The wounded storyteller: on speaking vulnerability, acknowledging dependence

This is a symposium presentation and paper I delivered at the research symposium, 'Vulnerability and Resistance', at CSM in June 2019

Symposium: On vulnerability and resistance

26 June 2019, Central Saint Martins

Co-organised by Judy Willcocks and Joanne Morra
Vulnerability has traditionally been viewed as a deficit. This symposium challenges such a notion by opening up a space in which vulnerability is understood as a powerful means of mobilising agency, resistance and activism.

Throughout the day, the theme of vulnerability and resistance will be examined through multiple lenses: from the intimacy of (auto)biography; to the social and cultural contexts which have seen the rise of a charged discourse on vulnerability and its embodied resistance; and the harnessing of the vulnerable for political action.

Bringing together staff, students and graduates we will examine the issues of vulnerability and resistance through a variety of approaches: from filmmaking and graphic illustration, through curation and artistic practice, to academic writing and design thinking.

On vulnerability and resistance is the first symposium hosted by the Creative Practices, Education and Wellbeing Research Network run by Judy Willcocks (Head of the Museum and Study Collection at CSM) and
Dr Joanne Morra (Professor of Art and Culture, CSM). This event has been kindly supported by CSM Knowledge Exchange funding and CSM Research Visibility Fund.

Speakers
* John Miers – Speaking my truth through the voices of others
* Anne-Marie Creamer – The wounded storyteller: on speaking vulnerability, acknowledging dependence
* Brian O’Callaghan – The vulnerable archive
* Caterina Albano – Vulnerability: the making of a discourse
* Dr Clare Warner – Margins and centres in curriculum discourse
* Sal Anderson and Beverley Carruthers – Creative Transformation: a case study
* Susan Ibreck – Integrating Emotional Learning into education settings
* Judah Armani – Seeing Clearly
* Brooke Wilson and Marcus Nelson – Emotionally naked: men and vulnerability
* Laura E. Fischer – The radical embrace of vulnerability for healing and growth

My own paper for the symposium titled, 'The wounded storyteller: on speaking vulnerability, acknowledging dependence'.

This paper was delivered at On Vulnerability and Resistance, the inaugural symposium of the Creative Practices, Education and Wellbeing project at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, on 26 June 2019. Speaking from my experience of diagnosis with a rare, aggressive spinal tumour in 2018, and explicitly refusing the framing of heroic struggle, the talk asks what it means to speak publicly about illness within the university where one works, and proposes that illness is a form of knowledge with existential impact.

The paper argues that the customary separation of the personal from the professional in academic life rests on the assumption that illness produces no knowledge. Drawing on Havi Carel's phenomenology of illness, it traces the texture of that knowledge: the calculation every ill or vulnerable person performs in deciding how much a listener can bear; testimony written to friends as a means of keeping a self intact; the altered geography of a return to work; and the consulting room, where trust is granted in proportion to surrender. Reading Arthur W Frank's figure of 'the wounded storyteller,' and his notion of the remission society, alongside Alasdair MacIntyre's account of acknowledged dependence, it reimagines the university as a network of giving and receiving rather than an engine of self-sufficiency. A closing movement, through Eliane Scarry and Susan Sontag, considers the difficulty of representing suffering after the waning of shared religious visual languages, drawing on the author's/ my Irish Catholic upbringing, and calls for a wider critical vocabulary for vulnerability in teaching and curriculum design. Dependence, openly acknowledged, is here proposed as an act of resistance.

For the "additional information" field, covering the inclusion of there substance of this talk at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) in 2020:

The paper subsequently contributed to international discussion on vulnerability in artistic research: it informed The Ethics of Vulnerability and Artistic Research, a panel at the Artistic Research Week, Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), convened by Maziar Raein with Tale Næss and Camille Norment, which examined individual and institutional vulnerability and the place of vulnerability in artistic research and its teaching.

• https://youtu.be/wqufv1KsgXA?si=OYvocJBJ...