How can we understand self-harm from a sociological perspective? Two ground-breaking recent books address this question: Self-Injury, Medicine and Society: Authentic Bodies (2016) by Amy Chandler and Why do we Hurt Ourselves? Understanding Self-Harm in Social Life (2018) by Baptiste Brossard. The authors will discuss their research in conversation with Celia Roberts, author of Puberty in Crisis: A Bio-psycho-social Account (2015).

The conversation will explore the nature of self-harm, how it functions and why someone might engage in it. The framing of self-harm as a social and embodied practice provides a fresh perspective which raises questions about the dominant psychological and medical approaches to the phenomenon.