Programme full

Frontiers
W308, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
Wednesday 15 April 2015 09:00 - 10:30
PAPER SESSION 1
Fragile Identifications in a Fantasmatic Present: the Social and Psychical Function of Temporality in the
Practice of Academic Research
Lapping, C.
(Institute of Education, University of London)
This performative paper explores some of the spatialities embedded in the thinking and practice of psychoanalyticallyinformed
clinical work. I reflect on the subjective use I make of journeys to and from the settings in which I practice, as
well as the micro-geographies that take place within these settings. In so doing I seek to communicate something of
the sense of interior worlds created by and necessary for therapeutic work. My account gestures towards the spatial
ideas that permeate psychoanalytic, which I and suggest sometimes operate as a common language shared across
different theoretical positions.
A Personal Geography of Psychodynamic Practice
Bondi, L.
(University of Edinburgh)
This performative paper explores some of the spatialities embedded in the thinking and practice of psychoanalyticallyinformed
clinical work. I reflect on the subjective use I make of journeys to and from the settings in which I practice, as
well as the micro-geographies that take place within these settings. In so doing I seek to communicate something of
the sense of interior worlds created by and necessary for therapeutic work. My account gestures towards the spatial
ideas that permeate psychoanalytic, which I and suggest sometimes operate as a common language shared across
different theoretical positions.
The Psycho-social Orders of Supervision : Ignorance and Ignominy
Webb, R., Hey, V.
(University of Sussex)
If learning is about the acquisition of new knowledge, it implicates the state of a 'before of ignorance' and an 'after of
enlightenment'. How do differently positioned academic subjects negotiate the affective dimensions at play in such
transactions?
In this paper Rebecca Webb and her 'ex' supervisor, Valerie Hey, draw on their empirical accounts of supervision,
sharing some of the writing they have generated as part of their supervisory sessions together. They do this in order
to think through the affects of shame in the shaping and honing of different kinds of subjecthood, rendered im/possible
in their encounters. Indeed, they explore shame as something which is inherently unstable and yet potentially
productive and affirming, born out of the opacity and tantalizing quality of writing itself.
What is at stake in shame in the encounter, especially as it frames the mimetic quality of engaging with writing in a
supervisor/supervisee relationship? Is shame that which must be 'avoided' at all costs, something damaging and
eroding of any worthwhile sense of self? Does this mean that it must be named (and shamed) at the outset and swept
away with a deft swish of a supervisory broom? Or, rather, is it that which must be countenanced and acknowledged
in the processes of subjectification (Butler, 1995) and is that particular affect constitutive of an emergence of a
'getting to know' in any supervisory relationship worth its salt?
Shame and Welfare Practice: A Relational Analysis
Dobson, R.
(Kingston University)
This presentation draws on psycho-social, critical race and feminist informed theorisations of shame, and empirical
data from social housing and homelessness workers, to contribute to a lineage of research on 'front-line' welfare
practitioners and welfare practices in social policy and welfare. Within sociological and policy debates, and in contexts
of 'austerity', welfare practitioners are typically positioned in binary terms: constructed as good, benevolent and heroic
resisters to, or as exercising bad, malevolent and inadequate complicities with, punitive policy, political and popular
climates. Critical psycho-social works have engaged with those debates through the analysis of relationships between
'dilemmatic' experience, human subjectivity and institutional space (Hoggett 2001, 2006). This presentation builds on
those vital intellectual interventions by drawing on relational and performative informed conceptualisations of shame
65 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University