IRL (In Real Life): Launch & Inaugural Symposium

We warmly invite UAL students, staff and external guests to join us for the launch of IRL (In Real Life), Lived Experience Lab, and its inaugural symposium - a new cross-UAL research collective centring lived health experience to shape research and art.

Whose experience counts as knowledge, and who gets to decide?

When the people most entangled with, and affected by, systems of health, care and research are positioned as subjects rather than thinkers, something important is lost. IRL (In Real Life), Lived Experience Lab, begins from the opposite position: those most entangled and affected are often the ones doing the thinking. These are not abstract concerns. They sit at the heart of pressing debates in contemporary research, policy and creative practice, and drive IRL, which explores what it means to work with, from and alongside lived experience, methodologically, ethically and relationally.

IRL (In Real Life), Lived Experience Lab is attentive to experiences of physical and mental (ill) health, “illbeing”, disability and care, and recognises lived experience as a form of experiential knowledge - not only personal testimony but as embodied, situated and relational knowledge shaping research, collective enquiry and creative practices.

Comprising a day of ideas, provocation and conversation exploring the power, and the limits, of lived experience, IRL’s inaugural symposium brings together philosophers, writers, researchers, artists (and more) including: Professor Havi Carel, Professor Tom Shakespeare, Dr Corinna Hackmann, Dr Sofie Layton, Evelyn Tehraniand Georgia Corbet, and Amberlee Green. The day will be opened with a welcome by Professor Helen Brooks, CSM Dean of Research and Knowledge Exchange, and feature short contributions and responses from UAL staff and Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs).

IRL (In Real Life), Lived Experience Lab is a cross-UAL research collective, co-created by Anne-Marie Creamer(Central Saint Martins, UAL Art Programme), Dr Hannah Zeilig (London College of Fashion) and Dr Rachel Marsden(Learning and Teaching Directorate).

With thanks to CSM Research Board for funding this event.

Note: Only light refreshments will be provided throughout the day. Please bring your own lunch.

If you have any further questions about the event, please contact: IRL@arts.ac.uk

Image credit: Lucy Chapman (2022) MA Art and Science, Central Saint Martins, UAL. Photograph: Ben Turner.