Pain as Emotional Experience

Pain as Emotional Experience   Ms Emma Sheppard, Edge Hill    Date: Wednesday 18 January, 2017 Time: 2.15pm–3.45pm Place: EDEN 109, Liverpool Hope University, UK   Ms Sheppard presents a critical crip reading of pain as an emotional lived experience, based on the findings of her PhD research. It begins with a crip reading of normative understandings of pain, which exposes how this relies on normative understandings of bodies, health, and “appropriate” reactions to our own pain and others’. This is then used to underpin an exploration of two themes in the research: the emotional experience of pain for individuals living with chronic pain who engage with BDSM pain, and how engaging with the pain of others during the research impacted Ms Sheppard’s own emotional experience as a person living with chronic pain. This demonstrates how a crip reading of pain blurs the line between emotion and physical experience, and how normative constructions of pain constricts how pain is recognised and discussed.   Emma Sheppard is Doctoral Candidate at Edge Hill University. Her thesis, Kinked and Crip(pl)ed: disabled BDSM practitioner’s experiences and embodiment of pain, explores pain from the viewpoint of people with chronic pain who play with erotic pain/BDSM, exploring concepts of pain, disability, sexuality, and crip.    This seminar is part of the CCDS series, Disability and the Emotions. Other dates include: 01 Mar 2017, For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts, Chris Foss. 10 May 2017, A secret worth knowing, Michael Rembis.   Also, Disability and Disciplines, the International Conference on Educational, Cultural, and Disability Studies is taking place 5-6 July, 2017.