Pain is notoriously hard to communicate to others. Scholars have debated the relationship between pain and language: does pain require a shared language and common understanding to be explicable, or does hearing about the pain of others always entail doubt? What kinds of communication best enable us to express and hear about pain? On what foundations can we build understanding? This session will explore the capacities of stories, poems and photographs as forms of pain communication, and the possible relations between them.
Yasmin Gunaratnam is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has a specialist interest in narrative and stories and writes short stories and poems and her recent research includes a British Academy Fellowship on the palliative care philosophy of ‘total pain’. Yasmin’s latest book Death and the Migrant brings together her interest in stories with her sociological research on transnational dying and intercultural care. Her co-edited collection Narrative and Stories in Care was shortlisted and ‘highly commended’ in the British Medical Association Book Awards 2010.
Deborah Padfield is a visual artist specialising in lens based media and inter-disciplinary practice and research within Fine Art and Medicine. She is currently Research Associate at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and Artist in Residence at the Eastman Dental Hospital. She has collaborated extensively with clinicians and patients exploring the value of visual images to clinician-patient interactions and the communication of pain. In 2001 her work with Dr Charles Pither and staff and patients from INPUT Pain Management Unit, St Thomas’ Hospital, led to a touring exhibition, pilot study and book, Perceptions of Pain. Her collaboration with Professor Joanna Zakrzewska and facial pain clinicians and patients from UCLH led to several exhibitions, symposia and the current UCL CHIRP funded project Pain: speaking the threshold. She has exhibited widely including the National Portrait Gallery, the Wellcome Trust and the Science Museum. She is the winner of several awards including the Sciart Research Award and British Pain Society Artist of the Year 2012.
Jude Rosen is a poet, translator and independent researcher in urban culture, policy, planning and citizenship and former university lecturer in politics at UCL until ill-health retirement. Her book of poems, A Small Gateway, was published by Hearing Eye in 2009, addressing the scars of history and displacement in shaping personal and collective identity, memory and art. The poem Crohn Heroine formed the backdrop to the hospital video produced by Richard Crow for desperate optimists and was later used in the Communicating Chronic Pain workshop on sound. In her current work she has been experimenting with a walking and narrative-based poetic practice writing from field notes and observation of resonant places and routes, gathering oral histories and scoring the voices of former workers, displaced people and inhabitants of the marshes and Olympic borderlands of East London as an act of retrieval, reclaiming the space, its peoples and history.
Elena Gonzalez-Polledo is Course Tutor in the Department of Methodology. Together with colleagues, she recently completed the ESRC-NCRM funded project Communicating Chronic Pain, which explored the use of arts-based and non-verbal methods for communicating about pain.
The Department of Methodology (@MethodologyLSE) provides courses for PhD and MSc students and LSE staff in the design of social research and in qualitative and quantitative analysis, and hosts degree programmes for MSc Social Research Methods and MPhil/PhD in Social Research Methods.
This event forms part of the LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2015, taking place from Monday 23 - Saturday 28 February 2015, with the theme 'Foundations'.
Suggested hashtag for this event for Twitter users: #LSElitfest
Podcast
A podcast of this event is available to download from Communicating Chronic Pain
Podcasts and videos of many LSE events can be found at the LSE Public Lectures and Events: podcasts and videos channel.