‘Shame’s Object(s): Interactionally Respecifying Stigma’

Phil Hutchinson is currently Senior Lecturer in Applied Philosophical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He has worked on Shame, Emotions, Wittgenstein, Ethnomethodology, the Placebo Response and E-cognition. Phil is currently working on a number of projects: One on Wittgenstein and Ethnomethodology, which seeks to remap the relationship by looking at how Wittgenstein and Garfinkel respecify both phenomenology and Gestalt Psychology grammatically (W) and interactionally (EM). A second project on Stigma which seeks to advocate a return to interactional analyses of stigma. And a third project, in collaboration with Doug Hardman, on method in Psychological research.

‘Shame’s Object(s): Interactionally Respecifying Stigma’
In 2012, I began work on bringing my philosophical work (e.g. Hutchinson, 2008) on shame to bear on the shame as experienced by some people living with HIV and how this affects them, their medical care and public health policy on HIV. As I began this project, it became clear that shame was discussed little, if at all, in the literature on the psycho-social factors impacting HIV treatment, public health policy and a life lived with the virus. Instead, the dialogue about psycho-social determinants, barriers to good treatment and the experience of living with the virus was dominated by reflections on stigma, and had been since the early days of the epidemic in the 1980s. In a couple of papers (Hutchinson and Dhairyawan, 2017a, 2017b), the HIV consultant Rageshri Dhairyawan and I made the point that studying stigma without also studying the emotional response to stigma was a little like investigating danger in the absence of any discussion of the fear experienced in response the perception of danger; our point was that there is an internal relationship between an emotion, like shame, and it’s object, like… … . But here I hit a problem, because after Ragreshri and I made this point and I turned my attention to stigma taken as shame’s object, I found that notwithstanding the huge amount of literature on stigma, much of which depicts stigma as an attribute or mark, stigma is a category term which brings together a range of interactional phenomena, such as discreditation, degradation and discrimination. In this talk I lay out a programme for the interactional study of the phenomena which are brought together by the category of stigma. In doing so, I also talk a little about some assumptions about stigma that pervade not only the academic literature but also stigma activism.

References:
Hutchinson, P. (2008) Shame and Philosophy: An Investigation in the Philosophy of Emotions and Ethics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hutchinson, P. and Dhairyawan, R. (2017a) ‘Shame, Stigma, HIV: Philosophical Reflections.’ Med Humanit, 43(4) pp. 225–230.
Hutchinson, P. and Dhairyawan, R. (2017b) ‘Shame and HIV: Strategies for addressing the negative impact shame has on public health and diagnosis and treatment of HIV.’ Bioethics, 32(1) pp. 68–76.

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