It’s not-not-romanticism: Responsivity as precarious metaethics in British equine-assisted therapies

The seminar series is funded by a grant from UKRI. SOAS launched its Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA) this year, as a centre that aims to foster collaborations between anthropology and mental health research and practice. 

Abstract

In Equine-assisted therapists (ETs) for young people, horses are seen as guides toward more responsive, fair, and authentic forms of relatedness. This is valued in contrast with what ETs see as the ‘broken systems’ of modern education, clinical therapy, and of broader society. But rather than use ethnographic cases from ET to support anthropological theories about embodiment and responsivity in ethical life, this article argues that ETs hold a metaethical concern that ethical imperatives should come from more responsive, and healthy, engagements with the world.

The flip side to this concern is that ETs critique one another’s attempts at particularly ‘responsive’ forms of ethics as naive, delusional and self-indulgent, revealing that ‘white, privileged, female’ thought is considered epistemologically, and metaethically, precarious: part of the ‘broken system’ after all.

Rosie Jones McVey suggests that these metaethical concerns are situated within a context of enhanced epistemological culpability, in which one is to blame for how one handles knowledge as part of relationships of dependence and care.

Finally, Rosie suggests recent anthropological interest in the responsive form of ethical life is sometimes better positioned to satiate these epistemological concerns, than to study them.

Speaker

Rosie Jones McVey is a research fellow at the Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. Rosie’s research attends to the ethical and political dynamics associated with different ways of understanding minds – especially those of animals, children, and others considered to have different forms or states of minds such as neurodiversities and mental health challenges. 

Rosie’s PhD at Cambridge investigated ethical shifts in British equestrianism, and highlighted the heightened ethical potency and fragility of epistemology in contemporary moral worlds. The monograph from that PhD is called Horse-Human Relations and the Ethics if Knowing and is published by Routledge. A subsequent fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge investigated equine assisted therapies for youth – which is the research that today’s talk relates to. 

Rosie’s most recent research investigates green social prescribing, as part of a four year Wellcome Trust funded fellowship based at Exeter.

Registration

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Image (banner): Sinisa Lekovic (Unsplash)

Image (inset): created in CANVA with brand kit