Provocations & Conversations | Whose Experience: Annie Ernaux

Experience is not just my experience, not just a personal affair. How can careful and iterative exploration of experience of events and encounters be the springboard for inquiries that make discoveries of far-reaching interest? This is the question RinA members have been exploring creatively since 2018. But we are only the latest in a long line. This series seeks the company of 3 twentieth century European women writers (one still living) who pursued their own path in inquiring into their experience of events, became influential voices in their own fields and left a lasting influence on what it means to inquire. The 3 women are Marion Milner born in the UK in 1900, Hannah Arendt, born in Germany in 1906, and Annie Ernaux , born in France in 1940. Each approaches experience in their own unique way, seriously, playfully, critically and reflexively and in so doing each illuminates potential worlds that many others can recognise afresh . Although the three sessions will form a series with connections between them, each session will stand alone, taking one writer in turn, starting with Annie Ernaux in October turning to Marion Milner in April 2027 and ending with Hannah Arendt in July 2027. You do not have to read these writers to join the session. I will briefly introduce each one and read some extracts from their work and ask some questions to spark conversation amongst those present. Session 1, October 7th: Annie Ernaux won the nobel prize for literature in 2022, the first French woman to do so. Her many novels created a new genre of writing, where intensely personal experience is written in a way that it becomes accessible, recognisable, relatable to that of other people of different gender and nationality – it becomes collective, because all humans live as carnal creatures experiencing intense bodily sensations as well as thoughts and feelings. How did she do this? She invented a form of inquiry she called ‘flat writing’ and by ‘writing as though with a knife.` Host: Patricia Shaw has spent the last 4 decades working with processes of social inquiry in organisation and community development, advanced practitioner education and practice-based research. Her special interest is in peer accompaniment, recognition and validation as an alternative to academic systems of supervision and accreditation. She is the original founder of the independent Research-in Action Community which grew out of the research node for Schumacher College she initiated with Plymouth University, that developed the college’s Goethian and phenomenological approach to inquiry. She also co-founded one of the first UK professional doctorates in complexity approaches to change at the University of Hertfordshire where she was a Visiting Professor from 2000 to 2016.