When: Tuesday, 5 December 2023, 13:30-14:30pm, with lunch from 13:15pm and followed by time to network (lunch provided, please register so we can cater accordingly)

Where: FAB 5.03

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Issues of health and wellbeing – from adolescent mental health, to empowering vulnerable communities in policy decisions - are at the forefront of many contemporary debates and research efforts. What distinctive contributions are Arts and Social Science researchers at Warwick making to improving health and wellbeing? What key principles are at stake in this space, and how can we ensure our research makes a meaningful difference?

Speakers:  

• Dr Fabiola Creed & Professor Hilary Marland (Department of History) 
• Dr Mark Fabian (Department of Politics and International Studies)
• Chair:  Professor Jerry Ahearne (Deputy Chair of the Faculty of Arts) 

Hilary Marland is a Professor in the Department of History and PI on the on the Wellcome Trust Investigator Award project ‘The Last Taboo of Motherhood? Postnatal Mental Disorders in Twentieth-Century Britain’, which explores changing diagnoses, treatment, and attitudes towards postnatal mental illness across the twentieth century, including the framing of the condition postnatal depression after the 1960s. Fabiola Creed is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the project, whose work focuses on narrative accounts, lived experience and media representations. Of postnatal mental illness. They have recently collaborated with Fuel Theatre Company and playwrights Courtney Conrad, Bryony Kimmings, and Sara Shaarawi on three audio pieces for a touring installation, which responds to their research. It will be at Warwick Arts Centre 4-11 November 2023Link opens in a new window as part of the Resonate Festival.

Mark Fabian is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Warwick and an Affiliate Fellow at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge. He works on wellbeing from an interdisciplinary point of view with a focus on policy applications. Since 2021, he has been working with the national anti-poverty charity Turn2us and their Edinburgh branch to coproduce, along with their service users, a wellbeing framework and associated theory of change to inform and enhance their work.

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Tuesday 05 December, 5:30-7pm, R0.14

Helmut Schmitz: ‘How To Have One's Cake And Eat It: Navid Kermani's Große Liebe, Sufi Mysticism, And Paradoxical Cultural Identities’

 In cooperation with the Centre for Research in Philosophy, LIterture and the Arts

Navid Kermani’s novel Große Liebe (2014, Love Writ Large) charts the development of a young teenager’s infatuation with an A-level student in the early 1980s in Germany. The love story is refracted through the adult narrator’s reflections and through readings from Sufi mysticism and Nizami’s 12th ct. epic poem Lailï and Majnûn. This creates a narrative framework in which (Iranian and Muslim) cultural sources and (West German) cultural memory subtly comment on one another, allowing Kermani to ironically undermine both contemporary masculinity and his narrator’s former self as lover while simultaneously reflecting on the cultural and religious traditions of his own background and their relations to a Western tradition of love. The paper examines Kermani’s ironic narrative construction in the context of his construction of a paradoxical cultural identity.