Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 5c
Other Knowledges
Thursday 9 September, 9.30 - 11am
'Is there anybody there?: reflections on using evidence from beyond the grave' - Dr Sara MacKian (Open University)
"In a secularised Protestant society such as Britain, the living and the dead are separated not only physically, but also conceptually, with transgressors across the boundary (ghosts, prayers for the dead, appearances of the dead to the bereaved, spiritualist mediums) treated with suspicion" (Walter, 2004. 472).
This paper presents reflections on the process of researching across this boundary, based on fieldwork with individuals and groups, engaged with spirit guides, angels and divination. For those who regularly weave a ‘spirit world’ into their everyday living, it becomes a vital component in the fabric of their social and material worlds. As a researcher, seeking, encountering and interpreting these worlds, this multi-dimensional lived experience has implications for the way in which I understand and represent those experiences; because they cannot be extracted from how we think and theorise about the visible and material worlds we think we know. However, when speaking to an audience of peers - with both feet firmly planted on one side of this exigent boundary - I have found it is not only the transgressors who are treated with suspicion, but also occasionally those who chose to present them as valid research concerns. The paper reflects on just how far the sociological imagination is truly willing to capture the unseen and unseeable as a legitimate part of knowing the multi-dimensional realities we live in.
(Walter T (2004) Body Worlds: clinical detachment and anatomical awe Sociology of Health and Illness 26(4). 464-488)
'Places in the heart: nostalgia, psychogeography and late-life dementia' - Andrea Capstick (University of Bradford)
'It’s all long gone now...they’ve closed the shop on the corner of Athlone Street..my dad ran it a long time ago...that time...'
Within the dominant biomedical discourse, late-life dementia is regarded as a pathological condition characterised by disorientation in time and space, word finding difficulties and ‘problem behaviours’ such as ‘wandering’ and ‘repetitive questioning’. Once taken out of its biomedical straightjacket, however, dementia emerges as a condition which has much in common with the conscious projects of surrealist and situationist arts movements. This includes the subversion of the idea of time (and history) as linear, unidirectional progress.
People diagnosed with dementia frequently state a desire to return (or indeed a fear of returning) to places from the past which may no longer exist in physical space, but which remain real as remembered worlds and sources of nostalgia (literally ‘the pain of returning’). These are also issues central to the field of psychogeography – an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the emotional and sensory impact of specific, particularly urban, locations.
Informed by the work of poets such as Blake, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, as theorised by, for example, Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord, psychogeography privileges undirected ‘wandering’ through its emphasis on concepts such as the flaneur, and the dérive (or ‘drift’). In this paper, such concepts will be used as a way of exploring the spatio-temporal experiences of people with dementia, using extracts from film and narrative life stories.
'Ways of Knowing: crossing species boundaries' - Prof Carol Smart (University of Manchester)
Empirical social science research is inevitably highly dependent on verbal communication. Observation, ethnographic and visual methods do of course go beyond words (or meanings derived and shared through language) but talking remains central. In this paper I want to explore ways of knowing that, while not fully independent of talk, discourse and narrative, nonetheless form a bodily way of knowing. Thinking about other ways of knowing is a challenge, but it is important that there is space to appreciate the different ways in which people come to know things. So in this paper I shall give consideration to acquiring cross-species knowledge using the example of human interaction with horses. In this realm it is vital to speak through the body and to interpret through parts of the body not usually called upon in the research process. In this way I will explore knowledge claims which are not usually regarded a legitimate but which may have parallels with work in fields of dance and music.
Back to Vital Signs 2 Programme | Back to Vital Signs 2 homepage