As a French PhD candidate, I would like to question the shareability of pain in the particular context of academia. Indeed, physical and mental suffering among PhD students is a widely but unofficially admitted fact in the French academic milieu. Consequently, I decided to find out how things stood for my fellow PhD candidates.
Author: paulinempicot
Pauline Picot is a PhD candidate in Theater Studies at the Université Lumière Lyon 2. Her thesis is titled “Magnétisme, électricité, spiritisme : imaginaire du fluide dans le théâtre du XIXe siècle” [Magnetism, electricity, spiritualism: on the imaginary representations of fluid in French XIXth century theatre]. She is also a published playwright and poet.
Artists in the Aftermath : The COVID-19 Crisis and Its Repercussions on Artists and Their Practice
Pauline Picot // PROTOCOL The paper you are about to read does not pretend to have the scope nor the scientific rigor of a comprehensive survey. I do not claim to have reached any general conclusions regarding the matter that I am about to address ; rather, I attempted to probe a mix of thoughts and…
Outpacing Death: How Formula 1 Is Dealing with the Covid-19 Crisis
Pauline Picot // Viruses know no borders; nor does Formula 1 – or at least, not until now. The first ever international racing competition was officially launched in 1950 with the British Grand Prix, taking place at the Silverstone circuit. Since then, it has come to be known as a world-wide circus: a glamorous contest…
Transcending Nervous Illnesses: an Artistic Praise of “Violent Fits”
Pauline Picot // “There are some violent fits, some disorders of the body that often excite the nervous system and feed the imagination with an inconceivable activity: the body is in pain, but the mind is lucid. Some people may be ill and yet astonish us with the liveliness of their ideas, and there are…
From Healing to Feeling: Two Experiments with Electric Shocks
Pauline Picot // 2013. Lyon, France. A young woman is sitting on a chair. She has long, well-groomed hair and is wearing a denim jacket. She knows what is about to happen. She agreed to participate. There is a disposable camera in front of her. She hesitates for a moment. Then she suddenly presses the…
Galvanism in 19th Century French Theater: Bringing Dead Words Back to Life
Pauline Picot // Have you ever felt galvanized? Surely you must have—if we consider the meaning that is nowadays assigned to this verb, which is to “shock or excite (someone) into taking action”[1]. But have you ever felt galvanized in an electrical sense, according to the original meaning of the word? The term comes from…
