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Panel discussion:
Prof. Mark Smith, University of South Carolina
PhD candidate Merve Cigdem Talu, McGill University
PhD candidate Ryan Tristram-Walmsley, Universidade do Porto and the University of Kent
Chair: Dr. Rob Boddice, Senior Research Fellow, Tampere University/HEX
Chris Millard recently opined that ‘our most private inner life, our most potent experiences are always already parsed, structured and interpreted’ in ‘vast intellectual and practical ways’. In this session we aim to drill down to the specific ways in which emotional and sensory experience is ‘parsed, structured and interpreted’ in situated modern historical contexts. The purpose is to grapple with the concept of ‘authenticity’ as both lived experience and as analytical category, which is often bundled with ‘agency’ to emphasise a residual element of the subject that is somehow untouched by pervasive mediating factors. The situated empirical research here shows that the experience of authentic feeling or authentic living, including the feeling of agency, is constructed and mediated by multiple overlapping frames – the built environment; conceptual development and use; political culture and rhetoric; identity, belief and memory – in dynamic relation with body-minds. They also explore how the feeling of authenticity has been denied as part of a politics of exclusion. In turn, the papers probe whether authenticity as an analytical category should be discarded, for there is no level of experience that remains outside of the kinds of cultural mediation here described.
Presentation titles:
Mark Smith: ‘A Walk-on Part in the War’: Reflections on Re-enactment
Ryan Walmsley: Drilling up and down the Union Jack: Authenticity, Britishness and Jamaican education, 1920-1940
Merve Cigdem Talu: Agency mediated through architecture: public spaces and emotions in late-Victorian London
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