History as it Actually Seemed. Theorizing Lived Experience
Rob Boddice
Tampere University / McGill University
27 February 2025, 17.00-19.00
University of Florence, SAGAS Department, Via San Gallo 10, Aula Parva
Mediterranean Emotions – A Global Research Hotspot
Seminar Series “Emotional Grammars of Globalization”
GMeet Link: meet.google.com/gve-rhcy-bex
Abstract
How reality is perceived by humans is situated and contingent and mutable. Meaning is derived, shared, confirmed and reproduced in the interrelation of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and collectivity. An assessment of relative authenticity is found in this dynamic relation: references to ‘my lived experience’ or my truth are perforce appeals to those who will validate it as the truth. It is such a consensus, collectively formed and intersubjectively maintained, that underscores and underwrites the situated perception or reality. This is framed, delimited, defined, and scripted by a context that is in turn haunted by agencies of power and authority and by the legacies they leave: logics, technologies, systematic limitations and institutionalised conceits. Ultimately, people act on the basis of what their reality seems to be. This amounts to something like an historical lived-experience theory of social practice and power: history not wie es eigentlich gewesen ist – how it actually was – but history wie es eigentlich erschienen ist – how it actually seemed.
Speaker’s Bio
Rob Boddice is Senior Research Fellow at the Research Council of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (HEX), Tampere University and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University. He has previously held positions at Bard College Berlin, Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and Freie Universität Berlin.
Dr Boddice is chiefly known as an historian of emotions, experience, science and medicine, with special interests in pain, medical experimentation, and interdisciplinary engagement. He is the author or editor of 14 books of historical non-fiction, as well as dozens of articles, book chapters, and reviews. He published the monograph Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge) in 2020, together with Mark Smith, and the second edition of The History of Emotions (Manchester) in 2024. His latest book, The Power of Belief: Why the History and Science of the Placebo Effect Matters to Modern Medicine, is forthcoming with Reaktion Books.
Ultimo aggiornamento
19.12.2025