First Responders: Care in Literature, Art and Psychoanalysis

First Responders: Care in Literature, Art and Psychoanalysis

Friday, May 9, 2014
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
10:00 AM-5:30 PM

Arriving on the scene of accidents and emergencies, first responders provide assistance to the wounded, initiating a continuum of care that was first systematized by French military surgeons during the Napoleonic Wars.  This conference seeks to explore literature, art and psychoanalysis as critical (in both the urgent and analytic sense of the term), even lifesaving, forms of first response. It will examine how discursive practices and interactions – from storytelling to testimony, from play to art-making –  can make suffering visible, and, in the aftermath of injury, can also aid in healing.

Conference Schedule

10:00 AM Welcome: Susan Derwin, Director, IHC

 10:10 AM Panel 1:

Brett Collins, Classics, UCSB, “’Terrible and Unable to be Spoken’: Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the Poetics of Pain”

Rebecca M. Groves, Drama, Stanford University, “Performance Philosophy, Dramaturgy, and the Ethics of Care”

Ming Holden, Theater and Dance, UCSB, “Jeanine”

Jessica Stankis, Music, UCSB, “Survival with Sight and Sound: Experiencing the Okinawan Uta-Sanshin Tradition”

12:00 lunch

1:00 Panel 2:

Ljiljana Coklin, Writing Program, UCSB, “Self-Care and ‘Defamilialized’ Writing in Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure

Shannon Forbes, English, University of St. Thomas “Creating Art from Crisis: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as an Experiment in Psychoanalysis”

Michaela Wunsch, UCLA, “Television as First Responder”

3:00 Reading:

Cole Cohen, UCSB
“Care and Writing About the Body”

3:30 Artist talks:

Alejandro Casazi, Department of Art, UCSB
“Empathic Art Installation”

Jennifer Vanderpool, Artist, Los Angeles
“Hotel Santa Barbara: Living in Plain Sight.”

 5:00 reception

Sponsored by the IHC’s The Value of Care series.

Click here to listen to a recording of this conference from the IHC’s The Value of Care series.