Inaugural Lectures

The University of Bolton is hosting two Inaugural Lectures.

To book your place, please email Pat Foster at P.A.Foster@bolton.ac.uk (places are limited).

The speakers are:

Professor Alec Grant PhD - Visiting Professor (Psychology)

- University of Bolton

Autoethnography: In Praise of Subjectivity

Autoethnography is a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings.

Professor Grant has developed an international profile in autoethnography over more than two decades, with many single- and joint-authored articles, book chapters, and books to his name. In 2020 he was the recipient of the International Conference of Autoethnography (ICAE) inaugural Lifetime Contribution Award, ‘in recognition of making a significant contribution to the development and nurturance of the field of autoethnography and those working within it’.

He has an academic and professional background in psychology and cultural studies, psychotherapy, critical ethnography, critical mental health, and philosophy. With a firm commitment to autoethnography, his current and ongoing project is to make this qualitative methodology more philosophically rigorous and informed.

Professor Bob Johnson MRCPsych, MRCGP, MA (Psychol), PhD (med computing), MBCS, DPM, MRCS - Visiting Professor (Psychology)

- University of Bolton

Using warmer emotions to melt past traumas – lessons from working with serial killers

Professor Bob Johnson began his medical career aged 16 working as a nursing orderly in the local mental hospital, as a holiday job. There he was fired with the ambition of finding a talking cure for psychotic symptoms. After training and working as a psychiatrist, both here and in the USA, he was a GP for 20 years, where he identified the long-term effects of child abuse.

He currently has MRCGP, MRCPsych, and GMC specialty registers for psychiatry.

Case histories show that childhood traumas can last a lifetime – but they needn’t. For example, a 40-year-old who, as a child, had been threatened with an axe by her late father, was enabled first to talk about, and then to discard, her crippling toxic memories. Even after the initial trauma is long gone, Speechless-Terror blocks both thinking and talking – findings that have been confirmed by objective scientific brain scan data.

As a prison psychiatrist in Parkhurst Prison, Bob worked with 50 murderers, including serial killers, exploring why they were killed. One serial killer was taking revenge for his father throwing his mother downstairs when he was 4. Once able to discard this, he grew up emotionally. Violence disappeared from that maximum security wing – no alarm bells were rung there for three years, down from 20 a year previously. Bob’s research interests include identifying a philosophical framework for this, and exploring why trauma is still so widely neglected, both medically and elsewhere, and how to rectify this, urgently.