What is the Place of 'Personal Experience' in Scholarship?
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
This public talk (with three responses) on the place of "personal experience" in scholarship will be followed by a discussion.
In public talk, Chris Millard will draw upon his important new (Open Access) study of the Munchausen syndromes to think about the ways our emotional investments and past experiences shape our historical research. Drawing upon his own life and his historical scholarship, he will work through the examples of Munchausen Syndrome (faking illness) and Munchausen by Proxy (faking or inducing illness in a dependent) to open up a new critical perspective on the writing of psychiatric history.
Academics often try to cultivate an image of neutrality, adopting a style that somehow obscures their personal experience. Yet this experience still emerges - in prefaces, afterwords and epilogues, in questions after a scholarly paper, in the coffee breaks in conferences or at post-seminar drinks. It is the subject of gossip, speculation, and insider knowledge. In history especially it is often woefully under-theorised and only rarely the subject of critical or self-conscious reflection.
The notion of ‘lived experience’ is increasingly part of various knowledge claims in the twenty-first century, entangled with questions of authenticity, who has the right to speak, and on behalf of which group. The opportunities and costs of this disclosure are not evenly distributed across those marked and unmarked by various kinds of marginalisation, in scholarship or wider society.
Chris will speak about the book, exploring the politics of this disclosure in academic history, followed by responses from three other scholars in different disciplines (Felicity Callard, Louise Hide and Evan Sedgwick-Jell), who have wrestled from different angles with the politics of their own experiences and their scholarship.
This event is co-hosted by the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health; The Centre for the History of Emotions, QMUL; and History of the Human Sciences.
For information contact Katy (k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk)
Contact name: Katy Pettit
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