Mental health, archiving, the arts, and the pandemic - Roundtable 2

We’ll be meeting online at lunchtime across the first three Fridays of December to hear from a fabulous line-up of speakers from a range of disciplinary as well as professional backgrounds. 

As we reflect on the possibilities for archiving mental health experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, as researchers we are struck both by our lack of distance from our subject matter, and the sense we have of the pandemic receding from the immediacy of experience into the terrain of memory. In our second roundtable, our speakers bring their diverse expertise to bear on the challenges and opportunities of archiving in emergencies. How can we capture experience in situations which pose a danger either to ourselves as researchers or to the knowledge which we are seeking to record? How can we balance the need to respond urgently to prevent knowledge being lost with the imperative to do this justly, in a way that is ethical, participatory, and honours the specificity of experiences rather than erasing it?

 

To open up these questions, we’ve brought together three speakers whose work engages with the temporalities and ethics of archiving health experiences from a number of distinct directions. From the start of the pandemic, Amy Shelton has used art to support healthcare professionals and shielding elders, including through the Exeter Florilegium, created using pressed plant and wildflower specimens archived during daily lockdown walks . A historical archaeologist and heritage expert by background, Dr Thomas Biginagwa’s work on historical ecology, funded by the Imagining Futures project, archives endangered traditional herbal medicinal knowledge and practices in southern Tanzania; his work brings into sharp focus the imperatives of recording knowledge at risk of being lost. Through his research on memorialisation in relation to the Holocaust and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, Prof David Tollerton extends our engagement with the temporalities of a health crisis and the creation of new rituals and memorial spaces. Our speakers will each reflect for 15 minutes on their research and experiences around archiving in emergencies, before we open up the discussion to think through these issues together.