In May 2023 I was delighted to be featured as the speaker for the ‘First Thursday Seminar Series’ organised by the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry, in the School of Health in Social Science, at the University of Edinburgh.

This was a wonderful opportunity to share some thoughts, ideas and ongoing analyses from the pilot work that I did – along with Sarah Wright – for the Suicide Cultures project. We ran a series of arts-based workshops – testing out approaches to working with different community groups to have conversations about suicide, its meanings, and its effects. The audience was a broad mix of counselling and psychotherapy practitioners and researchers, as well other scholars of suicide, and the discussion afterwards was a welcome chance to hear how others connected with the findings, and our analysis of these.

The paper I gave for the seminar drew on some eclectic theoretical resources – Lauren Berlant’s ‘slow death’ and Avery Gordon’s ‘haunted’ sociological imagination – to think through some of the stories that were told about living with and experiencing suicidal distress in our workshops.

You can listen to the seminar here.

Suicide Cultures and ‘the edge’ / Suicide Cultures: Reimagining Suicide Research by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0