Pedagogy, Psychotherapy and Creative Practice in Twentieth-Century France: Comparative Perspectives
Thursday 4th April, 2024
12:30-14:00 (lunch provided), Geography 126
Please join us for an exciting event co-hosted by the QMUL Comparative Literature and Modern Languages Research Seminar and The Centre for the History of Emotions
Geography 126, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS (see map here).
All are very welcome! For catering purposes, please register for the event here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/pedagogy-psychotherapy-and-creative-practice-in-twentieth-century-france-tickets-838499042207?aff=oddtdtcreator
Encompassing discussion of figures whose trajectories traversed the domains of psychiatry, pedagogy and the arts in twentieth-century France — including Jean Dubuffet, Élise and Célestin Freinet, François Tosquelles and Frantz Fanon — the two papers will explore how interactions across these fields generated new conceptions of creative expression and collective life.
By delineating the historical, political and aesthetic circumstances that determined these exchanges between education, psychotherapy and the arts, the session invites discussion around disciplinary innovation in the contemporary moment.
Professor Jean Duffy ‘From psychiatrist to pedagogue, patient to pupil: Jean Dubuffet’s catalytic encounters with theory and practice’ (The University of Edinburgh)
Dr Richard Mason ‘Traits d’union: institutional psychotherapy, emancipatory pedagogy and the collective stakes of learning to read and write’ (Queen Mary University London)
Chaired by Professor Kiera Vaclavik, Director of the Centre for Childhood Cultures (QMUL)
Jean Duffy is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on the nouveau roman, on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, and on ritual, image, and artefact in contemporary French fiction. Her most recent book, Perceiving Dubuffet: Art, Embodiment, and the Viewer (2021), contextualizes Jean Dubuffet’s work within contemporary developments in phenomenology and examines the central role played by questions relating to embodiment in the evolution of his aesthetic thinking and artistic practice. She is currently preparing a second monograph on Dubuffet which will focus on his creative writings.
Richard Mason is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University London. His research looks at conceptual exchanges between the domains of literature and education, primarily in French and francophone contexts. He is currently working on two projects: one on the relationship between learning to read and write and institutional and collective life in twentieth-century France; the second on the status of ‘education’ in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Recently he has co-edited, with Kasia Mika, a special issue of the critical theory journal Paragraph, entitled Difficulty’s Knots: Disturbance, Untimeliness, Risk (March 2024), which looks at conceptions of difficulty across education and the arts and humanities.