Affective Experience Lab: Launch Event

The Affective Experience Lab is one of six labs in Durham University’s new Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. It is led by Corinne Saunders and Fraser Riddell, from the Department of English Studies at Durham University, alongside an interdisciplinary team from the Institute of Medical Humanities. The lab’s activities will develop over a five year period, so we are excited to hear suggestions at this early stage of how colleagues can contribute to future research collaborations and how the lab might speak to your interests. We see the lab as developing organically in response to those involved in it, and are open to all ideas.

The afternoon will begin with lunch, followed by an introduction to the lab, a series of short cross-disciplinary reflections, and an opportunity for conversation and collaboration – and, of course, celebration. All are welcome.  

More on the aims of the Lab

The Affective Experience Lab brings together scholars from across disciplines engaged from different perspectives with the many facets of affective experience – sensory experience, the intersection of cognition and feeling, the history of the emotions, and the role of memory. We are interested in evidence from across art forms and genres, as well as in social science and science perspectives. The lab takes a long cultural perspective, putting past and present into dialogue, and drawing on historical periods from medieval to contemporary. Our aim is to bring together scholars with knowledge of how these forms of evidence represent, stimulate and articulate people’s emotional worlds in order to inform our wider understanding of the significance of emotion in health.

Health and wellbeing are profoundly shaped by our feelings and emotions. Such affective forms range from nebulous states of mood and being to the extremes of emotional experience, and from the spiritual to the traumatic. Sensory processes and memory also play key roles in shaping our affective orientations. Yet the immediacy and ephemerality of affective experience presents special challenges to representation and understanding. Affective states are difficult to verbalise, measure or capture, while the complexity and affective power of sensory experience is often overlooked.

While there has been considerable interest within individual academic disciplines in the body, the senses and the emotions, interdisciplinary methodologies for research into affective experience remain limited. The lab aims to create a space for methodological innovation and experiment, facilitating cross-disciplinary collaborations to discover new ways of investigating the complex significance of affect, emotion and the senses for health and wellbeing.

The research of the lab will be shaped through work with key partners and collaborators, including the ‘Deep End (North East/ North Cumbria)’, a network of GP surgeries based in communities with particularly challenging health inequalities, ‘ReCoCO’, a peer-led collective focused on community building activities for mental health service users, and a range of museums and heritage and cultural organisations in the North East of England.