University of Groningen

Post-Doc, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences

Thesis Title: Suffering Difference: The Ethics and Politics of Modifying Bodies

About

I completed my PhD in Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Australia, graduating in 2009. Entitled 'Suffering Difference: The Ethics and Politics of Modifying Bodies", it drew on the work of feminist philosophers, especially of the body, critical race and whiteness theorists, and critical theorists of disability to shape my analysis of Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida and Australian philosopher Roslyn Diprose. The thesis examined the relationship between normalcy and the experience of suffering, arguing that suffering, rather than being the result of the failure of politics to negotiate with naturally-given sites of vulnerability, as is often assumed, is a key technique in the production of normalcy.

In 2011, I am taking up a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. My work in the Theory and History of Psychology Research Group is focussed on 'therapeutic forgetting,' and specifically the use of the beta-blocker propranolol to 'dampen' the emotional weight of trauma. It seeks to provide a critical engagement with the developing pharmaceutical practice of ‘memory dampening’, particularly the potentials of the betablocker propranolol. I will explore the issue of therapeutic forgetting in ways that intervene in or critique ‘common sense’ or dominant understandings of it, specifically by considering the often-neglected intersections between embodied subjectivity, memory, suffering and happiness. I seek to offer a postconventional analysis of the ethical and political issues around therapeutic forgetting, as well as consider the way that propranolol is likely to affect individual subjects, given contemporary structures of subjectivity and embodiment.