Image Credit: Rose Gibbs
Alex Mermikides is performance-maker and researcher. Since 2013, she has been leading Chimera, a performance/research company that investigates the ambivalent relationship we have with the medical domain, producing interdisciplinary artworks and events. Recent productions include Careful, a collaboration with the nursing department at Kingston University about the concept and practice of care; and bloodlines (produced at the Science Museum London, Antwerp University Hospital and elsewhere). Publications include Performance and the Medical Body (2016) and Devising in Process (2010).
Current projects:
Careful (performance/collaboration with nursing): https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2016/dec/14/theatre-show-teaching-student-nurses-compassion
Bloodlines (performance): http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/transplant-inspires-siblings-bloodlines-project/2010835.article
Performance and the Medical Body: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Performance-Medical-Body-Mermikides-Alex/dp/1472570774/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1437379472&sr=8-1&keywords=performance+and+the+medical+body
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Vanessa Puetz conducted her doctoral research on the influences of early adverse experiences at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Germany under the supervision of Professor Kerstin Konrad. In particular she focused on exploring the impact of early caregiver separation on the emotional and neural development of children. In order to investigate this question she employed a variety of assessments including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), endocrine measures and psychological assessments. Specifically, she examined the neural correlates of social rejection in a sample of children that were separated from their birth parents with fMRI. She joined the Developmental Risk and Resilience Unit in October 2013 and continues to pursue her interest in investigating how early adversity affects later emotional (dys)function and the putative mechanisms that may increase vulnerability for psychiatric disorders. A key aspect of their current research is to investigate which factors promote resilience in children who have experienced early adversity. Her work continues to employ both neuroimaging (s/fMRI) and behavioural approaches with the longer-term aim of informing more effective ways to support and intervene with children exposed to early adversity. She also contribute to several strands of postdoctoral teaching in the department, and act as module lead for the Affective Neuroscience module for the MSc in Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology.
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Sally Alexander is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Goldsmiths University of London. Her books include Becoming a Woman: and other essays in 19th and 20th century feminist history (London: Virago, 1994), and most recently History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past, edited with Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and has written on social movements, the history of London. An organiser of the first national UK Women’s Liberation Movement conference held at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1970, she was a member of several groups in the London Women’s Liberation Workshop, including the History group, she participated in the 1970 Miss World Demonstration and the Night Cleaners Campaign 1970-72. She taught feminist history for the WEA, the Extra-Mural Dept of the University of London in the 1970s.
Professor Susan Himmelweit is a British economist, emeritus professor of economics for the Open University in the UK, and was the 2009 president of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). She is a member of The Women's Budget Group a network of feminist economists, academics, activists, people from women's organisations and trade unionists who have come together to analyse the impact of government economic policy on women. They are best known for their analysis of the budget every year, but they also analyse other areas of economic policy and promote equality impact assessments particularly gender impact assessments. Other bodies which Himmelweit is connected to include: principal investigator on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research project entitled, Gender and intra-household entitlements – a cross-national longitudinal analysis (GenIX); member of an international network on care policy called Political and Social Economy of Care in a Globalising World (PASEC), funded by Nordic Centre of Excellence's REASSESS scheme looking at the Nordic economic and social model; member of the management committee for the Women's Budget Group member of the editorial board of Feminist Economics; and member of the editorial board of the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy
I am interested in transnationalisation and globalisation as social processes, together with their impacts on, and implications for, social policy as a field of academic teaching and research and as a political practice of state and non-state actors. An on-going theme in my work is how social diversity, divisions and inequalities are constructed, manifested and contested through diverse trans-border social processes.
Recent areas of interest include globalisation(s) 'from above' and 'from below', including the development of global and regional governance and its relationship to national social systems, state and non-state strategies of internationalisation, including labour migration, family formation, health and social protection, and the development of transnational social, advocacy and policy networks. Many of my recent publications are on the relationship between international migration and social and health care ('global care chains'), global social policy, and regional social governance.
Recent Publications: Globalising Care Economies and Migrant Workers, Globalization and Social Policy
I joined Birkbeck as a faculty member in 2005, and have been involved in the development of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck ever since. My first degree was in Medical Science and Psychology, followed by a Master's in Counselling and Psychotherapy, and a PhD in Psychology. Between 1995 and 2005 I trained as a psychodynamic counsellor, and worked in a range of mental health settings, thinking through the psychological ramifications of violence, abuse and poverty in the lives of women. During this time, I was also the Artistic Director of an experimental theatre collective known as PUR. Since taking up an academic position, my research is on gender and sexuality, motherhood and the maternal, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and philosophies of ethics, affects, materiality, temporality and event.
One strand of my research has focused on the fraught relations, as well as creative tensions, between motherhood, female subjectivities and ethics. I am interested in different ways of understanding the conjunction ‘maternal ethics’, especially what ‘mothering’ does to our concepts of care, labour and subjectivity if we strip normative and idealised figurations out of mothering itself. How, in other words, might we think about maternal subjectivity as an utterly new position of experience, one that goes on to challenge and deform our understanding of singularity and relatedness, ethics and care, encounter and event? I draw on debates in contemporary psychoanalysis, feminist and social theory to rethink maternal subjectivities. I am also interested in the use of autobiographical writing, anecdote, and other literary forms as ways of generating theory. A monograph entitled Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009) draws this work together.
More recent maternal research focuses on what happens when mothering ‘erupts’ into the public sphere, prompting us to think about the public anew. I have published a series of papers that develop the idea of ‘maternal publics’ and the place of ‘birth’ in contemporary culture in collaboration with Professor Imogen Tyler at the University of Lancaster.
I run an international interdisciplinary research network – Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics (MaMSIE) - which organises events and publishes a scholarly online journal, Studies in the Maternal, in collaboration with Sigal Spigel at the University of Cambridge.
The second strand of research focuses on the psychosocial, particularly its epistemological and methodological dimensions. This includes work on the relation between psychoanalysis as a theoretical and clinical practice, and debates on affect, emotions, ethics, temporality, performance and the emerging discipline of psychosocial studies itself.
My current research is on gender and temporality. I am interested in time that fails to unfold, and the place in contemporary culture of various forms of ‘stuck’ or suspended time that play out in relation to the more and more ‘qualified’ time of work. I am writing about temporal tropes such as waiting, staying, delay, maintenance and endurance in relation to a range of durational practices and social projects (psychoanalysis, mothering, care, incarceration, activism) in a bid to understand affective survival in late liberal conditions. A new monograph, Enduring Time, is published with Bloomsbury (2017).
I was recently awarded a Collaborative Award (£1.2 million) by the Wellcome Trust for a five-year cycle of research with Professor Laura Salisbury (Medical Humanities and English, University of Exeter) on temporality and care in health contexts (mental health treatment, the GP encounter, and end of life care)
Recent Publications: Enduring Time (2017), Maternal Encounters - The Ethics of Interruption (2009)