ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Testing, Staging and Recording: Film as Research and Practice in the Psy-Disciplines

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

The 2024 issue of History of Human Sciences on ‘Film, Observation and the Mind’ explored the role of moving image technology in shaping psy-scientific knowledge. This roundtable takes the special relationship between film media and the psy-disciplines as its starting point. Participants will discuss how they utilise methods from experimental history of science and practice-based research in the creative arts to unlock new methodological horizons for scholars of film and the psy-disciplines. Sasha Bergstrom-Katz will comment on how artistic methods can disrupt or reproduce the project of knowledge production through a discussion of her film series ‘On the Subject of Tests: Performing with Objects’, which explores the twentieth-century intelligence test kit as a readymade performance. David Bucheli will focus on projective diagnostic techniques such as the Rorschach test, discussing how film theory and audiovisual research may foster a renewed understanding of ‘test images’ as material objects, persuasive tools, and epistemic agents in the psy-disciplines. In her contribution on ‘Animal Hypnosis’, Sophia Gräfe will address the historiographical pitfalls involved in examining useful films. Using examples from the Charité film collection, she will explore ‘hypnosis’ as both a subject of study and an analytical tool. Grace Whorrall-Campbell’s intervention into ‘Neuro Psychiatry 1943’ will inform comments on the relationship between historical and creative methods, focussing on how re-watching moving image shapes the production of historical knowledge. The roundtable will encourage discussion of film as a method of restaging and re-playing through a mixture of screening and discussion.

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Chair

• Alfred Freeborn, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

Participants

• David Bucheli, University of Basel

• Sasha Bergstrom-Katz, University of Bielefeld

• Sophia Gräfe, Humboldt-University Berlin

Session Organizer

• Grace Whorrall-Campbell, University of Oxford