A podcast from thefamiliarstrange.com
In this month’s panel discussion, Jodie (1:14) tells us about documents with agency: “Ideas just get up and grow legs, and they run away with themselves.” (Trigger warning: this segment mentions the recent Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. If you want to avoid that part, skip
to 3:45.)
Next, Ian (6:00) considers what it’s like to live in an imaginary landscape: “the kind of imaginary landscape that I’m talking about [is] where the one that’s around you, that’s physically substantiated, is the one that isn’t real.”
Simon (11:09) taps into his work in Iran, where people seemed to have a basic expectation that their politicians would tell the truth, to ask why, in democracies, we so often assume our politicians are liars: “they had a greater expectation that people should be telling the truth than we do.”
Finally, Julia (15:44) lays bare the danger she faces when the emotions of the people she studies — in her case, schizophrenia patients — percolate through her own body: “I don’t think I would be able to access my participants’ experiences the way I have without putting myself at some kind of emotional risk.”