Advanced Studies Seminars and Meetings
This archive contains details of scheduled and past meetings, Advance Studies Seminars, and webinars held since January 2020. For a list of meetings held before January 2020 please click here.
27 March 2026 - 3pm
What counts as successful co-creation? This talk approaches the question by treating co-creation as joint transformative action rather than transformative experience
4th March 2026 - 9:30 - 17:10
Contemporary Western aesthetics embraces aesthetic experience that is participatory, immersive and connective with oneself and through this, with others and the environments we meet them in. Such encounters are central in healthcare practice. This seminar will address why awareness of such aesthetic experience matters in mental health and wellbeing. This daylong seminar will include a range of speakers covering underpinning ideas and aspects of other fields that may be relevant to healthcare care.
The seminar will be hybrid (in person and online) and is organised by the Aesthetics in Mental Health Network of the Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice in Health and Social Care, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, Sigmund Freud University, Vienna.
11th February 2026 - 9:30 - 16:00
This event celebrates the publication of Values in Psychiatry by Robert Dudas
This event celebrates the publication of Values in Psychiatry, a book written by a multidisciplinary group of authors with a variety of lived experience and professional expertise in mental illness.
The objective of the authors was to explore the role of values in order to improve psychiatric practice. A key insight of the book is that carefully mapping patients’ values can be helpful with this in many ways. Clinically, it can improve treatment adherence and patient satisfaction as well as reduce the risk or moral injury for the clinician.
But clinical value mapping can also be helpful in improving the quality and precision of research in psychiatry. The book includes a number of examples of how to integrate the psychological and the social into the bio-psycho-social model and how to add to this the existential dimension to develop a truly holistic approach with the help of the social sciences, philosophy, literature, and art.
21st January 2026 - 9:30am-4:00pm
This seminar aims to deepen our understanding of improvisation in professional practice through discussion and the sharing of improvisatory experience, learning what we can from philosophical perspectives, and improvisation in art and music.
2nd December 2025 - 2pm-4:30pm
This seminar brings together phenomenological and psychoanalytic perspectives to explore the therapeutic space in its multiple dimensions. While therapeutic space is often taken for granted and treated as self-evident, it is in fact the very field in which therapeutic work unfolds. The recent shift to online modalities has brought these spatial dimensions into sharper focus, drawing attention to features that might otherwise remain unnoticed. The discussion will address, among other themes, the material setting of therapy, the specific dynamics of online therapeutic environments, and the relational space shaped by transference and countertransference, all considered within a broader phenomenological field.
5th November 2025 - 9:30am-4pm
Modern psychiatry has given us novel ways of thinking and talking about human experience. The resulting transformation in our self-understanding is especially evident in the domain of emotional experience. Over the past five decades, the notion has grown increasingly pervasive that much of our emotional distress signifies a condition of pathology.