Podcast: Professor Keith Smyth’s Inaugural Lecture; ‘It’s Third Space, Jim, but not as we know it’

This is a podcast and record of Professor Keith Smyth’s Inaugural Lecture; ‘It’s Third Space, Jim, but not as we know it’.  As I pull away in the train from Inverness, I leave with the thought of ‘pivotal moments’. This is one of the messages which I have taken from Keith Smyth’s inaugural address for his Professorship in the University of the Highlands and Islands. That we should be seeking them out and trying to join them up in our world… Read more…

Inspector Rosenhan Visits The Asylum

As part of the Mad World exhibition which examined missing voices from the story of psychiatry. The word ‘Madness’ is a rich word, and in its labyrinths are held important stories of humanity. It means a lot of different things to different people, and for me it has come to be a word which sometimes symbolises the best qualities in humans. Billy, a man who is part of ‘the old and the bold’ that keep our ambulance service running told me:
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‘Future Shock’: The Crisis of Relationships Between Body, Mind and Environment by Anne Fernie

Nervous exhaustion, melancholy, Weltschmerz, ennui, alienation, neurasthenia, Americanitis, stress, chronic fatigue syndrome, burnout ~ the labels & the socio-cultural context may change yet the symptoms remain the same. We are not referring to issues of faulty brain chemistry here such as clinical depression, mania or psychosis, yet these common & everyday emotions are increasingly being perceived as mental health issues. Should they be? Existential malaise manifests itself in a myriad of symptoms with crucially, no definitive cause ever identified.
A common historical (and current) explanation is that of the socio-cultural, likened to a virus attacking the body but this psychic virus‘inflames’ the psyche (Schaffner, 2014), no more so than during times of rapid social change (Kury, 2012). I do not intend to present a clinical analysis of the ‘condition’ but, whilst acknowledging a consistent trajectory in the occurrence of this individual ‘dis-ease’ with life, focus on the presumptions, treatments and explanations of the times to demonstrate to what extent perceptions of ‘illness’ are influenced by social prejudices and expectations. Read more…

Podcast: The British Experimental Novelists of the 1960s; A Forgotten Avant Garde

In April 2015, Joseph Darlington gave a talk on ‘The British Experimental Novelists of the 1960s; A Forgotten Avant Garde’ at the Ragged University in Manchester.  He and Anne Fernie organised it and shared their knowledge in Gulliver’s – a great pub on Oldham Street in the Northern Quarter.
He introduced a history of the life and times of four writers – B.S. Johnson, Eva Figes, Alan Burns, and Ann Quin – and how their close allegiance has, until now, gone unrecognised by literary scholars. He examined how each member of this group broke new ground in their works and painted a picture of their iconoclastic experiments in form which resulted in books being published unbound, some cut apart and stuck back together, some merely transcripts of audio tapes, and other eyecatching and unusual approaches to remaking the novel form. Read more…