Emily Hughes - '"Heavier, and less mine": grief and the modification of bodily experience'

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Emily Hughes, University of York.

Emily Hughes '"Heavier, and less mine": grief and the modification of bodily experience'

Abstract: This paper gives a phenomenological analysis of the impact of grief upon bodily experience. In the first half of the paper I will provide an analysis of responses to Question 7 of the ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience' questionnaire, ‘Has your body felt any different during grief?' which was conducted with colleagues from the University of York. Using Braun and Clarke's qualitative method of thematic analysis, I will organise the descriptions of bodily experience into patterns of themes, including feelings of heaviness, emptiness, constriction, numbness and depersonalisation. In the second half of the paper I will critically evaluate these themes in light of the broader literature on the lived body and lived space, as given in the work of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Marcel, Minkowski, Bollnow and Schmitz. In so doing, I will explore the ways in which modifications to bodily experience in grief can be seen to impact spatial experience and, by implication, the way in which the mourner finds themselves in the world as a whole.

Bio: I am a postdoctoral research associate in philosophy at the University of York working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience.' I completed my PhD at the University of New South Wales. My research is situated in the intersection between existential phenomenology and the philosophy of psychiatry and psychology, with a particular focus on phenomenological interpretations of affect and the way in which emotions modify temporal experience.

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.

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