Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology Launch Event

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:  

 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.  

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: to access them please click on the highlighted titles below:

Opening: Project and Team Introduction: Matthew Broome (University of Birmingham): Giovanni Stanghellini (University of Florence); Lucienne Spencer (University of Birmingham); Roxana Baiasu (University of Birmingham, University of Oxford and Stanford University in Oxford)

Plenary Session 1: Robert Chapman (Sheffield Hallam University, U.K.)

Plenary Session 2: Lucy Bolton (Queen Mary, the University of London, U.K.) 

Plenary Session 3: Kevin Aho (Florida Gulf Coast University in the U.S.) 

Parallel Sessions

In-person parallel session: Intersections

Online Parallel Session 1: Phenomenological Psychopathology: Bringing the Past into the Future

Online Parallel Session 2: Global and Interdisciplinary Methods in Phenomenological Psychopathology