Laura Di Pasquale

Laura Di Pasquale is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant in Social Anthropology and Visual Media . Her doctoral project examines how people negotiate their physical body, social and moral relations, imagination, sense of self and identity, at time of disruption, in Rome.  The primary research focus is Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), an injury to the brain caused by a substantial impact to the head or body.  The research is grounded in an auto-ethnography of her own experience of traumatic brain injury, in 2005, following a road accident in Rome.  However, the research also builds on the experience, reflections, insights, actions and artworks of twelve people who have also been diagnosed a TBI, at different points in their lives, who embarked on a journey of self-discovery of their experience of TBI. During the research they developed a set of innovative collaborative creative auto-ethnographic practices suited to exploring dynamic social and existential processes, like illness: “Auto-ethnographic Dialogues”

The main argument of the thesis is that at times of disruption, a self-reflective space emerges in which people’s embodied ways of knowing and being, their moral and social relations, their body, sense of self and identity, may become present to their conscience, questioned and transformed.  What, before the life-changing event, was taken for granted is often called into question, a constellation of practices and meanings is unmade and remade and people develop a repertoire of creative, provisional and performative tactics and strategies to make their world re-inhabitable. The set of methods developed during fieldwork allows these strategies to emerge, to be remembered, shown, made tangible or discovered and crafted. The set of methods may become the strategy to answer the existential question “who am I?”

Before starting her doctoral research,  Laura worked in Italy as an applied social researcher on health, youth and social inclusion in the charity sector, for trade unions, academic institutions and intergovernmental organizations ( Save the children, OIM, University Roma Tor Vergata, COSPE,  EU Fundamental Rights Agency