[Kaupunkitutkimus] Seminar: Agency and Care in Literature and Film

Wed Oct 30 12:41:53 EET 2024

The next online seminar in the series Current Intersections of Culture, Language, and Wellbeing<https://www.utu.fi/en/news/events/current-intersections-of-culture-language-and-wellbeing> takes place on Tuesday 12 November, 14:00-16:00 EET (12:00-14:00 GMT / 13:00-15:00 CET).

Register here<https://utu.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50kfuirqDkrE9KFpqo3l_viARlX7Xr7cRyv#/registration>!

Agency and Care in Literature and Film

Alicja Bemben, Assistant Professor, University of Silesia, Poland.
"Expressions and Perceptions of Agency in Dementia-Affected Individuals"

Adarsh Yadav, PhD student, Department of English, University of Exeter, UK.
"Bordering Bodies: Public Health and Noninnocent Care in Literary Studies"

See abstracts and bios below.

Presentations:

Alicja Bemben<https://us.edu.pl/instytut/il/osoby/alicja-bemben/>: Expressions and Perceptions of Agency in Dementia-Affected Individuals

Saul - one of the protagonists of Michel Franco's 2023 film Memory - suffers from early symptoms of dementia. On the one hand, he tries to handle his memory problems himself. On the other hand, those around him also try to be of help: his brother Isaac, by and large, confines Saul to his apartment and hires medical carers to look after his brother. The other protagonist of the series, Sylvia, and her daughter grow to be interested in making Saul as comfortable in his life as his dementia allows. In my presentation, I focus on Saul's ways of handling his memory problems and the contrastive perceptions (by Isaac as well as by Sylvia and her daughter) of his actions. In its first part, I would like to show that Saul targets his agency not so much at solving his unsolvable problem - dementia - but at handling the disorientation it generates. In its second part, I would like to argue that, depending on how Saul's expressions of agency are (mis)understood by particular characters translates into how they try to help him. For both these purposes, I rely on Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier's ideas concerning the expressions of agency in neurotraumatised individuals (2016). I close my presentation by pointing to several implications of my findings (especially the ones related to the pedagogical potential of Franco's depiction of dementia).

Biography: Alicja Bemben, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland. She is a founder of the H/Story research group<https://hstory.us.edu.pl/>, under the auspices of which she has co-organised a number of conferences<https://hstory.us.edu.pl/>. She has also co-edited several monographs and authored a number of texts dealing primarily with historical fiction, historiography, and their affinities. She is an associate editor of The Robert Graves Review and cooperates with several other journals. Her recent publications include Emotions as Engines of History (Routledge, 2021) and "Mask as a Means of Shaping Intellectual Identity" (Springer, 2023).

Adarsh Yadav<https://wcceh.org/meet-the-team/phd-students/adarsh-yadav/>: Bordering Bodies: Public Health and Noninnocent Care in Literary Studies

The reimagining of care work requires us to first understand the public health system in India. Scholars in critical caste studies (Gopal Guru, Sundar Sarukkai), feminist studies (Uma Chakravarty, Anupama Roy), and queer studies (Aniruddha Dutta) have highlighted how social structures in India are enmeshed with colonial legacies, caste, class and rooted in material power. In this presentation, through a variety of texts by authors Aman Sethi, Geetanjali Shree and others, I will argue that to understand noninnocent care, we must trace colonial and caste narratives of health and hygiene in literature. These literatures from India alert us to the links between contagion, borders around certain bodies, and affects such as disgust. This labour points at the noninnocent care work that operates in homes, hospitals, and hospice settings. This presentation will end with an imagining otherwise - a reconceptualising of public health and care work through specific fiction and nonfiction literatures from India.

Biography: Adarsh Yadav (she/her) is a PhD student at the University of Exeter's Department of English. She is a member of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter. Her PhD project aims to contribute to the existing scholarship around 'care' through an exploration of contemporary South Asian fiction.

Her PhD research is looking at the ways in which contemporary South Asian literature especially the novel reflects, constructs and critiques care work through an exploration of illness, bodies, and mental health. She is particularly interested in migration studies, feminist studies and critical caste studies. She is also collaborating with people with lived experience of chronic illness/conditions, care workers, informal caregivers to shape her creative methodology and reflect on collaborative research in health/medical humanities.

This seminar is part of the online, multidisciplinary collaboration between three networks of the University of Turku: the Cultural Interaction Researcher Network KULTVA<https://blogit.utu.fi/kultva/en/front-page/>, the Centre of Language and Wellbeing (LaWe)<https://sites.utu.fi/lawe/en/#:~:text=Centre%20for%20the%20Study%20of%20Language%20and%20Wellbeing%20LaWe%20aims,serves%20and%20improves%20our%20societies.>, and the Research Center for Culture and Health<https://www.utu.fi/en/yliopisto/humanistinen-tiedekunta/kulttuurin-ja-terveyden-tutkimusyksikko>.

Dr Avril Tynan

Academy Researcher 2023-2027 (NarRec)

Room 224, Arcanum

University of Turku, Vatselankatu 2

20500 Turku

Finland

Editor of Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies<https://nebraskapressjournals.unl.edu/journal/storyworlds-a-journal-of-narrative-studies/>
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