Symposium: Liminality, process and paradox in practice encounters

Focusing mainly on processes at the interface of psychology, medicine and law, the project develops a psychosocial approach to practice problems characterised by liminality (experiences of being on or crossing a threshold).

The symposium featured thinkers/practitioners whose work is of great value in the development of this psychosocial approach to liminal practice problems:

Arpad Szakolczai is Professor of Sociology and Head of Department at University College Cork. In a series of important books and articles, he has pioneered a reflexive historical sociology that takes seriously the experiential dimension in its full societal scope. An encyclopedic thinker, Szakolczai has written extensively on a range of social theorists including Foucault, Weber, Nietzsche, Elias and Voegelin, and integrated their work with the anthropology of Mauss, van Gennep, Turner, Girard, Douglas, Turnbull, Bateson and the comparative mythology of Dumézil, Kerényi, Eliade and Burkert. His recent work on liminality (and his diagnosis of modernity as characterised by the paradox of ‘permanent liminality’) has been inspirational in revitalizing the mission of social science as a transdisciplinary pursuit of integrated meaning.  

Morten Nissen is a Professor of Community Psychology at the University of Copenhagen and editor of the critical practice studies journal ‘Outlines’. A leading advocate of subject-oriented participatory critical psychology, he practices social work with young people using drugs and he heads the SUBSTANce research centre, which deals with subjectivity and standards in this practice field. Morten has a long standing interest in the paradoxical aspects of practices around drug use, such as what he calls the ‘to be and not to be’ paradox of the subject’s ‘self-cancelation’, and the paradoxical truth relation whereby drugs are held both to distort reality and to provide a privileged point of access. He also attends to the broader social and political contexts of drug related policies in an age in which, to use one of his memorable phrases, ‘opium is the religion of the masses’ (Nissen, 2002).

Mads Bank is a PhD candidate working with Morten Nissen at the University of Copenhagen.

Programme

Videos of the presentations are available on the links below.

Morten Nissen and Mads Bank Presentations (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3)

Arpad Szakolczai Presentation (Part 4 and Part 5).