The role of 'lived experience' in academic, practical and professional spaces is contested and uncertain. The term contains many overlapping meanings, and there are often fractious contests over how 'lived experience' might exist in tension with other kinds of expertise. The discipline of academic history is a relatively inhospitable place for 'lived experience' on the part of the historian, even as historians attempt to elicit and collect the 'lived experiences' of others. In this context I have written a book about the history of illness fabrication and the induction of illness in dependent children (what used to be called Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen by Proxy). I have also been explicit within the book that my mother exhibited illness-fabricating behaviour for much of her adult life, and took me around hospitals for much of my childhood. I have attempted to chart the implications of this 'lived experience' for the written history. I have used roughly half of the book to investigate the various ways that different academics have used their lived experience in their work (most often dumped untheorised in prefaces, acknowledgements or forewords). I want to think through in a more precise and specific way what we mean when we talk about 'lived experience', and what this means for professional practice of all kinds. 'Lived experience' is not just an attribute of the people helped by psychiatric or social work professionals, just as it is not solely something that past actors have, as they populate social histories. Professionals have it too - even if we often forget it in our work.
The webinar a mixture of presentation, discussion, and Q&A.
