Knowledge Is Made for Cutting – An Introduction

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Social Epistemology represents a departure point from the traditional field of suicidology. Unlike its predecessor, critical suicidology, or more recently, critical suicide studies, consider the scientific framework of research too narrow and argue against universalizing assumptions and applications of ideas about suicide, which often centre on Western notions of psychopathology, and individualist accounts of suicidal agency and subjectivity. Instead, critical suicidology advocates for researching suicide and suicide prevention from a contextualist, historical, subjective, political, cultural, linguistic and social perspectives. Arguably, critical suicidology has been in the making since the 1980s, as a handful of researchers persistently raised concerns about the way suicidology generated knowledge about suicide and suicide prevention. Perhaps then it is not surprising that critical suicidology, as an intellectual movement, came together in March 2016 at its very first conference, “Suicidology’s Cultural Turn and Beyond”. Articles in this issue have been developed from some of the papers presented at the conference. They represent a series of epistemological interventions into the way suicide and suicide prevention have been understood in different contexts, be it in relation to history, theory, knowledge production, ethics and the way suicide is represented publicly and personally.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical suicidology
• critical suicide studies
• social epistemology
• knowledge production

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term, critical suicidology, was used a few years earlier prior to 2016 as a number of publications attest (see Jaworski 2014, 2016; Kral 2015; White et al. 2016; Marsh 2015; Widger 2015; White 2015). Increasingly, the term, critical suicide studies, is now used. We use both terms given that this special issue contains papers presented at the 2016 conference in Prague, Czech Republic.

2. Scott Fitzpatrick contribution in this volume is the exception. However, we intentionally invited Fitzpatrick to be part of this collection, as his 2014 co-authored paper began a series of responses in the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. The article and the responses were a prologue to what would be articulated and discussed in the very first conference.

3. This issue is a companion to an earlier special issue on the topic of critical suicidology published in 2017 by the journal, Death Studies. Papers published earlier retain a greater focus on what critical suicidology can do more practically without forgetting the importance of theory in the way practice is understood and analysed (Kral, Morris, and White 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katrina Jaworski

Katrina Jaworski is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of South Australia. She primarily researches the agency of suicide, with a focus on gender, sexuality, youth, ethics and poetry. She also works on Rwandan genocide, the philosophy of dying bodies, trauma and the cultural politics of thinking.

Ian Marsh

Ian Marsh is a senior lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University. He is the Suicide-Safer Universities project lead, and academic lead for the Kent and Medway Suicide Prevention Group. Ian is the author of Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and co-editor of Critical Suicidology: Toward Creative Alternatives (UBC Press, 2016).