This special bonus episode of The Familiar Strange brings you a public lecture by Dr Gabrielle Carey and our own Dr Julia Brown. Gabrielle is an award-winning writer of creative non-fiction, essayist, a lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, and an occasional documentary filmmaker. Her research areas include James Joyce, Elizabeth von Arnim, and, most recently, mental illness and families. Gabrielle is currently the H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the ANU, where she and Julia have started collaborating on the topic of schizophrenia. For those unfamiliar, Julia did her PhD on the lived experiences of clozapine-treated schizophrenia in the UK and Australia.
This episode is somewhat of a sequel to the recent ABC Radio National interview Gabrielle and Julia did with Lynne Malcolm for All in the Mind: ‘The Silence Around Schizophrenia’. We encourage you to listen to this first.
In this public lecture, Gabrielle and Julia hoped to achieve at least two things. First, to humanise and reduce fear around the condition of schizophrenia (a heavily neglected social issue in Australia). They were very heartened by the turn out of 130 audience members on a cold Canberra night! Second, they wanted to show how two disciplines (literature and anthropology) can complement each other in the name of better communicating lived experiences of difficult subject matter.
Special thanks to the ANU Humanities Research Centre, particularly Dr Russell Smith and Professor Will Christie, for organising the event, and to Pamela Lourandos and Penny Brew for arranging the recording. Special thanks also to journalist extraordinaire Jane Faure-Brac.
Links and citations can be found at
thefamiliarstrange.com
This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.
Shownotes are by Julia Brown.
Our Executive Producers are Deanna Catto and Matthew Phung.
Music is by Pete Dabro:
dabro1.bandcamp.com