Workshop "Narrative and Beyond: Negotiating Experiences through Imaginative Practices"
Topic: Throughout cultural history, human agents have engaged in imaginative practices of meaning-making to negotiate their experiences of loss, disruption, and alienation. From storytelling to painting, from music to dance, and more recently from film-making to video-gaming. These imaginative practices can be conducive to cognitive and affective flourishing. In recent years, philosophical theorising on practices of meaning-making has focussed on linguistic forms of narration, largely ignoring the importance of the positionality and socio-cultural situatedness of human agents. However, not all kinds of experiences lend themselves to linguistic expression and narratability. Furthermore, not all agents have equal opportunities to engage in imaginative practices. And not all kinds of socio-cultural environments are conducive to the creation of and engagement with artefacts and artworks. Without taking these aspects into account, we are not able to understand the full potential and scope of imaginative practices of meaning-making. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together leading scholars in philosophy of mind and cognition, phenomenology, and philosophy of psychiatry to address these experiential-creative, positional, and environmental aspects. By combining philosophical analyses with the examination of a variety of case studies, the workshop aims at arriving at a better understanding of the contributions of imaginative practices of meaning-making to cognitive and affective flourishing.
Speakers: Becky Millar (Cardiff University), Jussi Saarinen (University of Jyväskylä), Louise Richardson-Self (University of Tasmania), Marilyn Stendera (University of Wollongong), Emily Hughes (Macquarie University), Richard Menary (Macquarie University) and Regina Fabry (Macquarie University).
You can find all relevant information on the workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/narrative-and-beyond
This event is in-person only at Macquarie University in Sydney and is generously funded by the Macquarie Minds and Intelligences Initiative
