First event of new network: Articulation / Experience / Embodiment

‘Articulation / Experience / Embodiment’ is a new research network that stretches across the Eastern Arc, and is part of our wider health and medical humanities collaboration.

The first network event will take place at the University of Essex on 9 November between 2-5pm. It will be a chance to play a part in scoping out the capacity across participating academic institutions; identify shared approaches, methods, and areas of interest; and locate cross-sector partners and participants for future workshops.

This is an in-person event, but we aim to make future events more accessible, and to run a supplementary online event if there is demand.

More details of the rationale behind the network are below. If you would like to attend this event or you are interested in participating in the network in future, please contact Tracey Loughran (t.loughran@essex.ac.uk).

We welcome researchers at all stages of their studies and careers, working both within and outside academia. We have a limited budget to support attendance, which will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with prioritisation of PG students and those travelling from outside Essex.

Rationale

Our experiences of the world are always embodied. We cannot help but speak from bodies; our bodies speak to us, in ways we may not consciously understand; and they also often speak for us in uncontrollable ways. As we articulate our embodied experiences, we bump against the understandings, experiences, and articulations of other-bodied people. The entanglements of articulation, experience, and embodiment mark every attempt to understand ourselves and every interaction with others.

Articulation / Experience / Embodiment probes these entanglements at the heart of the critical medical humanities. Through workshops, provocations, and dialogue, the network will examine crucial questions around the relationship between experience and representation; different forms, means and contexts of articulating knowledge and health and illness; and the methods for narrativizing embodied experience that open out techniques and spaces for empathy, healing and change.

Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy