Inaugural Professorial Lecture Series 2024 - Professor Tom Grimwood. Crisis or Cliché? The Problem of Critique in the ‘Grey Zones’ of Delivering Car

Event Overview

Tom Grimwood is Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Cumbria, where he leads the Health and Society Knowledge Exchange (HASKE) within the Centre for Research in Health and Society. He is the author of Against Critical Thinking in Health, Social Care and Social Work: Reframing Philosophy for Professional Practice (2023), The Problem with Stupid: Ignorance, Intellectuals, Post-Truth and Resistance (2023), The Shock of the Same: An Anti-Philosophy of Clichés (2021), Key Debates in Social Work and Philosophy (2016) and Irony, Misogyny and Interpretation (2012).

Crisis or Cliché? The Problem of Critique in the ‘Grey Zones’ of Delivering Care

Drawing together his extensive work on service evaluation in health and care delivery, with his explorations of the philosophy of interpretation, Tom Grimwood discusses the relationship between ‘crisis’ and ‘critical thinking’ in contemporary care. While the crises of care delivery are well-documented, Grimwood suggests that the responses to it often risk falling into clichés. To address this, he explores crisis as a form of ‘grey zone’ – a term taken from Hans-Georg Gadamer to describe areas ‘which are not fully amenable to techniques of methodological verification’. Negotiating these grey zones involves bringing concepts of knowledge, understanding and critical thinking into dialogue with the demands of contemporary care.

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