Lisa Blackman - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Lisa Blackman

Palgrave eBooks, 2002

How can we develop a politics and theory of subjectivity suitable for the twenty-first century? W... more How can we develop a politics and theory of subjectivity suitable for the twenty-first century? What place does an account of subjectivity have within the development of critical psychology today? Leading authors from a range of disciplines explore the themes of politics, migration, population movement, culture and spirituality, to examine how we might find new ways to think about the human subject in the new millenium. The chapters are diverse in terms of approach, theoretical orientation and subject matter. What joins them together is an engagement with pressing social, cultural and political issues and an innovative approach to the issues of subjectivity contained within them. From the legacies of fascism to the politics of Northern Ireland, from anti-road protesters to the new physics, Challenging Subjects takes a challenging look at what forms of human subjectivity will look like and how we might study them.

Feminist Review, Nov 1, 2015

This paper explores the experiences of women who "hear voices" (auditory verbal hallucinations). ... more This paper explores the experiences of women who "hear voices" (auditory verbal hallucinations). We begin by examining historical understandings of women hearing voices, showing these have been driven by androcentric theories of how women's bodies functioned leading to women being viewed as requiring their voices be interpreted by men. We show the twentieth century was associated with recognition that the mental violation of women's minds (represented by some voice-hearing) was often a consequence of the physical violation of women's bodies. We next report the results of a qualitative study into voice-hearing women's experiences (n = 8). This found similarities between women's relationships with their voices and their relationships with others and the wider social context. Finally, we present results from a quantitative study comparing voice-hearing in women (n = 65) and men (n = 132) in a psychiatric setting. Women were more likely than men to have certain forms of voice-hearing (voices conversing) and to have antecedent events of trauma, physical illness, and relationship problems. Voices identified as female may have more positive affect than male voices. We conclude that women voice-hearers have and continue to face specific challenges necessitating research and activism, and hope this paper will act as a stimulus to such work.

Subjectivity, Nov 3, 2014

Theory, Culture & Society, Jun 17, 2015

This paper will consider how digital communication, social media, and the digital transformation ... more This paper will consider how digital communication, social media, and the digital transformation of the publishing industry are transforming academic work practices. In light of increasing “impact” agendas, and pressures on academics to increase the reach, traction and appropriation of their published work using social media, the paper will consider the tensions, contradictions, attachments, hidden and not so hidden injuries that this is creating. This context, and the production of new forms of affective relationality, will be located within the rise of PPPR (post-publication-peer-review) where the published journal article no longer exists as a static un-modifiable entity. The paper will debate these issues, taking an affective and hauntological approach, by exploring two recent science controversies, which took shape across social media and within digital forms of communication (blogs, twitter, facebook, comments on websites etc). The paper will draw on empirical material taken f...

Theory, Culture & Society, 2015

Academics across the sciences and humanities are increasingly being encouraged to use social medi... more Academics across the sciences and humanities are increasingly being encouraged to use social media as a post-publication strategy to enhance and extend the impact of their articles and books. As well as various measures of social media impact, the turn towards publication outlets which are open access and free to use is contributing to anxieties over where, what and how to publish. This is all the more pernicious given the increasing measures of academic value that govern the academy, and the stresses, strains and hidden injuries that structure academic life. This article will debate these issues and their consequences for the humanities and social sciences by analysing the contours of a recent controversy in academic science publishing, which follows the after-lives of a highly cited journal article. This includes a discussion of the value and status of post-publication peer review, and the politics of open access publishing, of citation and the public communication of science with...

Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation

We discussed in the introduction the way in which we are driven to understand the ‘psychology of ... more We discussed in the introduction the way in which we are driven to understand the ‘psychology of individuals’ who transgress the boundaries of normal conduct. We need to establish their ‘Otherness’, their difference from us, in order to establish our own innocence and normality. Peter Sutcliffe (known as the Yorkshire Ripper) claimed that he heard voices that drove him to violently rape and kill women, mainly prostitutes. The fact that he heard voices (or made claims that he did), ironically, offers us a calm reassurance. In western societies voice hearing is mainly taken to be a sign of a disease process. Sutcliffe killed, he alleged, because he lacked the biological, or even biochemical, means to control his own behaviour. Sutcliffe was ill or sick, and therefore the answer to why he killed women was located within his psychological make-up. His motives were explained by his biological ill health.

This article, which appeared in a local evening newspaper, is an example of the common way in whi... more This article, which appeared in a local evening newspaper, is an example of the common way in which the media (especially violent and sexually explicit media) are discussed, judged and evaluated. A ‘dangerous woman’ who, as the article goes on to establish, was ‘mentally unstable’ was corrupted by a sexually explicit and violent video. Psychiatrist Dr John Stone, of Knowle Hospital, Wickham, said the woman suffered from psychotic depression and that, on the night of the attack, alcohol had been a factor causing her to stab the sailor.

We have in this book presented the basis of a different way of looking at the relationship betwee... more We have in this book presented the basis of a different way of looking at the relationship between critical psychology and the media. In this chapter we will review the arguments made in previous ones and go on to discuss the implications of our argument for an understanding of the death of Princess Diana, an event that was characterized by accusations of mass hysteria on the one hand and ‘people power’ on the other.

In the last chapter we discussed the importance of the work of Jacques Lacan in the development o... more In the last chapter we discussed the importance of the work of Jacques Lacan in the development of work on ideology. In the same period, second-wave feminism began with American women taking a leaf out of the civil rights movement, arguing not for a mass movement led by a revolutionary party, as in Marxism, but for a wide-based political movement without any clear organization or structure. This form of political action was crucial to new ways of thinking because it was one of the first breaks with traditional left, male-dominated party politics. Central to this early feminism was the concept of consciousness raising. Groups formed in which women would discuss their situation and ‘raise their consciousness’ about the oppression they, as women, were suffering. It is interesting therefore to note the way in which, once more, psychological transformation was understood as lying at the heart of the political process. The idea of a raised consciousness was of course not a million miles away from a true or revolutionary one, but in placing the consciousness of one’s own situation at the heart of political change, the recalcitrance of the mass mind once again appears.

In the last chapter we began to explore how the ‘Other’ forms the basis of media representations ... more In the last chapter we began to explore how the ‘Other’ forms the basis of media representations of psychopathology and criminality. The way in which we analysed these representations is similar to Bhabha’s concept of the ‘colonial stereotype’. The ‘stereotype’ does not denote a misrepresentation or distortion of a pregiven reality. Instead, it is given a semiotic and productive role in which the ‘Other’ as a sign repeatedly signifies in a particular way. The same old stories about racial difference as pathological are endlessly told and retold… We feel that how Bhabha uses the concept of the stereotype is useful when thinking about the status of representations of psychopathology and criminality, especially within the mass media.

New Formations, 2021

This article focuses on the activism of the Walterton and Elgin Action Group (WEAG) who successfu... more This article focuses on the activism of the Walterton and Elgin Action Group (WEAG) who successfully campaigned against attempts by the UK Conservative government in the 1980's to sell off their council homes to private tenders. Focusing on their inventive and creative actions, and the composition of the group not usually associated with militancy, the article takes the formation of WEAG as an example of affective politics and the cultivation of a housing commons-through-difference. What was foregrounded and became important were the relations of mutual dependence and care that existed and could be mobilised to stir collective action across categories of race, class, gender, disability and age. These relations existed at the nexus of personal histories including those of migration, poverty, displacement, social exclusion, homelessness, neglect and discrimination. These histories were mobilised within an area that had a strong history of community development and activism, and am...

During the nineteenth century scientists, philosophers, artists, engineers, medics and fascinated... more During the nineteenth century scientists, philosophers, artists, engineers, medics and fascinated audiences were interested in phenomena and experiences which appeared to confound, disturb, disrupt and unsettle distinctions between the self and other, inside and out, natural and cultural, real and unreal, material and immaterial, subjective and collective and past and present. This included mediumship, table-tilting, rapping, hypnotic suggestion, telepathy, hallucinatory phenomena and other unusual entities and processes. These experiences have largely now become the subject and object of a particular research field within psychology and the cognitive sciences, known as the "psychology of anomalous experience." However, their mystery and puzzling and enigmatic status continue to engage our imaginations and carry longstanding reflections related to the question of what it means to be human, what it means to be embodied, and what remains inexplicable and un-representable. I will use the term immateriality in this paper to describe these processes, practices and phenomena; as in its usual definition immateriality refers to processes taken to have no material body or form (also to be unseen, invisible or ghostly). One common example related to this version of immateriality is that the mind is immaterial (related to ideation) and separate and distinct from the body as a material substance or process. The designation Immaterial also often assumes that something is of little or no relevance or consequence. These are all assumptions I wish to challenge. I am mindful that the term immaterial also has other genealogies within contemporary philosophy and media and cultural theory, which challenge this thinking. These are the subject of other papers in this special issue, and which this paper I hope can be read in dialogue with. I want to start by reflecting on what is articulated by the term, new, in New Immaterialities, the focus and title of this special issue. The prefix new suggests a turn to something overlooked, obscured, undiscovered or genuinely new in discussions of power, technology, the human and non-human, the body and subjectivity, for example. This has now become familiar terrain across the arts, humanities and social sciences, with increasing attention being paid to what are taken to be common ontologies emerging across science and the humanities. In a special issue on Affect, for example, I argued with Couze Venn that interest in the themes of immaterial and affective labour and the capitalization or economization of affect and emotion through teletechnologies and a multitude of therapies have drawn attention to affect as a phenomenon in need of fresh study. Advances in the fields of genetics, the biological sciences, mathematics, quantum physics/the physics of small particles, neurosciences and media and information theory have contributed to an epistemological shift. In its wake, there are seen to be common ontologies linking the social and the natural, the mind and body, the cognitive and affective, the material and immaterial, grounded in such concepts as assemblage, flow, turbulence,

In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry,... more In this follow-up interview to her keynote lecture at the MeCCSA-PGN 2015 Conference in Coventry, Lisa Blackman discusses her work on affect and the body, as well as her new book Haunted Data, which explores the creative and critical challenges of computational cultures for theories of affect and mediation, and the potential of PPPR (post-publication peer-review) to provide a corpus of data that be re-moved (Rheinberger) and performed for its hauntological potential. Working with the concept of ‘haunted data’ to follow those traces, deferrals, absences, gaps and their movements within a particular corpus of data, and to re-move and keep alive what becomes submerged or hidden by particular regimes of visibility and remembering, Blackman illustrates how these movements are simultaneously technical, affective, historical, social, political and ethical.

Mass Hysteria, 2001