Talk by Emily Hughes on Grief and Embodiment

Heavier, and less mine’: the ambiguity of bodily experience in grief

Recent work in the philosophy of emotion has emphasised the idea that grief has a two-sided structure. A process of loss that unfolds unevenly over time, grief is oriented towards the death of a particular person, yet can at the same time be all-encompassing, disrupting one’s entire world in a sustained way. This paper aims to clarify this two-sided structure by focusing on the ambiguity of bodily experience in grief in particular. Drawing on survey responses to the question ‘Has your body felt any different during grief?’ collected with colleagues as part of the ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience’ project at the University of York, this paper will analyse bodily feelings such as ‘heaviness,’ ‘numbness,’ ‘emptiness,’ ‘hollowness,’ and ‘disembodiment,’ in order to help illuminate what is lost in grief, and how it is that this loss can be both so specific and so diffuse.

Emily Hughes
I am a postdoctoral research associate in philosophy at the University of York working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience.’ I completed my PhD at the University of New South Wales. My research is situated in the intersection between existential phenomenology and the philosophy of psychiatry and psychology, with a particular focus on phenomenological interpretations of affect and the way in which emotions modify temporal, spatial and bodily experience.

Time: 14.15 - 16.00
Place: Sokrates mødelokale
Registration: No registration