Exploring Liminal States of Mind Workshop

Professor Tom Stoneham (Philosophy, York)
Professor Sally Shuttleworth (English, Oxford)
Dr William MacLehose (History, UCL)
Dr Rachael Wiseman (Philosophy, York)

This interdisciplinary one-day workshop draws together scholars from English Literature, History, Philosophy and Creative Writing to examine the spectrum of inner states that sit between the conscious and unconscious mind. Encompassing reveries, dreams, visions, hallucinations, sleepwalking, and infant psychology, these liminal forms of mental experience will be investigated in order to assess their meanings in the cultural past and their influence upon variable concepts such as personal identity, the will and ethical responsibility. The workshop aims to establish how these liminal states were framed, experienced, explained, mediated, and culturally represented in different historical contexts. Did such in-between phenomena align with agreed definitions of the human? In what ways could they threaten, or displace, the operation of reason and self-possession? Did liminal states appear to elicit any advantageous properties, such as prophetic insight or intensified sensibility, and how were they represented in the collective imaginary? Participants will consider how understandings of liminal states have been shaped by changing medical and philosophical theories, and by accounts of creativity, inspiration and aesthetic genesis.  The workshop will bring together specialists in this area from across different disciplines with a view to broadening our understanding of the concepts of liminal states of consciousness.

The event is part of a series of three one-day workshops being organized by members of the Situating States of Mind Research Group at Northumbria University.  All are welcome to attend.