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The Potentials and Pitfalls of Lived Experience: Theoretical and Practical Reflections
The one day interdisciplinary Symposium took place on April 1st 2025 in the CACSSS Seminar room, ORB.
Symposium Theme
‘Lived experience’ has become a key concept in academia and public discourse, often used to highlight positionality, marginality, and personal knowledge in understanding social issues such as poverty, migration, crime, and inequality. However, questions remain about how it should be conceptualized and what kind of knowledge it produces. This symposium aimed to critically examine these questions from various disciplinary perspectives, drawing on feminist, sociological, criminological, and political insights.
Keynote speakers
Professor Jenny Pearce (University of Bedfordshire) and Professor Sharon Wright (University of Glasgow) are leading experts on lived experience in scholarship and policy, with significant contributions in both the Global North and Global South. They each delivered a keynote address, which served as a catalyst for roundtable discussions which in turn provided an opportunity for further interdisciplinary engagement and debate around the theoretical, methodological, and practical applications of lived experience.
Presentations were given by Dr Julius-Cezar MacQuarie, Dr Aoife Price and Dr Calvin Swords, Dr Lydia Sapouna, and Dr Amin Sharifi Isaloo.
Further presentations took place in the afternoon; these were given by Dr Tom Boland, Dr Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, Dr Ray Griffin, and Jody Moore-Ponce (PhD Researcher).
This event was funded through the Collective Social Futures Major Events Fund and hosted by the following ISS21 research clusters: Crime & Social Harm; Genders, Sexualities and Families; Populism and the Rise of the Far-right; Research for Civil Society, Environment and Social Action (REACT) and Work, Organisations and Welfare.
See more at the Collective Social Futures webpage here