Past Events

Delusions at the Intersection

Interdisciplinary expansion sandpit 

Date: 26 - 27 February , 2024

Organisers: Rosa Ritunnano and Jeanette Littlemore from University of Birmingham; Anke Maatz and Julian Hofman from University of Zürich

Location: Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich

Madpeople's Coping Mechanisms

Date: 25 - 26 September , 2023

Organisers: Sofia Jeppsson & Paul Lodge 
Location: Faculty of Philosophy, Radcliffe Humanities,
Woodstock Road, University of Oxford, OX2 6GG

Camouflaging: Philosophical and Clinical Perspectives

Date: 28 - 29 September 2023, 4-8 PM (CET)
Organisers: Valentina Petrolini and Philipp Schmidt
Location: Online
  

Launch event - Friday 14 October 2022

Through this launch event, we invited critical reflection on the theme of Renewing phenomenological psychopathology. The Launch Event introduced the award, kicked-off initial engagement with academic stakeholders in order to frame research questions and plans for the next two years.

Thanks to the generous support of the Wellcome Trust, the Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology project was formally launched at the University of Birmingham and via Zoom on the 14th of October 2022. This was a one-day hybrid event, with online and in-person panels running simultaneously. In total we had fifteen excellent speakers from multiple backgrounds and of all career stages. We had around fifty in person attendees and over 100 online attendees.  

Following introductions from the project team, our launch event was kicked off by our first keynote speaker Dr Robert Chapman from Sheffield Hallam University, with their talk entitled ‘Marx and Mental Health: Alienation in a Post-Fordist Era’. In this talk Robert focused on experiences of mental illness and disablement in a post-Fordist era, with an emphasis on this era’s heavy reliance on cognitive and emotional labour. 

This was followed by our second keynote, Dr Lucy Bolton from Queen Mary University of London, with her talk entitled ‘Fear Itself, and Not the Statement “I Am afraid”:  Film Phenomenology: Consciousness, Bodies, and Lived Experience’. Here, Lucy traces back the development of film-phenomenology in order to demonstrate that phenomenology as an approach to film is enabling for both the film and those who encounter it. She argued that this open, receptive, and inclusive orientation is grounded in the recognition of a variety of possibilities, not all of which are reducible to neat theoretical categories. 

After lunch we ran three simultaneous panels, two solely online and one hybrid. During these panels we heard incredible talks from the following academics:   

Parallel Sessions

In-person Panel: Intersections	Online Panel 1: Phenomenological Psychopathology: Bringing the Past into the Future	Online Panel 2: Global and Interdisciplinary Methods in Phenomenological Psychopathology
Rosa Ritunnano- Investigating the Meaning of Delusions at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Applied Linguistics	Mariana Cardoso Puchivailo - Anomalies of Self-Experience in First Psychotic Episodes: Differential Diagnostics between Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders and Dissociative Disorders	Janko Nešić -Ecological Psychopathology of Autism Spectrum Disorder
Cat Fischer- Making the Body Home Again: Phenomenological Insights into Anorexia Nervosa	Nandini Chakraborty -The Importance of Embedding Psychopathology and Phenomenology in Clinical Practice and Training in Psychiatry	Santiago Sourigues -The Transpositive Structure of the Word and the Bond to the Other. An Interdisciplinary Approach from Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis and Literature.
Mollie Cornell- A (Court)Room with a View: The Role of Phenomenology in the Court of Protection	Felipe Arruda- The Concept of Paraphrenia: Decline and Rebirth of a Psychopathological Concept	Marucela Uscamayta Ayvar- Phenomenology of Mental Illness in the Andes of Cusco, Peru
Jodie Louise Russell- Self-interpretation, Agency and Mental Disorder	Guilherme Messas- How Learning from History can Help to Foster a Successful New Era of Phenomenological Psychopathology	Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen- Ontology of Phenomenological Psychopathology (OPheP): A Collaborative, Decentralised, and Open-science Initiative for the 21st Century

The launch event was brought to a close by our final keynote speaker, Professor Kevin Aho from Florida Gulf Coast University in the U.S., with his talk entitled: 'Phenomenological Psychopathology in the Age of Anti-Depressants'. Kevin argued that the medicalisation of mental illness and the overprescribing of antidepressants is a very real problem and that antidepressants can be valuable from a phenomenological perspective insofar as they act on the meaning-structures that are disrupted in mental illness.  

Here are a couple of conference related blogs on 'Hermeneutical Injustice and the depths of depression' by Ian James Kidd and 'Loss and Grief in the Context of Mental Illness' by Bernice Brijan. 

The RPP team would like to say a *big* thank you to all those who participated in our launch event!  

For those who missed our launch event, you’re in luck! You can listen to the recordings of the talks (please see below)! 

 

 Parallel Sessions