{"id":174,"date":"2013-11-22T19:11:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-22T19:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/2013\/11\/22\/what-weve-been-reading-zombies-medication-social-construction-and-lots-of-feminism\/"},"modified":"2015-11-11T13:30:31","modified_gmt":"2015-11-11T13:30:31","slug":"what-weve-been-reading-zombies-medication-social-construction-and-lots-of-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/what-weve-been-reading-zombies-medication-social-construction-and-lots-of-feminism\/","title":{"rendered":"What we\u2019ve been reading: Zombies, medication, social construction and lots of feminism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018I\u2019m so glad\u2019, says our head of Salomons Centre Prof Margie Callanan, \u2018that I am reading something a little edifying when you ask this\u2019. Clearly, it\u2019s a relief to seem professorial when someone looks your way. She goes on to recommend \u2018The First Sex<\/a>\u2019 by Elizabeth Gould Davis and specifically the\u00a0chapter entitled, \u2018Not Quite People \u2013 The Nineteenth Century\u2019. The sub-heading to the chapter is \u2018A Special Kind of Property\u2019. This book is about the female in society through the ages, from early civilisation to the Aquarian Age, through mythology and religion.\u00a0 It is of course, more political than psychological, but if we agree with Robert Graves that \u2018The present intolerable world situation…cannot even begin to ease until the basic argument of Elizabeth Gould Davis\u2019s ‘The First Sex’ is accepted by all schools and universities\u2019, then perhaps the psychological can draw on this understanding of the past to inform both our present and our future.\u00a0For men and women.<\/p>\n

Helen Caird suggests \u2018The Ethics of Care\u2019<\/a> by Virginia Held, a feminist perspective on what it means to be ethical: in particular, ethics when sitting in a room with someone in therapy, rather than the more meta level on which these discussions often start. Helen\u2019s wonkish side is on display with her recommendation of \u2018A Reader in Promoting Public Health<\/a>\u2019, suggesting she\u2019s also wanting to go beyond the consulting room. She did confess to reading the Hunger Games (we suspect when the above gets too much).<\/p>\n

Thinking about public health, Anne Cooke recommends The Midlands Psychology Group\u2019s \u2018Draft Manifesto for a Social Materialist Psychology of Distress<\/a>\u2019. No intellectual credibility worries if you\u2019re caught reading that. At its heart is a plea to look beyond individual and illness-based understandings of distress and to think about the social world, inequality and poverty.<\/p>\n

In a week in which we\u2019ve had many interesting exchanges on this site and on Twitter about the medicalisation of distress, we also note that psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff has a new website and \u00a0blog<\/a>. The first blog entry, \u2018Models of Drug Action<\/a>\u2019, considers whether drugs prescribed for mental illnesses actually do correct an \u2018abnormal state\u2019.<\/p>\n

Blog co-editor, and champion Tweeter<\/a> Angela Gilchrist, suggests \u2018Conversations with my Sons and Daughters<\/a>\u2019 by Mamphela Ramphela, leader of SA\u2019s new political party (AgangSA), and the former partner of murdered Black Consciousness activist, Steve Biko. Angela suggests that there are similarities between the ways in which situations of oppression unravel, no matter where they are situated in the world.<\/p>\n

Drawing all these threads together, or perhaps sinking into the weekend, John McGowan our Academic Director, recommends \u2018World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War<\/a>\u2019 by Max Brooks. A fictitious oral history in the Studs Terkel \u2018Hard Times<\/a>\u2019 mould, John describes it as \u2018A Swiftian tour of humanity in all its rivalries, pettiness, sexism, nationalism, racism and ultimately dignity and worth; with some pretty scary Zombies on the side.\u2019 As there is a (fairly) respectable academic tradition<\/a> looking at apocalyptic fiction as a lens on social issues, we\u2019ll let it go. Maybe.<\/p>\n

By The Editors<\/i><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018I\u2019m so glad\u2019, says our head of Salomons Centre Prof Margie Callanan, \u2018that I am reading something a little edifying when you ask this\u2019. Clearly, it\u2019s a relief to seem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5457,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[657,662,685],"tags":[418,410,426,78,422,414,406],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-culture","category-from-the-editors","tag-ethics","tag-feminism","tag-joanna-moncrieff","tag-medicalisation-of-everyday-life","tag-public-health","tag-what-weve-been-reading","tag-zombies"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"authorName":"John McGowan","featuredImage":false,"postExcerpt":"\u2018I\u2019m so glad\u2019, says our head of Salomons Centre Prof Margie Callanan, \u2018that I am reading something a little edifying when you ask this\u2019. Clearly, it\u2019s a relief to seem […]","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5457"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/discursive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}