authored many academic papers, non-academic articles, several books and writes a regular blog.
Krishna Istha is a London-based screenwriter, comedian, performance artist and theatre maker. They make socially conscious, form-pushing works about taboo or underrepresented experiences of gender, race and sexual politics. Currently, they are writing on Sex Education (Netflix), is a Barbican Centre Open Lab artist (2022), and is part of the writing team at Die Gute Fabrik (a Copenhagen-based games studio). More recently, they co-directed Jazz and Dice by Naked Productions for BBC Radio 4, was an Arts Admin Bursary Artist (2020-21), and came Runner-Up on Screenshot (a competition for comedy writer-performers hosted by Sister Pictures and South of the River Pictures).
Laura Salisbury is a Professor in Medicine and English Literature at the University of Exeter. She has research and teaching interests in modernist, postmodernist and contemporary fiction; medical humanities; philosophies of temporality, ethics and affect; psychoanalysis; neuroscience and language. With Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck) she is joint PI on a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award called ‘Waiting Times’ (2017-2022), a project working to uncover what it means to wait in and for healthcare. She is currently writing a cultural history of waiting in modernity.
Ruth Pearce is a trans health activist and Lecturer in Community Development at the University of Glasgow. Her work explores issues of inequality, marginalisation, power, and transformative political struggle from a trans feminist perspective. She has conducted research on trans health services in the UK, international alternatives to traditional gender clinics, and trans people’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. She is the author of “Understanding Trans Health”, plus co-editor of “The Emergence of Trans” and “TERF Wars”. Ruth also plays bass in noise-pop band wormboys, shouts a lot in queer punk trio Dispute Settlement Mechanism, and blogs at http://ruthpearce.net.
Trans Healthcare and Creativity is funded by the University of Manchester. Our aim is to contribute to current conversations about trans healthcare provision in the UK whilst advocating for the role of creativity in imagining future models of care. Our second event will take place on Tuesday 7th June, on the theme of ‘Possible Futures’. To contact us, email: transhealthcareandcreativity@gmail.com.
A few weeks back I had the amazing opportunity to go into Acland Burghley School for a collaboration between the Peltz Gallery, The Waiting Times Project, artist Sally Booth, and a group of year 11 students in the art classes. The goal was to begin an early relationship with the school in the hopes to do a great deal more collaboration in the future. Overall it was quite a success! To tie into the current Time Being exhibit at the Peltz and the larger theme of the Waiting Times project we asked Sally Booth to come in a craft a workshop for the students. Over a 4 hour workshop we spoke with the students about the Peltz and when they could come to the exhibit, gave an overview of the exhibit Time Being and a rundown on what Waiting Times was researching around themes of waiting and care. After Sally introduced herself and her work and talked the students through her process as an artist and the ways she has learned to navigate the world, we moved into the project for the day. The work Sally did with the students was to create concertina pieces where they collaborated in pairs to build their work. Here began a great discussion with the students on the ideas around waiting and care and what it meant for them to wait and how to look forward. Questions came up such as when have you had to wait? When have you had to be patient and resilient? Waiting for appointments, for a birthday, to go on holiday, to go out, to see their friends, waiting for COVID to end? What do you look forward to? A special place? To be more independent? To go somewhere new, to do something fun? Jumping off from this chat we quickly lead the students into work to settle on a theme for their concertina piece. Students found a multitude of ways to pick a time they had to wait and to work that into the piece they were creating while also finding ways to collaborate that piece with a partner. Some ideas they crafted were waiting for public transit, a groom waiting for his bride, a pig waiting for slaughter, a bird waiting to take flight, and waiting for family to visit. At the end of the session, the students grouped all their concertina pieces together and curated a layout that wrapped around the room with their beautiful work. Before leaving the students were encouraged to come to the exhibit and sit more with the themes of the project. Peltz is hoping to collaborate further with the art team at Acland Burghley, to continue doing workshops of this type, and to hopefully host a small student exhibit in the near future. Please enjoy some of the students’ pieces and check out the Time Being exhibit running at the Peltz Gallery.
Emily Jewison, School of Art, Birkbeck, University of London
Time Beingis a 14-minute film which meditates on waiting and care. In a research system that prioritises speed of production and the written word,Time Beingexplores how touch is also central to methods of knowledge building and creative enquiry, enabling alternative and perhaps more careful perceptions of time. It was commissioned by Waiting Times, a research project investigating time and care based at Birkbeck, University of London and the University of Exeter, and funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Please join Lisa Baraitser, Harriet Cooper, Martin O’Brien, Rachel Purtell, Laura Salisbury and Sejal Sutaria for an evening of discussion about care and waiting centred around Time Being, a 14-minute film made by artist Deborah Robinson in collaboration with Ruairí Corr, a creative maker who works through co-production.
Time Being offers a sensory exploration of what it means to wait. Deborah writes, “working with Ruairí encouraged me to slow my pace to match with his, to let go of pre-set ideas and pay careful attention to qualities in the footage gathered – a path that led to a film structure organised around touch, materials and sound.” Through holding and containing time differently, Ruairí and Deborah open up new possibilities for creative expression – for divergent, slow-forming ideas rendered inaccessible by more normative ways of being in the world and in time. Time Being tackles the crucial question of the time needed for care in a context in which time appears to be always running out.
Time Being was commissioned as part of Waiting Times, a Wellcome Trust funded research project based at Birkbeck, University of London, and the University of Exeter that brings together academics and artists to offer a fundamental re-conceptualisation of the relation between time and care in contemporary thinking about health, illness, and wellbeing.
The event will be held in person at Birkbeck in conjunction with an exhibition of the film at the Peltz Gallery, and can also be joined online. Those who attend in person will watch the film together, and then join a panel discussion with experts-by-experience, artist-researchers, and academics working across disability studies, the medical humanities, and critical time studies. Those attending online can watch an online version of the film prior to the panel discussion.
Contributors:
Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory, Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. She is co-Principal Investigator of the Waiting Times project, and has written widely on time and care.
Harriet Cooper is Lecturer in Medical Education (Sociology) at the University of East Anglia. She works at the intersection of medical humanities, disability studies and applied qualitative health research and is the author of Critical Disability Studies and the Disabled Child: Unsettling Distinctions (Routledge, 2020),
Martin O’Brien is Senior Lecturer in Live Art at QMUL and a performance artist and scholar whose work is concerned with the performance and representation of illness and disability. He uses physical endurance, hardship and pain-based practices to challenge common representations of illness and to examine what it means to be born with a life-threatening disease. He is recently the recipient of the 2021 Leverhulme Trust Prize in Live Arts.
Rachel Purtell is a Disabled Woman. She was the Director of Folk.us at the University of Exeter, where she facilitated and supported the involvement of service users, patients or/and carers in medical and social care research to ensure that service users have a positive and meaningful impact on research, research processes, and research structures. Rachel lectures on involving people in research and on Disability Equality and delivers training using the Social Model of Disability as the central approach. She currently acts as the Critical Friend for Engaged Research at Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter and has published widely on involvement and disability issues.
Deborah Robinson is an artist working collaboratively and across disciplines with scientists, artists, biomedical experts and technologists to make installation artwork using moving image and sound. She uses experimental film-based processes to explore issues in science, health and the environment. She is Honorary Artistic Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter and previously was Associate Professor in Contemporary Art Practice at the University of Plymouth.
Laura Salisbury is Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities, working between Exeter University’s Dept. of English and Film and the Wellcome Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Health. With Lisa Baraitser, she is co-Principal Investigator of Waiting Times. She has published widely in modern and contemporary literature, particularly on the work of Samuel Beckett; on neurology, psychoanalysis, and literature; and on ethics and time. She is current President of the Samuel Beckett Society.
Sejal Sutaria is a visiting-assistant professor of 20th and 21st Century Postcolonial Literature at Grinnell College, US. Prior to this she completed a Marie Curie Fellowship at King’s College, London. Her current book manuscript, Making Waves: Britain, India, and the Sounding of Postcolonial Resistance, examines how sound archives amplify our understanding of the role that globally circulating ideas, capital, and migrants played in shaping anticolonial resistance in the colony and the metropole. She has published widely including a piece about Venu Chitale to the 100 Voices that Made the BBC.
The Political Mind Presents: The Roots of Misogyny
A Psychoanalytic Conference
Saturday 22nd January 2022
10.00am – 4:30pm
These discussions will be delivered remotely via Zoom.
Recording available*
This is a psychoanalytic conference exploring developmental and psycho-social perspectives on misogyny. We will discuss the emergence of hatred and violent persecution of women, linking its origins in the crucible of the family with its manifestations in wider society.
We hope to provide insight into the extremes of the uncivilised psyche. This special event day will include people from a wide range of disciplines.
Chair:
Ruth McCall is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, supervisor and training psychotherapist for several British psychoanalytic psychotherapy trainings and past tutor for MSc in Psychoanalytic Studies, UCL. She has a special interest in hysteria and psychosomatic disorders, and lectures on Freud and Winnicott’s work.
Speakers:
Renee Danziger is a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and an Honorary Senior Lecturer at UCL. She has a DPhil in politics, and a particular interest in the application of psychoanalytic theory to social and political issues. She is the author of Radical Revenge: Shame, Blame, and the Urge for Retaliation. Free Association Books (2021).
Dr Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and co-founder of The Women’s Therapy Centre in London (1976) and The WTCI in New York (1981).
Susie is the author of twelve books. Her most recent In Therapy: The Unfolding Story is an annotated version of the BBC Radio 4 series. Her first book Fat is a Feminist Issue has been continuously in print since 1978. Bodies (which won the APA Psychology of Women’s Book Prize in 2009) was updated in 2019. She has published many papers and frequently writes articles for the press, and wrote a Guardian column for ten years.
She has a strong interest in social policy and co-authored recent government-commissioned reports and has also been a member of government expert panels.
She was Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Social Policy at the London School of Economics for ten years. Susie is the recipient of the Inaugural British Psychoanalytic Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2019.
Prof Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, and a psychoanalyst and member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is author of the award-winning monograph, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009) and Enduring Time (Bloomsbury, 2017). She currently holds a collaborative award from the Wellcome Trust for a 5-year cycle of research, Waiting Times, that investigates the relationship between time and healthcare.
Jacob Johanssen is Senior Lecturer in Communications, St. Mary’s University (London, UK). He is the author of Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data (Routledge, 2019). His research interests include psychoanalysis and digital media, audience research, sexuality and digital media, affect theories, psychosocial studies, and critical theory. His second monograph Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: Male Bodies of Dis/Inhibition is forthcoming with Routledge. He is Co-Editor of the Counterspace section of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. Jacob is a Founder Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC).
Prof Kate Manne is an associate professor of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2011 to 2013.
She specialises in moral philosophy (especially metaethics and moral psychology). feminist philosophy, and social philosophy and writes opinion pieces, essays, and reviews.
She authored Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press: New York, 2018; Penguin UK, 2019) about the nature, function, and persistence of misogyny. A second book, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women came out in August 2020, with Crown (US) and Penguin (UK).
Panel Chair:
Dr Anuradha Menon is a Psychoanalyst in private practice in Leeds, UK and a Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is originally from Kerala, India where she trained in Medicine. She qualified as a Psychiatrist in Mumbai. In the U.K she dual trained in Medical Psychotherapy and Adult Psychiatry in Leeds and works part-time as a Consultant in Liaison Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in the NHS.
Panel:
Rosanna Lewis, Ruth McCall, Jacob Johanssen, Marika Mckennell.
Rosanna Lewis is a senior independent domestic advisor for Sistah Space). Sistah Space, is a domestic abuse service that profiles and gives voice to awareness of African Heritage Women and Girls affected by domestic and sexual abuse. Rosanna has a social work background, particularly with children and families, and has also worked in domestic violence in the local area. She has always been involved in community work and facilitates holistic health workshops, and she has also been a bookseller for many years.
Marika Mckennell is an award-winning playwright with a background in spoken word poetry and performance. She was a member of the Royal Court writers’ group and was a resident artist at the Round House London 2017-18. Marika has written shows for venues such as Camden People’s Theatre, Shaftsbury Theatre Westend (for the NYT Gala), North Wall Oxford, The Roundhouse, Bunker Theatre, Southwark Playhouse (for ALT show case) and Edinburgh Fringe 2019 where she won a Fringe First Award for her play E8. Marika has performed poetry across the UK, at venues such as The Sky Garden, The Freud Museum, and The Royal Court, as part of the Open Court Festival. As well as writing and performing Marika facilitates creative workshops and has worked for 6 years as head of drama in an alternative provision for excluded young people with complex behavioural needs in Hackney East London.
This talk analyses the phenomenon of ‘doomscrolling’ – the compulsive reading of anxiety-inducing online content – during the COVID-19 pandemic against the common idea that it is simply an addictive social practice that impedes mental flourishing. Instead, in order to open up its inclination towards care, I read doomscrolling through the anachronistic neologism that has come to define this textual practice. My talk reads the anxious textuality of Don DeLillo’s The Silence and Saidiya Hartman’s reworking of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Comet’ to demonstrate how doomscrolling emerges from a moment in which trust is anxiously fractured, but how it works, nevertheless, to witness what gets to count within a time felt to be coming to an end.
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