About

Experience studies gained emphasis in reaction to the macro-structural and positivist analyses, constructing itself as a subjectivist, situational and comprehensive alternative. If, at a given moment, the studies of experience meant the return of the subject, we also witnessed inflections of its decentralisation, death, dissolution in the wake of the “post” –humanism, -modernism, -structuralism, -human, -gender,  -colonial, etc., in the late twentieth century. It is not a question of polarizing or disregarding those terms in the analyses, but of refusing their purity or fixity and, in this sense, what is proposed is to think of them located, in interaction, in their continuities/discontinuities, connections/disconnections and daily fluency that fade supposed borders.

Experience is here taken as the construction and the senses of something that happens in the existence of a particular person, group, human community: not everything that happens and that is lived, but that which affects, marks, is retained, is brought to remembrance and expressed in the present. Thus, the concept refers to the original form as concrete subjects experience the world in the flow of daily life and it is for this flow that the interlocutors are asked to respond impelling them to remember - what they do by editing and (re)presenting researched phenomena, as narrative, narrative, silences, drawings, gestures, texts, etc. If there is uniqueness in experience, it goes through boundaries circumscribed by selectivity of memory, shared values, social interactions (personal, institutional, technological), sensory perceptions in a body.

This Seminar presents the reflections and research of a group of researchers that come together in a socio-anthropological perspective which recognizes the uniqueness of acting/interpreting in the daily situations experienced by a multiple set of actors that compose the complex network that integrates the experience of illnesses and chronic conditions - patients, family members, professionals, formal and informal caregivers.

Organisers: Sílvia Portugal and Reni Barsaglini