Read Ryan Holiday’s interview with Jules Evans in Observer magazine. Jules talks about his research into Stoicism and CBT.

Missed our Annual Lecture? Never fear, you can catch up on YouTube. Prof Stephen Brooke was our 2016 speaker: his talk was titled ‘Hate and Fear: Emotion, Politics and Race in 1980s London’.

Abstract

‘Hate and Fear? Emotions, Politics and Race in 1980s London’ will be an exploration of the role emotion played in race relations in 1980s London. It will examine incidents of racial harassment and violence on housing estates in London between 1981 and 1986 and relates those incidents to the history and theory of emotions, the political history of postwar Britain and our understanding of everyday life. The lecture will stress that understanding emotion is critical to comprehending the politics of race in London. The lecture will also reflect upon the broader role emotion plays in politics.

Tiffany Watt Smith has been awarded a £15,000 grant from The Leverhulme Trust to support director and designer of puppets Mervyn Millar to work on the project ‘Signs of Life’ at the Centre for nine months. In line with our grant ‘Living with Feeling’, ‘Signs of Life’ will investigate how the mind perceives emotion in non-living things.

Abstract

Signs of Life will bring director and designer of puppets, Mervyn Millar, to the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London. During his residency, Millar will investigate our emotional responses to animated objects, asking what happens to us when we indulge in the illusion that a dead object has life, intelligence, and emotion. The main output of the residency will be the development of a new piece of object-based theatre about how the mind perceives emotion in non-living things. Millar’s purpose in the residency and in the theatre piece will be to explore what processes are at work in these moments, and understand why they cause us such pleasure – and sometimes, discomfort – and to play with the implications of these ideas for our psychology and culture. The piece will mix puppetry and actors, and blend history, narrative, science, and movement. The second output will be a public symposium, which will bring together all the collaborators in the project, to reflect on the relationship between artists and scientists, as well as exploring new ideas in the perception of emotion in non-living things.

On the 4 and 5 November Helen Stark gave two talks at the public engagement event, State Festival, in Berlin where the theme was ‘The Emotional Machine’. On the 4th, alongside Daphne Rozenblatt of the Max Planck Institute of Human Development, Helen gave a public talk to about fifty people about the man of feeling and his emotions. You can watch Helen’s talk on YouTube (from about 36 minutes).

You can read Helen’s post about the man of feeling on the Emotions blog. On the 5th, Helen contributed to a talkshow organised by Dandelions, a collapse-aware performance project. Helen was interviewed by Simo Vassinen about national identity and climate change. You can also read a review of the festival which singles out Helen’s contributions.

Queen Mary, University of London, 20^th and 21^st April 2017

‘Autism is not limited to a single region or a country; it is a worldwide challenge that requires global action’ – Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General, 2012

The autism diagnosis has become an important category of global health; capable of attracting large amounts of funding, shaping disability rights legislation, and impacting education, health and welfare policies internationally. This symposium will bring together scholars from across the world to reflect on how and why the autism category has achieved such significance in shaping international healthcare, research, and policy interventions, since the middle decades of the twentieth century. It will consider how and why autism became a global category, and what the implications of this are for understanding autism, research networks, and health policy in the future. The symposium will lead to a groundbreaking edited collection on the globalisation of autism for a wide international readership.

The symposium will address questions such as:

• How has the autism diagnosis been employed in different national contexts to ensure education, healthcare and disability rights?

• How have facts about autism travelled, and what impact has travel had on these facts?

• How has the neurodiversity movement arisen in response to the growth of autism diagnoses, and what opportunities and challenges has this movement created internationally?

• How has the autism diagnosis changed ideas about children’s typical emotional development in different national or international contexts?

• What role have the neurosciences played in establishing international models of autism?

• How have the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) influenced legal, political, medical and research approaches to autism internationally?

• What has been the role of caregivers and other stakeholders in challenging models of autism developed in the scientific literature both nationally and internationally?

The symposium will consider the political dimension of the autism diagnosis, in particular its role in establishing education, health and welfare rights internationally, and its entry into international human rights discourse.  It will also consider its role in generating new forms of knowledge and research programmes internationally. It aims to encourage dialogue across countries in order to generate new perspectives on how the autism diagnosis has been integrated into different cultural contexts, and the impact that this has had on models of psychological development and individual identity.

Confirmed contributors already include Francisco Ortega (Rio de Janeiro State), Stuart Murray (Leeds), Richard Ashcroft (QMUL), Jonathyne Briggs (Indiana U. Northwest), Des Fitzgerald (Cardiff), Gregory Hollin (Leeds), Kristien Hens (Antwerp), Ilina Singh (Oxford), and Bonnie Evans (QMUL).

We encourage application from countries across the world, and from scholars at all stages of their career. We also encourage applications that adopt interdisciplinary approaches and that employ innovative methodological approaches. We have some travel bursaries available for those travelling from abroad.  This symposium is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Please send the title of your paper together with an abstract of up to 500 words to b.evans@qmul.ac.uk. Please include your name, email address, and your affiliation. Please state clearly if you would like to be considered for one of the bursaries for your travel and/or accommodation. The deadline for submissions is 29^th December 2016.