Downstream IRL: Ash Sarkar in Conversation With Catherine Liu

Are we in the era of trauma Top Trumps? ‘Lived Experience’ has become a byword for standpoint authority and progressive politics. It has allowed people from marginalised groups to speak and be heard, and forced us to confront how power plays out in interpersonal dynamics.

But it has also become a way for people to brand themselves online, and excuse antisocial or even downright nasty behaviours. Has ‘lived experience’ helped the left, or turned us into self-obsessed therapy-speakers, incapable of communicating with the majority of people?

Join us for this Downstream IRL where Ash Sarkar will sit down with Catherine Liu – cultural theorist, professor and author of Virtue Hoarders – to discuss her new book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering. 

Liu argues that as class politics has declined, the language of psychology has stepped in to explain problems rooted in capitalism. But what happens when trauma becomes content and politics gives way to what Liu calls the ‘gentrification of pain’?

Is ‘lived experience’ a prerequisite for legitimate political analysis? Why do movements so often end up policing each other rather than confronting power? And if politics becomes about who’s hurting most, who benefits?

To kick things off, Aaron Bastani will be speaking to Darren McGarvey aka Scottish rapper Loki, Orwell Prize-winning writer and author of The Trauma Industrial Complex. Beginning with his own experiences of addiction, poverty and recovery, McGarvey explores the personal and political costs of baring our wounds in the online attention economy.  How do we avoid both trivialising trauma and gatekeeping who is ‘allowed’ to claim it? 

Can the left move beyond a ‘theatre of empathy’ and recover a politics capable of building majorities?

Expect big questions, bold analysis, and the kind of conversation you simply won’t find anywhere else.