Cultural Haunting and the Shared Unconscious:an experiment with dream and art in cosmopolitan space

Organised by Elizabeth Silva (Professor of Sociology, Open University), Lynn Froggett (Professor of Psychosocial Welfare, University of Central Lancashire) and Julian Manley (Research Associate, Psychosocial Research Unit, University of Central Lancashire). With art experiment by Sheila Goloborotko (Artistic Director, Printmaking Center of New Jersey, Instructor at Pratt Institute, New York).

Funded by the Open University's Centre for Citizenship, Identity and Governance (CCIG), Psychosocial Research Group (directed by Gail Lewis and Johanna Motzkau), supported by British Sociological Association Psychoanalysis, Psycho-social and Sociology Study Group (convened by Peter Redman and Sasha Roseneil).

Each time and space has a particular cultural haunting which affects personal and social life. To understand this we are required to develop a particular way of knowing and of making the known knowable. Avery Gordon’s (1997) proposition for an epistemology of haunting is to look at haunting as a generalizable social phenomenon. Haunting does not only accounts for memory but also for the ways in which we interact and understand each other and ourselves in the here and now. Gordon Lawrence (1998) works with dreams as ‘objects’ that are woven into the experiences of the real world, giving voice to thoughts unspoken. Dreams are not solely the property of the dreamer, but belong to the greater context of which the dreamer is a part, their everyday life, the socio-cultural context the individual lives in. Thus dream is ‘the essential transaction’ between the internal and the external worlds. An innovative methodology to capture the ghostly matters of culture is sought through the experiment of participants with dream and art in this workshop. Our proposal is to capture the workings of the imagination, images and the imaginary in the individual and collective in the bounded space of cosmopolitan London. We intend to enact action research – as a creative experiment - to search for connections between the individual and the social, the internal (unconscious) and the external (conscious) drawing on narratives of dreams and engagement with art objects.

The workshop is both an experiential space of an individual and social kind, an artistic event and an academic intellectual engagement with a new methodological exploration.

Programme

10:15              Arrival and tea/coffee

10:30              Welcome and introduction- Elizabeth Silva

10:40              Experiment with a Social Dreaming Matrix – Lynn Froggett, Julian Manley and John Wilkes

12:00              Tea break

12:15              Discussion about the experiment in small groups

12:45              General discussion about the experiment – Julian Manley

13:00              Lunch

14:00              The art and dream in cosmopolitan space project – Elizabeth Silva and Sheila Goloborotko

15:00              Discussion (associations) between the experiment and the overall project – Elizabeth Silva and Lynn Froggett

16:00              End