In no other conversation this season has the relationship between ontology and ethics felt more pressing and more pregnant. How we define a person, how we classify their suffering and needs, radically determines the different interventions we might choose, either opening up a space for healing or, inversely, creating further harm. This conversation about healing drew together three researcher-practitioners of different horizons - Amy Cohen Varela, Dr Rika Preiser, and Dr Sanneke De Haan - to reflect on the ways in which practices of healing imply so much more than normative claims toward ‘getting better,’ and are so much messier than the cognitivist, medical, and colonial modes of epistemology would imply. Spaces of healing are alive with the tension of breakdowns and transgressions, overdetermination and underdetermination, safety and risk, and require a unique form of epistemic humility from those involved. Participatory sense-making provided a powerful frame for this conversation, wherein suffering could be understood anew—as a mismatch between one’s sense-making and that of one’s environment, rather than an intrinsic burden of the individual.

A couple references mentioned in the conversation:

Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture by Dr Sanneke De Haan: “The Person in Psychiatry: An Ecohumanist, Enactive Approach”

On ontological intimacy and various types of transgression, see: Kym Maclaren, “Intimacy as Transgression and the Problem of Freedom,” in Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology Vol. 1 No. 1 (2018).

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Vinod Khosla

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