UoB Grief Seminars: Prof Matthew Ratcliffe, The Unacknowledged Aspects of Grief

About the event

In this talk, Professor Matthew Ratcliffe will complicate the notion of disenfranchised grief by showing how grief involves experiencing and engaging with losses of life-possibilities, which are not always traceable in straightforward ways to specific life-events or situations. This means that (a) all experiences of grief will include aspects that others fail to recognise, acknowledge, or support, and (b) disenfranchised grief encompasses a host of different predicaments.  Prof. Matthew Ratcliffe will conclude that disenfranchised grief is best construed as an orienting concept, which can shape enquiry and practice by drawing attention to the many different ways in which grief can be disrupted by its interpersonal, social, and cultural context.

Matthew Ratcliffe is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, UK. His work addresses issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and emotion theory. Among other things, he is currently working on what it is to feel emotionally haunted. His publications include the books Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford University Press, 2008), Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2015), Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World (MIT Press, 2017), and Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience (MIT Press, 2022). His next book, provisionally entitled Feeling Haunted: A Phenomenology of the Emotional Self, is under contract with MIT Press.

This event is part of a new seminar series organised by the Bristol Centre for Grief Research and Engagement, in association with the Good Grief Festival.

The seminar will be online and will be held in UK time (BST). We will send the link to all registered attendees around 24 hours before the start time. If you have any questions, please email: [email protected]