Making voices: Curating encounters with personal experiences in an exhibition space

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Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEthical and methodological dilemmas in social science interventions : Careful engagements in healthcare, museums, design and beyond
Editors Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen
Number of pages16
PublisherSpringer, Social Science
Publication date2024
Edition1
Pages271-286
Chapter18
ISBN (Print)978-3-031-44118-9
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-031-44119-6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024

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