Critical approaches to like and dislike in medicine, law, and society: University of Bristol, 15th October 2025.

Centre for Health, Law, and Society Annual Symposium, University of Bristol Law School.

Opening address: Dr Fred Cooper, Law, University of Bristol.
Keynote speaker: Dr Lucy Series, School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol.

What does it mean to like – or dislike – someone? What does it pivot on, and what consequences can it have? Overwhelmingly, these questions – and their answers – have been considered too unknowable or idiosyncratic to make any kind of systematic sense from. Indeed, likeability has been specifically and repeatedly deployed (for example, in literatures on epistemic injustice) to demarcate more structural harms from simple bad luck.

Against this haziness, we make two interlocking arguments. Following emerging critiques in feminist political science and literary and narrative studies, we contend that likeability frequently has a politics, and understanding that politics can help chart a way through a series of knotty problems on the hinterlands (and often right in the heart) of medico-legal issues. Second, we suggest that attending to likeability from multiple, more-than-disciplinary perspectives reveals significant – and unjust – disparities in experiences or outcomes that might otherwise elude analysis. Reading legal judgements against the grain, as the Feminist Judgements Projects have, can afford rich insights into the close workings of like and dislike in processes with particularly high stakes. Similarly, research in the history of medicine might help tell a longer story about ‘dangers for patients who are hard to like’ (to borrow from the title of a 1994 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry).

A critical approach to likeability which takes in its epistemic and emotional politics, we think, can open up and thread together work in a number of spaces. It can trace – and solidify – the contours of neurotypical prejudice against neurodivergent people; it can make sense of the adverse treatment of patients perceived to be uncompliant, difficult, demanding, or unwilling to get well; it can ask important questions about trauma, and other good reasons why someone might be unwilling or unable to tap into the kinds of good-humoured conviviality that helps interactions with services or institutions along. It can follow and systematize some of the subtler iterations of racism, misogyny, ableism, or queerphobia (to name just a few); it can help put class firmly back in the picture.

The final programme has yet to be confirmed, but papers are likely to speak to the following themes:

• Theorizations, genealogies, or critiques of like and dislike as ideas;
• Case studies of like and dislike in medical, legal, or professional settings and literatures;
• Discussions of likeability in political, cultural, and literary discourses and depictions;
• The experience or phenomenology of being unlikeable (in self- or other-perception);
• Parallel, ancestor, or analogous narratives and phenomena (e.g., histories of difficult doctor/patient interactions, or the science of personality);
• Critical analyses of ‘bad traits’, ‘ugly emotions’, and where they come from;
• Likeability as an expression of identity prejudice;
• Emotional labour beyond the workplace;
• Like, dislike, and epistemic/affective injustice.