TY - CHAP

T1 - Making voices

T2 - Curating encounters with personal experiences in an exhibition space

AU - Friis, Tine

AU - Whiteley, Louise

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - This chapter is grounded in a case study; a participatory research practice where personal experiences of how the human gut and psyche connect were shared, and then curated for display in an exhibition entitled The World is in You in Copenhagen. The research practice at stake was collective memory-work—a group-based method developed by Haug and colleagues. Participants write down personal memories in the third person. The memories are then read aloud and collectively analyzed, to challenge pre-existing conceptions of the body and self that can cause suffering when used unreflexively in everyday life. We were invited to display memory-work on gut-psyche connections, as a way of bringing personal experiences into an art-science-humanities exhibition. Curating personal experiences for display poses questions about which kinds of engagement are supported, which subjectivities are produced, and with which ethical ramifications. To unfold these questions, we threaded the care ideal of response-ability developed in the research practice through the process of making that research public. This oriented us towards how voices and subjectivities of knowledge were being produced, supported respectively by medical anthropology, critical psychology, and science and technology studies. Our case study amplifies these issues as particularly relevant to memory-work, but we suggest that they are relevant more broadly: we suggest that questions of care should be allowed to linger throughout processes of producing public engagement, as a matter of collective response-ability.

AB - This chapter is grounded in a case study; a participatory research practice where personal experiences of how the human gut and psyche connect were shared, and then curated for display in an exhibition entitled The World is in You in Copenhagen. The research practice at stake was collective memory-work—a group-based method developed by Haug and colleagues. Participants write down personal memories in the third person. The memories are then read aloud and collectively analyzed, to challenge pre-existing conceptions of the body and self that can cause suffering when used unreflexively in everyday life. We were invited to display memory-work on gut-psyche connections, as a way of bringing personal experiences into an art-science-humanities exhibition. Curating personal experiences for display poses questions about which kinds of engagement are supported, which subjectivities are produced, and with which ethical ramifications. To unfold these questions, we threaded the care ideal of response-ability developed in the research practice through the process of making that research public. This oriented us towards how voices and subjectivities of knowledge were being produced, supported respectively by medical anthropology, critical psychology, and science and technology studies. Our case study amplifies these issues as particularly relevant to memory-work, but we suggest that they are relevant more broadly: we suggest that questions of care should be allowed to linger throughout processes of producing public engagement, as a matter of collective response-ability.

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-44119-6_18

DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-44119-6_18

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 978-3-031-44118-9

SP - 271

EP - 286

BT - Ethical and methodological dilemmas in social science interventions

A2 - null, Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen

PB - Springer, Social Science

ER -