Round table discussion

Engaging with the University of Birmingham's ongoing research into its institutional history connected to these practices, a panel of experts situated this history in its contemporary context and the current struggle to ban harmful reorientation activities aimed at LGBTQ+ people in Britain.

• Introduction
• Project Findings
• Key Reflections
• Historical Context of Feldman and MacCulloch's Work
• What Do Difficult Histories Offer Universities?
• What Can the History of "Conversion Therapy" Change?

Watch the full video

Acronyms

• BPS - British Psychological Society
• CHIP - Contextual and Historical Influences in Psychology

Participants

• Kate Davison is Lecturer in the History of Sexuality at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include queer and trans histories of the psy-sciences, transnational histories of the twentieth century and the history of emotion and experience. Her first book, Aversion Therapy: Sex, Psychiatry and the Cold War, will be published by Cambridge University Press.
• Katherine Hubbard is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology University of Surrey. Her interdisciplinary research looks at psychology from a historical and sociological perspective. She utilises a queer feminist approach which centralises inclusivity. Her book Queer Ink: A Blotted History Towards Liberation focuses on the use of the Rorschach test in pathologising and depathologising histories of psychology.
• Sarah Marks (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London and Director of the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health. Her work draws on historical methods, Science and Technology Studies, and qualitative research on lived experience. She runs a UKRI-funded project on Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies in Britain since 1950, including histories of aversion therapy.
• Mo Moulton is a professor in the history department at the University of Birmingham. Their research interests include queer history, trans history, and forms of community in twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. They were co-chair of the Steering Group for the University of Birmingham's Historical Research into Sexuality project, which investigated the University's past sexual reorientation practices.
• Helen Spandler (they/she) is Professor of Mental Health Studies at the University of Central Lancashire and the Managing Editor of Asylum, the radical mental health magazine. They were the Principal Investigator of a research study exploring lesbian’s experiences of aversion therapy and other conversion treatments in the UK mental health system, and is now researching radical mental health zines (both funded by Wellcome).
• Rebecca Wynter is a historian of medicine, mental health and psychiatry at the University of Birmingham, where she is an Associate of the Institute for Mental Health and co-founder of the Mental Health Humanities initiative. She was the researcher and writer of the official investigation and report, “Conversion Therapy’ and the University of Birmingham, c.1966-1983’.