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Power Conflict and Ideology Cluster Seminar 2011

TITLE: “'Social Suffering': Key Problems and Fields of Concern”

SPEAKER: Dr. Iain Wilkinson, University of Kent, UK

TIME: 2 pm, Friday, 21 January  2011

LOCATION: Room 333, Aras Moyola

All are welcome.

This seminar provides a brief history of ’social suffering’ within the traditions of Western social science and an overview of the key problems and critical concerns associated with the idea in contemporary social science. Dr. Wilkinson assesses the ways in which problems of ’social suffering’ may mount a radical challenge to the intellectual conventions and practices of social science and explores their potential to give rise to new modes of critical praxis and research practice

Context

In recent years, the concept of ’social suffering’ has been widely adopted as a means of denoting lived experiences of pain, damage, injury, deprivation and loss. Here it is generally understood that human suffering exists in many different forms and that its deleterious effects are many; but an emphasis is brought to bear upon the extent to which social processes and cultural conditions both constitute and moderate the ways in which suffering is experienced and expressed. Here too, researchers aim to be particularly attentive towards the ways in which personal afflictions and subjective components of distress are rooted in social situations and conditioned by cultural circumstance. It is held that social worlds comprise the embodied experience of pain and that many subjective components of suffering are manifestations of social structural oppression.

From the late eighteenth century onwards occasional references to experiences and events of ’social suffering’ are found (Wordsworth 1793; Frothingham et al 1862: 26; Blaickie 1865: 30; Schilder 1938; Haroutunian 1946). For most of this time, the concept was used as a means to label state policies as the primary cause of people’s miseries or to comment in broad  terms on the social hardships resulting from physical disability or mental illness; but it was never identified as a pivotal matter for theory or research. Only since the 1990s has ’social suffering’ been formally incorporated into the language of social science. From this point onwards, problems of ’social suffering’ were headlined as focal points of analytical concern.

This change is largely due to the influence of Pierre Bourdieu (sociology) and Arthur Kleinman (anthropology/psychiatry) whose work mobilised the concept of ’social suffering’ as a core component of the study of  political/moral economy and social distress. There are now distinct movements of social research that draw inspiration from the respective ways in which Bourdieu and Kleinman have fashioned ’social suffering’ as a term of analysis and critique. It is often with a mind to contribute to debates featured in either one or both of these writers’ works, that researchers explain their interests and practices in terms of a contribution to our understanding of ’social suffering’.

Brief Biography of Speaker

Dr. Wilkinson is Lecturer in Sociology and Director of the Centre for the Study of Philanthropy, Humanitarianism and Social Justice. Select Bibliography: Wilkinson, I (2009) Risk, Vulnerability and Everyday Life, London: Routledge; Wilkinson, I. and Petersen, A. (eds) (2008) Health, Risk and Vulnerability, London: Routledge; Wilkinson I. (2005) Suffering: A Sociological Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press (Winner of the 2006 Sociology of Health and Illness Prize).

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