This introduction to the themed section on Attunement explores the varied practices, politics, and aesthetics of attuning to more-than-human voices, temporalities, and material processes. What happens when we attempt to attune ourselves to forms of agency that do not possess a conventionally recognized 'voice' to be amplified? What new intersections between research, invention, and political agency might emerge when 'voices' have to be assembled rather than merely amplified, and when new methods of 'listening' need to be invented? The concept of 'attunement' speaks to subtle, affective, modulations in the relations between different bodies. We describe four broad traditions of scholarship that render differently the concept of attunement. Firstly, the Kantian sense of attunement as a harmonious and playful mediation between the human faculties of imagination and understanding. Secondly, attunement as a preconscious way in which we find ourselves disposed, or 'tuned', to our environment. Thirdly, attunement as a form of embodied relationality and interconnectedness that capacitates individual empathy and grounds the possibility of co-production. Finally, attunement to vastly different spatio-temporal scales as strange, uncanny and uncertain-transient achievements that brings us into contact with lost futures, haunted presents and even different versions of ourselves. The contributions we have drawn together explore the concept of attunement in relation to themes that include technology, aesthetics, human-animal relations, class, landscape, feminist, political and post-colonial theory.
Health inequalities research has shown a growing interest in participatory ways of working. However, the theoretical ideas underpinning mainstream approaches to participation remain underexplored. This article contributes to theorising participatory practice for the kind of egalitarian politics to which many of those focused on reducing health inequalities are committed. First, we argue that the ambitions of participatory practice should be concentrated on 'overcoming alienation', rather than 'attaining freedom from power'. An overemphasis on negative freedom may help to explain a worrying confluence between participatory democracy and neo-liberal marketization agendas -we look instead to traditions of participatory practice that emphasize positive freedom and capacities for collaboration. Second, we discuss some such perspectives though consideration of critical pedagogy, but highlighting the role of materialised relations of authority, spaces, objects and encounters. Third, we explore the relationship between objectivity and alienation, arguing that participatory politics, against alienation, can look to reclaim objectivity for participatory, lively, practice. We then seek to show that participatory practice can play a role in creating common knowledge and culture, and in fostering a sense of public ownership over objective knowledge and institutions concerned with health. We conclude by asking what this looks like in practice, drawing some 'rules of thumb' for participatory practice in health inequalities research from existing inspiring examples.
In The Use of Pleasure, Michel Foucault suggests that it is possible to read Walter Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire as a contribution to a genealogy of ethics. This article experiments with reading Benjamin in this way. It shows that a distinctive analysis of each of the four elements of Foucauldian ethics (ethical substance, mode of subjectivation, ethical practice and telos) can be found in Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire and the Paris arcades. Specifically, the article makes the case for reading Benjamin in terms of his valuable contribution to understandings of the role played by art in modern forms of ‘parrhesia’, or courageous truth-telling. However, whereas Foucault’s notion of ‘arts of living’ focuses on challenging actual relations of power, Benjamin’s focuses on activating potential forms of power. In this way, Benjamin’s ethical framework tests the limits of Foucault’s conceptualization of the government of self and others.
Through two case studies, the Hearing Voices Movement and Stepping Out Theatre Company, we demonstrate how successful participatory organisations can be seen as ‘engines of alternative objectivity’ rather than as the subjective other to objective, biomedical science. With the term ‘alternative objectivity’, we point to collectivisations of experience that are different to biomedical science but are nonetheless forms of objectivity. Taking inspiration from feminist theory, science studies and sociology of culture, we argue that participatory mental health organisations generate their own forms of objectivity through novel modes of collectivising experience. The Hearing Voices Movement cultivates an ‘activist science’ that generates an alternative objective knowledge through a commitment to experimentation, controlling, testing, recording and sharing experience. Stepping Out distinguishes itself from drama therapy by cultivating an alternative objective culture through its embrace of high production values, material culture, aesthetic standards. A crucial aspect of participatory practice is overcoming alienation, enabling people to get outside of themselves, encounter material worlds and join forces with others.
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