'Institutional Narratives; Human Narratives' Day Conference
Venue: Building 502, Room FLEX-1 [G17]
Date: Wednesday, 24/04/2024
Time: 14:00-17:00
Free to attend, food and drinks provided.
Speakers are Dr Jon Roberts (University of Liverpool), Professor Emma Mason (University of Warwick), and Dr Neil Armstrong (University of Oxford).
Institutional narratives—financial, theoretical, taxonomical, pedagogical, diagnostic—are objective, abstract and functional. Human narratives—autobiographical, confessional, poetic, fictional—are subjective, experiential, often sensual, and embodied. Human narratives are the subject of disciplines from the humanities themselves to the human-facing sciences such as psychiatry. Yet the stories those disciplines then tell of these human testimonies, are often institutional narratives. Academic life involves encountering and negotiating both kinds of narrative. Living and working in these institutions we come in and out of these narratives; listening to them, retelling them, we may find or lose ourselves in them.
Our speakers come from a range of perspectives on this negotiation: literary studies, psychotherapy, anthropology, and psychiatry. They have worked in, and on, and with institutions of many kinds, both modern and historical: the reading group, the prison, the asylum, the church, the consulting room, the classroom, the psychiatric ward, the department of English. Each speaker will discuss the human origins of their field of interest, how engagement in that field took them ever deeper into a world of abstraction, the impact of this experience, and how they have sought to reconnect with those human origins.
