Archives For suicidology

Divorcing Suicidology, Ethically, Katrina Jaworski

SERRC —  February 12, 2016 — Leave a comment

Contact details: Katrina Jaworski, University of South Australia,Katrina.Jaworski@unisa.edu.au

Jaworski, Katrina. “Divorcing Suicidology, Ethically.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 5, no. 2 (2016): 18-25.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-2Bw

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Jaworski article_image

Image credit: Hatice Emrah Kesimler, via flickr

Having entered the conversation long after the initial responses to the then timely online release of the article by Scott Fitzpatrick, Claire Hooker and Ian Kerridge, I want to begin by thanking those who considered my work relevant to their own thinking about the future of the study of suicide.[1] It goes without saying that it is gratifying to see one’s intellectual labors recognized especially on the topic of gender—a topic still considered by some as the province of feminist thinkers and thereby outside the mainstream thinking about suicide. While gratified, I am also surprised for in reality I am just a nerd, who, while refusing to be dislocated from the tangibility of suicide, spends a lot of time in front of the computer, thinking, reading and writing.  Continue Reading…

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Nomad Suicidology, Scott Kouri

SERRC —  August 18, 2015 — 3 Comments

Author Information: Scott Kouri, University of Victoria, scott.kouri@gmail.com

Kouri, Scott. “Nomad Suicidology.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 8 (2015): 66-75.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-2fg

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suicide_note

Image credit: Ann Liu, via flickr

Suicide is perhaps the most intimate and affectively charged of human experiences, yet its formal study, under the general rubric of suicidology, is a science of statistics—biological or social—that is disembodied and aloof. Mainstream suicidology, rather than allowing itself to be affected by the living world of culture, context, and corporeality, takes a limited and fixed view of suicide as its object and generally excludes competing frameworks and alternative interpretations for why people take their lives.  Continue Reading…

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I, Too, Have a Dream … About Suicidology, Luděk Brož

SERRC —  July 15, 2015 — 2 Comments

Author Information: Luděk Brož, Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic, broz@cantab.net

Brož, Luděk. “I, Too, Have a Dream … About Suicidology.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 7 (2015): 27-31.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-2bc

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death

Image credit: Michael Taggart, via flickr

Scott Fitzpatrick, Claire Hooker, and Ian Kerridge (2014) offered an excellent and timely analysis of suicidology as social practice, which has provoked equally stimulating reactions. When asked to participate in the debate, I had to think twice. Not only am I much less qualified to comment on suicidology than other participants in the debate, but I also feel that many important points have already been made. Furthermore, since my own position is very close to that of other contributors, we may run into a real danger of preaching to the converted. This danger is inevitable because any wicked fosterer of suicidology’s rigid epistemic purity is unlikely to join the debate, either as a straw man or someone of flesh and bone.  Continue Reading…

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Critical Suicidology as an Alternative to Mainstream Revolving-Door Suicidology, Michael J. Kral

SERRC —  June 4, 2015 — 3 Comments

Author Information: Michael J. Kral, Wayne State University, ft2226@wayne.edu

Kral, Michael J. “Critical Suicidology as an Alternative to Mainstream Revolving-Door Suicidology.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 6 (2015): 10-11.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-275

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alone_2

Image credit: Vinoth Chandar, via flickr

I am not as optimistic as Ian Marsh (2015) has been in these pages about suicidology moving toward a critical perspective. Mainstream suicidology is firmly entrenched in its positivistic scientism. Marsh cites Heidi Hjelmeland showing how very little qualitative research is in suicidology journals (Hjelmeland and Knizek 2010; Hjelmeland 2015). I agree with Heidi that there is not much new that is published in these journals. I stopped going to the conferences of the American Association of Suicidology because there was never anything new. The same risk factors were always being studied with the same populations, and no new research methods or ideas, nor alternative theoretical dimensions, were being discussed. It is a revolving door of sameness.  Continue Reading…

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‘Critical Suicidology’: Toward an Inclusive, Inventive and Collaborative (Post) Suicidology, Ian Marsh

SERRC —  June 3, 2015 — 5 Comments

Author Information: Ian Marsh, Canterbury Christ Church University, ian.marsh@canterbury.ac.uk

Marsh, Ian. “‘Critical Suicidology’: Toward an Inclusive, Inventive and Collaborative (Post) Suicidology.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 6 (2015): 5-9.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-26B

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alone

Image credit: Vinoth Chandar, via flickr

In the spirit of Jennifer White’s (2015) comments, I am going to take a mildly optimistic stance. Though I too have experienced mainstream suicidology as excluding (and I have often felt quite demoralized as a consequence so I have sympathy with Tom Widger and Jennifer White with regards to this) I think the limited (and limiting) underlying assumptions the field operates within and maintains are beginning to be effectively critiqued.

The paper by Scott Fitzpatrick, Claire Hooker, and Ian Kerridge (2014), Tom Widger’s response (2015) and Jennifer White’s subsequent comments bear witness to that. This ‘critical suiciology’, I believe, can facilitate the development of a ‘post-suicidology’ that has the potential to be far more inclusive, creative, collaborative and critically engaged that the current field of study, and would draw on a broader range of interests and people.  Continue Reading…

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Shaking Up Suicidology, Jennifer White

SERRC —  June 1, 2015 — 6 Comments

Author Information: Jennifer White, University of Victoria, jhwhite@uvic.ca

White, Jennifer. “Shaking Up Suicidology.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 6 (2015): 1-4.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-26q

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bleak

Image credit: Rising Damp, via flickr

We need shaking up because suicide is encumbered with so many conceptual taboos that we do not know how to think it.[1]

In their excellent article, “Suicidology as a Social Practice”, Scott Fitzpatrick, Claire Hooker, and Ian Kerridge offer a useful platform for re-thinking suicidology, which as Ian Hacking observes, could use a little shaking up. Even though there is a rich body of scholarship on suicide that is broad in scope and engages with a wide range of methodological and conceptual tools, the social practice of suicidology is something different altogether. As Fitzpatrick and colleagues note, “research into suicide is diverse and multidisciplinary [but] this is not necessarily true of suicidology” (5).  Continue Reading…

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“Suicidology as a Social Practice”: A Reply to Tom Widger, Scott Fitzpatrick, Claire Hooker and Ian Kerridge

SERRC —  March 25, 2015 — 6 Comments

Author Information: Scott Fitzpatrick, University of Newcastle, scott.fitzpatrick@newcastle.edu.au; Claire Hooker, University of Sydney, claire.hooker@sydney.edu.au; Ian Kerridge, University of Sydney, ian.kerridge@sydney.edu.au

Fitzpatrick, Scott, Claire Hooker and Ian Kerridge “‘Suicidology as a Social Practice’: A Reply to Tom Widger.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 4 (2015): 44-48.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1ZM

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silence

Image credit: Jack Keene, via flickr

In recent years, a growing body of critical literature has emerged that challenges the dominant norms and practices of mainstream suicidological research. Concerns over epistemology and methodology, the (political) rationales that determine how suicide is researched and responded to, and the lack of measurable advances in knowledge and prevention, are, for a growing number of scholars, symptoms of a more widely felt paradigm crisis in contemporary suicide research. Tom Widger (2015) crystallises the incommensurability between the globalising paradigm of ‘scientific’ suicidology and the meanings and nuances of self-inflicted death in specific cultural contexts, extending the concerns raised by our article ‘Suicidology as a Social Practice’ (2014). While recent debates have largely focused on issues of methodological pluralism as a way of moving suicidology forward, Widger questions the degree by which any study of suicide can truly subvert the suicidological paradigm when it produces both the subject and object involved. As he says, the very concept of suicide is suicidological.  Continue Reading…

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“Suicidology as a Social Practice”: A Reply, Tom Widger

SERRC —  February 1, 2015 — 9 Comments

Author Information: Tom Widger, Durham University, tswidger@gmail.com

Widger, Tom “‘Suicidology as a Social Practice’: A Reply.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 3 (2015): 1-4.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1V3

Please refer to:

bleak_horizons

Image credit: TempusVolat, via flickr

A few years ago, I submitted a manuscript to a leading suicide studies journal, only for the editor to reject it, even before review, because ‘studies of this nature are having trouble competing for space with studies with experimental and/or longitudinal features, with large samples.’ I’m an anthropologist, and for the past 13 years I’ve been trying to understand why Sri Lanka reports some of the world’s highest suicide and self-harm rates. Having conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the country, I thought that, perhaps, I would have something potentially interesting to say on the matter, and that what I had to say might also be considered interesting by suicide researchers from other disciplines—just as I, as an anthropologist, sometimes read and find interesting what they have to say. Although the journal’s webpage made no claim that it only published quantitative/population (‘nomothetic’) studies, but in fact played up its ‘interdisciplinary’ approach, the editor was telling me that whatever I had to say, as an anthropologist, simply wasn’t part of ‘suicidology,’ a field which, ostensibly at least, encompasses qualitative social sciences, the arts, and humanities.  Continue Reading…

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