It’s not-not-romanticism: responsivity as precarious metaethics in British equine-assisted therapies
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS, Main Building
- Room
- RB01
About this event
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.
Event series
This 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.
Registration
The event is free to attend, but external and non-SOAS visitor are required to sign up via the link at the top of the page.
Image credit: Sinisa Lekovic (Unsplash)
About the speaker
Rosie Jones McVey is a research fellow at the Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter. Her work explores the ethical and political dimensions of how minds are understood, particularly those of animals, children, and people with neurodiversities or mental health challenges. Her PhD at University of Cambridge examined ethical shifts in British equestrianism, leading to the book Horse-Human Relations and the Ethics of Knowing (Routledge). She later researched equine-assisted youth therapies and now studies green social prescribing through a Wellcome Trust fellowship at Exeter.
Series poster
