L Blackman
Biographic Data
| ID | 14644 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Blackman |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Blackman |
| SIGNATURE | BLACKMAN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7703-0588 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 618 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Queering the diagnostic trajectory of borderline personality disorder
There is increasing evidence that LGBTQIA+ people are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) at higher rates than cisgender and heterosexual populations. Despite this, limited qualitative research has critically examined the social, cultural, institutional, and diagnostic processes that shape these disparities. BPD is a highly stigmatised and contested psychiatric diagnosis, with a long history of debate across disciplines, includin…
What does leisure have to do with mental health – arts, creative and leisure practices and living with mental distress
There is a growing interest in the role of leisure, arts and creative activities in cultivating health and wellbeing across different contexts. Leisure sports have historically been considered beneficial for achieving health, and similar focus has recently been placed on arts and creativity. Recent research into the role of arts and creative engagement for wellbeing highlights the benefits of these modes of engagement on emotional wellbeing and s…
Experimenting with arts-based methods and affective provocations to understand complex lived experience of a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder
This article draws on arts-based psycho-social research to explore embodied and visceral knowing and feeling in the context of people living with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). It presents a discussion of creative artworks solicited through a nation-wide online survey conducted in Australia in 2021 that generated intimate and affective understanding about living with a diagnosis of BPD. To investigate what lived experiences…
Pioneer of cultural, post-colonial and social theory
Perspectives on person-centred care for borderline personality disorder: A Critical Research Agenda
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a highly contentious psychiatric diagnosis with ongoing tensions over nomenclature, aetiology and treatment recommendations. This article examines a number of these tensions and assesses how greater attention to the voices of people living with BPD may help inform the delivery of new modes of person-centred care. To this end, we present a critical social science research agenda for investigating the experi…
The challenges of new bio psycho socialities: Hearing voices, trauma, epigenetics and mediated perception
This chapter considers the promise of epigenetics in the context of what it means to hear voices and attempts to shape a biopsychosocial approach, which can account for the links between voice hearing, trauma and abuse. The chapter explores the epistemic spaces and controversies which surround the calls for a more psychosocial approach to be incorporated into the more molecular focus of epigenetics. This includes the vexed question of how to inve…
The Challenges of New Biopsychosocialities: Hearing Voices, Trauma, Epigenetics and Mediated Perception
This chapter considers the promise of epigenetics in the context of the phenomenon of voice hearing and the question of how to account for the links between voice hearing, trauma and abuse. The chapter explores the epistemic spaces and controversies, which surround the calls for a more psychosocial approach to be incorporated into the more molecular focus of epigenetics. This includes the vexed question of how to invent and work with models of ps…
The New Biologies: Epigenetics, the Microbiome and Immunities
This issue is made up of a special collection of articles that have been submitted to the journal, which tackle issues that have primarily been the subject and object of the life and biological sciences; this includes pregnancy, obesity, antibiotic resistance, and immunity within the context of viruses and super-bugs. All of these issues in different ways have increasingly become the subject of theories and methods within the humanities and socia…
Researching Affect and Embodied Hauntologies
Hearing the Unheard: An Interdisciplinary, Mixed Methodology Study of Women’s Experiences of Hearing Voices (Auditory Verbal Hallucinations)
This paper explores the experiences of women who "hear voices" (auditory verbal hallucinations). We begin by examining historical understandings of women hearing voices, showing these have been driven by androcentric theories of how women's bodies functioned leading to women being viewed as requiring their voices be interpreted by men. We show the twentieth century was associated with recognition that the mental violation of women's minds (repres…
Social Media and the Politics of Small Data: Post Publication Peer Review and Academic Value
Academics across the sciences and humanities are increasingly being encouraged to use social media as a post-publication strategy to enhance and extend the impact of their articles and books. As well as various measures of social media impact, the turn towards publication outlets which are open access and free to use is contributing to anxieties over where, what and how to publish. This is all the more pernicious given the increasing measures of …
Affective Politics, Debility and Hearing Voices: Towards a Feminist Politics of Ordinary Suffering
This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of 'feeling bad', to open up new ways of thinking about agen…
Affect and automaticy: Towards an analytics of experimentation
Habit and Affect: Revitalizing a Forgotten History
Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even …
Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation
Blackman focuses upon the affective capacities of bodies, human and non-human as well as addressing the challenges of the affective turn within the social sciences. She uncovers the paradoxes and tensions in work in affect studies by focusing on practices and experiences, including voice hearing, suggestion, hypnosis, telepathy, the placebo effect, rhythm and related phenomena
Listening to Voices: An Ethics of Entanglement
Purpose – To explore an ethics of entanglement in the context of mental health and psychosocial research.Design/methodology/approach – To bring together debates within body and affect studies, and specifically the concepts of mediated perception and the performativity of experimentation. My specific focus will be on voice hearing and research that I have conducted with voice hearers, both within and to the margins of the Hearing Voices Network (s…
‘This is a matter of pride’: The Choir : Unsung Town and Community Transformation
Introduction This chapter will take the British reality television three-part series The Choir: Unsung Town as its starting point to think through the role of affect for understanding engagement with televisual products. The pioneering practices of the choirmaster-turned-transformational coach, Gare
Affect, Performance and Queer Subjectivities
This article will re-configure the historical association between queer lives and psychopathology by focusing upon the enactive potential of particular performances of queer subjectivities. These are usually live performances which through their engagement with a background of trauma, shame, loneliness and isolation afford the circulation and distribution of what will be termed, 'unhappy affects'. These situated responses to a register of affects…
Embodying Affect: Voice-hearing, Telepathy, Suggestion and Modelling the Non-conscious
This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of 'affective transfer' identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relation…
Re-visioning Body & Society
Bodily Integrity
Affect
Starting Over: Politics, Hope, Movement
This review article explores the politics of hope and optimism made possible by a re-thinking of touch as a movement towards the not-yet-known, embodied through an engagement with the improvisational character of Argentine tango. Tango discloses the relational and enactive qualities of corporeality, moving us to ask not what bodies are, but rather what can bodies do; what can bodies become? The article engages with the moves to a Spinozist concep…
The Re-Making of Sexual Kinds: Queer Subjects and the Limits of Representation
This article discusses the importance of re-inventing subjectivity as an important analytic concern for understanding the production of lesbian sexualities. It explores the problems and possibilities with focusing on representational practices, and extends such work by analyzing the complex dilemmas, cultural logics, anxieties, and silences that are performed and enacted, particularly in the context of the hetero/lesbian. It argues that the psych…
Creating Subjectivities
Affect
Creating Subjectivities
Affect, Relationality and the 'Problem of Personality
This peer-reviewed journal article sets out an argument regarding the importance of genealogical work for understanding concepts such as affect and suggestion
Reinventing psychological matters: The importance of the suggestive realm of Tarde's ontology
This article will contribute to a growing body of writing which is considering the importance of suggestion as a neglected aspect of contemporary technologies of the self. Gabriel Tarde's writings foreground this importance, which was largely repudiated by the anti-mimetic turn that characterized the social sciences at the turn of the last century. The article will discuss the context of this refusal of suggestion, through exploring how early mas…
Embodying Affect: Voice-hearing, Telepathy, Suggestion and Modelling the Non-conscious
This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of 'affective transfer' identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relation…
Bodily Integrity
Habit and Affect: Revitalizing a Forgotten History
Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even …
Re-visioning Body & Society
Psychiatric Culture and Bodies of Resistance
Psychiatric culture provides an important site for humanities scholars interested in the relationships between body, culture and identity. The problem raised in this article is how to 'think' the body as discursive, material and embodied without reinstating the notion that the discursive and material are two separate, preexisting entities that somehow 'interact'. The focus of this article will be on the complex relational dynamics that exist betw…
Self-Help, Media Cultures and the Production of Female Psychopathology
This article brings together work at the intersection of critical psychology and cultural studies to explore the psychological and cultural significance of women’s magazine culture. Drawing on rhetorical psychology and Foucault’s later work on ‘techniques of the self’, it explores the complex injunctions and positionings that create the range of gendered anxieties and dilemmas produced within neoliberal relations. Self-help is discussed as a prac…
Affective Politics, Debility and Hearing Voices: Towards a Feminist Politics of Ordinary Suffering
This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of 'feeling bad', to open up new ways of thinking about agen…
The New Biologies: Epigenetics, the Microbiome and Immunities
This issue is made up of a special collection of articles that have been submitted to the journal, which tackle issues that have primarily been the subject and object of the life and biological sciences; this includes pregnancy, obesity, antibiotic resistance, and immunity within the context of viruses and super-bugs. All of these issues in different ways have increasingly become the subject of theories and methods within the humanities and socia…
Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation
Blackman focuses upon the affective capacities of bodies, human and non-human as well as addressing the challenges of the affective turn within the social sciences. She uncovers the paradoxes and tensions in work in affect studies by focusing on practices and experiences, including voice hearing, suggestion, hypnosis, telepathy, the placebo effect, rhythm and related phenomena
Affect and automaticy: Towards an analytics of experimentation
The Challenges of New Biopsychosocialities: Hearing Voices, Trauma, Epigenetics and Mediated Perception
This chapter considers the promise of epigenetics in the context of the phenomenon of voice hearing and the question of how to account for the links between voice hearing, trauma and abuse. The chapter explores the epistemic spaces and controversies, which surround the calls for a more psychosocial approach to be incorporated into the more molecular focus of epigenetics. This includes the vexed question of how to invent and work with models of ps…
The Dangerous Classes: Retelling the Psychiatric Story
This article examines the complex links between gender, class and the `psy' disciplines. It argues that there is a connection between those understandings of `class' embedded within contemporary `psy' discourse and the concepts utilized to render class intelligible when the working classes became a target and object of psychiatry in the l9th century. By adopting a form of historical-discursive inquiry informed by poststructuralist ideas (Foucault…
The Re-Making of Sexual Kinds: Queer Subjects and the Limits of Representation
This article discusses the importance of re-inventing subjectivity as an important analytic concern for understanding the production of lesbian sexualities. It explores the problems and possibilities with focusing on representational practices, and extends such work by analyzing the complex dilemmas, cultural logics, anxieties, and silences that are performed and enacted, particularly in the context of the hetero/lesbian. It argues that the psych…
The Dialogical Self, Flexibility and the Cultural Production of Psychopathology
This article examines recent discussions on 'dialogism' within psychology to assess the coherence of critical psychology's institutional position and its typical responses. It primarily explores how arguments about the dialogical self reshape our understanding of psychopathology, aligning it more closely with perspectives from various social and cultural practices that constitute our lives. This shift is investigated through arguments from scienc…
Ethics, Embodiment and the Voice-Hearing Experience
This article explores how theoretical arguments in relation to the concepts of embodiment and identity can allow one to analyse and explore the cultural and psychological significance of a contemporary set of practices of the 'hallucinatory self', exemplified by members of the Hearing Voices Network. The article considers work in 'critical psychology', which has largely been ignored by media and cultural theory. Through specific analysis of the w…
What does leisure have to do with mental health – arts, creative and leisure practices and living with mental distress
There is a growing interest in the role of leisure, arts and creative activities in cultivating health and wellbeing across different contexts. Leisure sports have historically been considered beneficial for achieving health, and similar focus has recently been placed on arts and creativity. Recent research into the role of arts and creative engagement for wellbeing highlights the benefits of these modes of engagement on emotional wellbeing and s…
Perspectives on person-centred care for borderline personality disorder: A Critical Research Agenda
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a highly contentious psychiatric diagnosis with ongoing tensions over nomenclature, aetiology and treatment recommendations. This article examines a number of these tensions and assesses how greater attention to the voices of people living with BPD may help inform the delivery of new modes of person-centred care. To this end, we present a critical social science research agenda for investigating the experi…
Social Media and the Politics of Small Data: Post Publication Peer Review and Academic Value
Academics across the sciences and humanities are increasingly being encouraged to use social media as a post-publication strategy to enhance and extend the impact of their articles and books. As well as various measures of social media impact, the turn towards publication outlets which are open access and free to use is contributing to anxieties over where, what and how to publish. This is all the more pernicious given the increasing measures of …
Experimenting with arts-based methods and affective provocations to understand complex lived experience of a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder
This article draws on arts-based psycho-social research to explore embodied and visceral knowing and feeling in the context of people living with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). It presents a discussion of creative artworks solicited through a nation-wide online survey conducted in Australia in 2021 that generated intimate and affective understanding about living with a diagnosis of BPD. To investigate what lived experiences…
The challenges of new bio psycho socialities: Hearing voices, trauma, epigenetics and mediated perception
This chapter considers the promise of epigenetics in the context of what it means to hear voices and attempts to shape a biopsychosocial approach, which can account for the links between voice hearing, trauma and abuse. The chapter explores the epistemic spaces and controversies which surround the calls for a more psychosocial approach to be incorporated into the more molecular focus of epigenetics. This includes the vexed question of how to inve…
What is Doing History: The Use of History to Understand the Constitution of Contemporary Psychological Objects
This paper discusses contemporary approaches to the study of history, and their relation to the `history of ideas' which underpins traditional historiographies. After outlining the conventional histories of psychology, and their implicit assumptions, an alternative `history of the present' is discussed. The implications of utilizing a `history of the present', or archaeological approach to history, are discussed in relation to the `discourse deba…
The Dangerous Classes: Retelling the Psychiatric Story
This article examines the complex links between gender, class and the `psy' disciplines. It argues that there is a connection between those understandings of `class' embedded within contemporary `psy' discourse and the concepts utilized to render class intelligible when the working classes became a target and object of psychiatry in the l9th century. By adopting a form of historical-discursive inquiry informed by poststructuralist ideas (Foucault…
Ethics, Embodiment and the Voice-Hearing Experience
This article explores how theoretical arguments in relation to the concepts of embodiment and identity can allow one to analyse and explore the cultural and psychological significance of a contemporary set of practices of the 'hallucinatory self', exemplified by members of the Hearing Voices Network. The article considers work in 'critical psychology', which has largely been ignored by media and cultural theory. Through specific analysis of the w…
Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies
Assuming no previous knowledge of psychology, this text provides an introduction to a field that is central to media studies. Using approaches such as discourse analysis, semiotics and post-structuralism, the book gently introduces the reader to psychology and its importance within media studies. Written in an accessible style, it has case studies and examples, chapter objectives and summaries, illustrative material and further reading sections.
Self-Help, Media Cultures and the Production of Female Psychopathology
This article brings together work at the intersection of critical psychology and cultural studies to explore the psychological and cultural significance of women’s magazine culture. Drawing on rhetorical psychology and Foucault’s later work on ‘techniques of the self’, it explores the complex injunctions and positionings that create the range of gendered anxieties and dilemmas produced within neoliberal relations. Self-help is discussed as a prac…
The Dialogical Self, Flexibility and the Cultural Production of Psychopathology
This article examines recent discussions on 'dialogism' within psychology to assess the coherence of critical psychology's institutional position and its typical responses. It primarily explores how arguments about the dialogical self reshape our understanding of psychopathology, aligning it more closely with perspectives from various social and cultural practices that constitute our lives. This shift is investigated through arguments from scienc…
Researching Affect and Embodied Hauntologies: Exploring an Analytics of Experimentation
This chapter will explore the challenges of researching affect by developing a methodological apparatus that is sensitive to ‘starting points’, and that foregrounds the researcher’s own affective investments in the subject under investigation. It will reflect on whether we can only do research with which we are already entangled, and on that basis, what kinds of methods might allow for such sensitivities. The chapter will argue that methodologica…
Psychiatric Culture and Bodies of Resistance
Psychiatric culture provides an important site for humanities scholars interested in the relationships between body, culture and identity. The problem raised in this article is how to 'think' the body as discursive, material and embodied without reinstating the notion that the discursive and material are two separate, preexisting entities that somehow 'interact'. The focus of this article will be on the complex relational dynamics that exist betw…
Reinventing psychological matters: The importance of the suggestive realm of Tarde's ontology
This article will contribute to a growing body of writing which is considering the importance of suggestion as a neglected aspect of contemporary technologies of the self. Gabriel Tarde's writings foreground this importance, which was largely repudiated by the anti-mimetic turn that characterized the social sciences at the turn of the last century. The article will discuss the context of this refusal of suggestion, through exploring how early mas…
Creating Subjectivities
Affect, Relationality and the 'Problem of Personality
This peer-reviewed journal article sets out an argument regarding the importance of genealogical work for understanding concepts such as affect and suggestion
Starting Over: Politics, Hope, Movement
This review article explores the politics of hope and optimism made possible by a re-thinking of touch as a movement towards the not-yet-known, embodied through an engagement with the improvisational character of Argentine tango. Tango discloses the relational and enactive qualities of corporeality, moving us to ask not what bodies are, but rather what can bodies do; what can bodies become? The article engages with the moves to a Spinozist concep…
The Re-Making of Sexual Kinds: Queer Subjects and the Limits of Representation
This article discusses the importance of re-inventing subjectivity as an important analytic concern for understanding the production of lesbian sexualities. It explores the problems and possibilities with focusing on representational practices, and extends such work by analyzing the complex dilemmas, cultural logics, anxieties, and silences that are performed and enacted, particularly in the context of the hetero/lesbian. It argues that the psych…
Embodying Affect: Voice-hearing, Telepathy, Suggestion and Modelling the Non-conscious
This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of 'affective transfer' identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relation…
Re-visioning Body & Society
Bodily Integrity
Affect
‘This is a matter of pride’: The Choir : Unsung Town and Community Transformation
Introduction This chapter will take the British reality television three-part series The Choir: Unsung Town as its starting point to think through the role of affect for understanding engagement with televisual products. The pioneering practices of the choirmaster-turned-transformational coach, Gare
Affect, Performance and Queer Subjectivities
This article will re-configure the historical association between queer lives and psychopathology by focusing upon the enactive potential of particular performances of queer subjectivities. These are usually live performances which through their engagement with a background of trauma, shame, loneliness and isolation afford the circulation and distribution of what will be termed, 'unhappy affects'. These situated responses to a register of affects…
Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation
Blackman focuses upon the affective capacities of bodies, human and non-human as well as addressing the challenges of the affective turn within the social sciences. She uncovers the paradoxes and tensions in work in affect studies by focusing on practices and experiences, including voice hearing, suggestion, hypnosis, telepathy, the placebo effect, rhythm and related phenomena
Listening to Voices: An Ethics of Entanglement
Purpose – To explore an ethics of entanglement in the context of mental health and psychosocial research.Design/methodology/approach – To bring together debates within body and affect studies, and specifically the concepts of mediated perception and the performativity of experimentation. My specific focus will be on voice hearing and research that I have conducted with voice hearers, both within and to the margins of the Hearing Voices Network (s…
Habit and Affect: Revitalizing a Forgotten History
Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even …
Affect and automaticy: Towards an analytics of experimentation
Researching Affect and Embodied Hauntologies
Hearing the Unheard: An Interdisciplinary, Mixed Methodology Study of Women’s Experiences of Hearing Voices (Auditory Verbal Hallucinations)
This paper explores the experiences of women who "hear voices" (auditory verbal hallucinations). We begin by examining historical understandings of women hearing voices, showing these have been driven by androcentric theories of how women's bodies functioned leading to women being viewed as requiring their voices be interpreted by men. We show the twentieth century was associated with recognition that the mental violation of women's minds (repres…
Sociology (29 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Epistemology (21 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (14 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Communication (8 works)