Tarot, Disorientation & Relational Self-Help: A Process Interview with Author and Social Worker Jessica Dore

Hosted by the Humanities Center and featuring visiting fellow, Jessica Dore.

For many, the COVID-19 pandemic marked a permanent rupture in the experience of self as bounded and autonomous. That collective disorientation has amplified existing challenges to some of the foundational assumptions upon which the genre of self-help and the helping industries more generally are based. Self-help author, former editorial staff at self-help publisher New Harbinger Publications, and trained social worker Jessica Dore has experienced and written through the disorientation of that transition in the sense that Ami Harbin describes disorientation, as "to lose one’s bearings in relation to others, environments, and life projects” in such a way that involves “sustained uncertainty" and not knowing how to go on. In this colloquium, Dore will briefly present on pre-circulated material from a work in progress, a follow-up to her debut self-help title Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth (Penguin Life, 2021). The new work is written from a distinctly un-expert position, and tentatively titled The Relational Tarot or Tarot for Becoming. Then, using a group interview model adapted from narrative therapy practice, Dore will be interviewed about her process and project by Carla Nappi, followed by brief interviews of audience members about their experiences of the interview.

Jessica Dore is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist from coastal New England and currently based in a suburb of Philadelphia. As a scholar, she is interested in experiences of disorientation, unwanted transitions and transformations, grief, loss, and mourning. She looks at these subjects in two primary ways: 1) through the works and writings of philosophers (primarily in the phenomenological tradition) and 2) through first-hand accounts of such experiences. Because she works primarily outside of academia, she relies heavily on open access articles/books/dissertations, publicly available qualitative research databases, oral history archives, memoir, nonfiction, and film.

This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer. Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two prior to the event.

Jessica will also lead a tarot meeting on Friday, April 2 and 10am.