Our good friend Wendy Dossett, who is one of our Recovery Voices, recently had an important event in her career. It was also an unusual occasion, as Wendy describes below. Here is what Wendy recently wrote on her personal website, along with a few of her photographs:
“It’s probably not a common thing that a promotion and a retirement is celebrated at the same time, but from the perspective of the promoted/retired person, it felt like ‘a very big thing.’
On Wednesday 6th November 2024, I gave a Public Lecture at the University of Chester which served as a kind of pseudo-inaugural lecture.
If you wanted to listen to the audio of the talk and see the slides you can do so here.
The lecture doesn’t inaugurate anything as such, because I’m retired, but it served a number of purposes. It was an opportunity to tell the story of the Higher Power Project, my large qualitative research project that explored the ways Twelve-Step Fellowship members engage with and negotiate the notion of Higher Power in their recovery from addiction. The talk was also a review of the impact work undertaken over last decade by the Chester Studies of Addiction, Recovery and Spirituality (CSARS) Group, among substance misuse professionals and people seeking recovery in North Wales and the North West of England. It was an opportunity to thank the many individuals and organsations involved in all that work. It was also a chance for me to reflect on what I have learned about the negative consequences of religious and spirituality illiteracy in the treatment world.
The lecture was chaired by Dr Helen Galbraith, who is the Senior Pro-Vice Chancellor and Chief Operating Officer of the University of Chester. Helen has been an ally, and indeed a driver, of the Recovery-Friendly University agenda within the University and further afield. It takes courage and insight for a senior manager to face down the stigma around addiction, to see past it to people, and to commit to genuine widening participation even when it’s hard. There aren’t many universities with senior managers like Helen. She’s an inspiration both inside and outside the University.
Dr Ed Day, the Government’s Recovery Champion and the University of Birmingham’s Clincial Reader in Addiction Psychiatry, kindly gave a response to the lecture. His response set the work of the Higher Power Project in the wider context of commissioning for addiction treatment and recovery in the UK’s changing political landscape. I’m indebted to Ed for his friendship and collegiality. Like many in the field, I’m also deeply grateful for the work that he does to explain the experience of grassroots of community-based recovery to the clinical professions and to policy makers. The field is fortunate that he advocates so strongly, in some very high places, for recovery-orientated systems of care.
I’m grateful to everyone who came to listen to the lecture and to celebrate with me. Every individual’s presence was special because it represented a unique relationship, and a particular element of a wider network that has held me up over my time at the University of Chester. It was lovely to have students there, including the students whose degrees I had to abandoned mid-stream because of my sudden retirement following my heart attack. I miss them hugely. Here are some of them who came early so we could have a catch-up.
It was lovely, of course, to have my close TRS Chester colleagues, to whom I owe so much, as well as academics from other parts of the University. There were even some academics from around the world joining online. I was so pleased that so many non-academic colleagues from the University were able to come. The University of Chester is fortunate to have some extremely able and principled staff members, genuinely committed to social justice, who work in various central services, such as in Student Experience, Student Support, HR, Outreach, Chaplaincy, LIS, Facilities, Grounds & Gardens and Corporate Comms. Working together on the Recovery-Friendly University with all these wonderful people was productive and purposeful. Stigma can only be challenged within insitutions, collectively. Collaboration with these energetic and motivated colleagues was a highlight of the last few years of my time at the University.
It also meant so much to have the wider audience at the talk: addiction treament professionals, members of recovery communities of various types – including Fallen Angels Dance Theatre, Eternal Media and members of community-based mutual aid, many of whom had themselves been participants in The Higher Power Project. I was blown-away that our friends from North Wales Recovery Communities actually sent a mini-bus! Thank you all so much for coming!
Just before the lecture started, I had a few photographs taken in my University of Wales PhD gown. The gown once belonged to Professor Cyril G Williams. Williams brought Religious Studies to the University of Wales, Lampeter. He was a renowned Sanskritist, and published the first translation of the Bhagavad-gītā into Welsh (directly from Sanskrit). I was honoured to speak at his funeral in 2005 to give an assessment of his extraordinary career. What Professor Ninian Smart was doing in England in the 70s and 80s, Williams was doing, in his own distinctive style, in Wales. Cyril lent me his gown to graduate with my PhD in 1997, and Cyril’s widow, a scholar herself, the late Irene Williams, very kindly gave it to me when he died. Academic rituals sometimes seem a bit silly to me, especially when they make people feel excluded, but it did give me such a warm feeling to wear Cyril’s gown for a bit, especially as in the lecture I was reflecting on the value of the religious studies lens in my recovery spirituality work. Here’s a picture of Cyril with me on the day in July 1997 when I graduated with my PhD.
After the lecture, we gathered downstairs, and my former Head of Department, Dr Ben Fulford, gave a lovely speech to congratulate me on my retirement, and presented me with some gifts from my colleagues. They had got me a wonderful pair of very fancy ‘range-finder’ binoculars for my coastguarding work, and an RSPB voucher. You can see how pleased I was!
Because of the irreversible weakness in my arteries, and the tendency for SCAD heart attacks to recur, I’ve been told by my cardiologist to avoid stress or extreme emotion. That’s somewhat easier said than done! I was nervous about agreeing to this event because, well, I’m an extremely emotional person. It was right, I think, to wait a while. Eighteen months on from the heart attack, and nearly as long from my actual retirement, I’ve had the opportunity to process and to come to terms, at least to some extent, with what has happened to me. It felt like the right time to celebrate the promotion that the University so kindly gave to me. It also felt right to mark my retirement, to say a kind of goodbye, and to put on record my immeasurable gratitude for the opportunity to do some fascinating and hopefully valuable work, with some truly wonderful people. I am so incredibly lucky.”
Please listen to Wendy’s lecture and see her presentation slides on Vimeo.