The Association for Psychosocial Studies

Performing (Post) Pandemic Grief: Prof Fintan Walsh
2025-02-19 16:00 - 17:30 (Europe/London)
Register here

We are incredibly happy to invite you to join us for our next APS online reading group! We are delighted to welcome Fintan Walsh to present his research on the reckoning with grief in pandemic theatre.
Please join us to learn more about the vital contribution of theatrical performance to the ongoing work of public mourning in the wake of COVID-19.
In advance of the session, please access Prof Walsh’s new book: Performing Grief in Pandemic Theatres. The text is quite short but we especially invite participants to read sections 1, 4 and Coda.
Abstract:
This Element explores how theatre responded to the death and loss produced by the COVID-19 pandemic, by innovating forms and spaces designed to support us in grief. It considers how theatre grieved for itself, for the dead, for lost ways of living, while also imagining and enacting new modes of being together. Even as it reckoned with its own demise, theatre endeavoured to collectivise grief by performing a range of functions more commonly associated with funerary, health and social care services, which buckled under restrictions and neglect. These pandemic theatres show how grief cannot only be let mourn over individual losses in private, but how it must also seep into the public sphere to fight to save critical services, institutions, communities and art forms, including theatre itself.
Author biography:
Fintan Walsh is Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, where is the founding Director of Birbeck Creative Practice Lab and Head of the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication. His research focuses on theatre, performance and cross-disciplinary arts practice, with monographs including Performing Grief in Pandemic Theatres (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions (Methuen Drama, 2023), Theatre & Therapy (Methuen Drama, 2013; expanded and reissued 2024), Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Edited volumes include Writing Queer Performance: Contemporary Texts and Documents (Methuen Drama, 2025), Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary (Methuen Drama, 2020), That Was Us: Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (Oberon Books, 2013), Performance, Identity and the Neo-Political Subject (with Matthew Causey, Routledge, 2013), Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland (Cork University Press, 2010), and Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (with Sara Brady, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Fintan is the founder and Senior Editor of the series Elements in Contemporary Performance Texts (Cambridge University Press) and is a former Senior Editor of the journal Theatre Research International (Cambridge University Press).

Prof Tony Jefferson: The Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI)
2024-03-27 17:00 - 19:00
Registration: Click here for more details
Join us in our APS online reading group, as we listen to Emeritus Prof Tony Jefferson’s reading of Panic and Perjury and FANI method
We are incredibly happy to invite you to join us for our next APS online reading group! We are welcoming Tony Jefferson to share his important work on the Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) Method as a key methodology for psychosocial research.
Tony Jefferson is an Emeritus Professor at Keele University who has researched and published widely on questions to do with youth subcultures, the media, policing, race and crime, masculinity, fear of crime, racial violence and psychosocial methodology. He worked with Stuart Hall and others to produce Resistance Through Rituals (1976/2006) and Policing the Crisis (1978/2013). His books on Policing include Controlling the Constable (1984/2023) and Interpreting Policework (1987/2023), both co-authored with Roger Grimshaw, and The Case Against Paramilitary Policing (1990/2023).
His fear of crime project, with Wendy Hollway, produced the novel Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) method and a subsequent book, Doing Qualitative Research Differently (2000/2012). Teaching psychosocial criminology with David Gadd produced their jointly authored text, Psychosocial Criminology (2007). His latest book is Stuart Hall, Conjunctural Analysis and Cultural Criminology (2021). He has held Visiting Professorships in the United States, Australia, Denmark and Sweden and was a one time European editor of the journal Theoretical Criminology.
To prepare for this reading, please read:
‘Panic and Perjury: A psychosocial exploration of agency’ by Hollway and Jefferson, 2005
https://oro.open.ac.uk/22982/
Abstract:
The primary aim of this article is to explore the predicament of one man, Vince, in difficult circumstances, in order to produce a psychosocial analysis that could contribute to the understanding of agency . In the process we note the role of what we prefer to call affect, rather than emotion, in most contexts. If emotions are, as Blackman and Cromby (2007: 6) suggest, ‘those patterned brain/body responses that are culturally recognizable and provide some unity, stability and coherence to the felt dimensions of our relational encounters’, it is perhaps unsurprising that, because we are focusing on unconscious dynamics in this chapter, the term affect proves more relevant to our analysis than the emotions of anger and shame that are, arguably, the core suppressed emotions in the account. Vince himself never talked in terms of specific emotions, but rather, in line with Blackman and Cromby’s definition that ‘feelings register intensive experiences as subjective experience’ (ibid), of how he was experiencing his painful world. In highlighting his embodied ‘sickness’, and the accompanying anxiety, we focus on the affective dimension. In this usage, anxiety is an affective state.

Emeritus Prof Stephen Frosh: Psychosocial studies with psychoanalysis (Reading Group)
2024-01-24 18:00 - 19:30
We are incredibly happy to invite you to join us for the first APS online reading group of the year! We are starting this academic year with Stephen Frosh’s important work on some of the principles of psychosocial thinking, including its transdisciplinarity and criticality and its interest in ethics and reflexivity.
Stephen Frosh will be there to talk about his work and in particular his paper:
`Psychosocial studies with psychoanalysis’ (Journal of Psychosocial Studies, 2019)
https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/jps/12/1-2/article-p101.xml

Please book here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/emeritus-prof-stephen-frosh-psychosocial-studies-with-psychoanalysis-tickets-781427790557

Abstract:
Psychosocial studies is methodologically and theoretically diverse, drawing on a wide range of intellectual resources. However, psychoanalysis has often taken a privileged position within this diversity, because of its well-developed conceptual vocabulary that can be put to use to theorise the psychosocial subject. Its practices have become a model for some aspects of psychosocial work, especially in relation to its focus on intense study of individuals, its explicit engagement with ethical relations, and its traversing of disciplinary boundaries across the arts, humanities and social sciences.
This article begins with a brief description of some principles of psychosocial thinking, including its transdisciplinarity and criticality and its interest in ethics and in reflexivity. It then explores the place of psychoanalysis in this genealogy, presenting the case for psychoanalysis’ continuing contribution to the development of psychosocial studies. It is argued that this case is a strong one, but that the critique of psychoanalysis from the discursive, postcolonial, feminist and queer perspectives that are also found in psychosocial studies is important. The claim will be made that the engagement between psychoanalysis and its psychosocial critics is fundamentally productive. Even though it generates real tensions, these tensions are necessary and significant, reflecting genuine struggles over how best to understand the socially constructed human subject
Author biography:
Stephen Frosh is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck, where he founded the Department of Psychosocial Studies. He has a background in academic and clinical psychology and was Consultant Clinical Psychologist and latterly Vice Dean at the Tavistock Clinic, London, throughout the 1990s.
He is the author of many books and papers, including Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and Hate and the Jewish Science: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). His recent book Antisemitism and Racism: Ethical Challenges for Psychoanalysis, was released last year by Bloomsbury. His book, Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness (Palgrave, 2019) won the 2023 British Psychological Society award for the best Academic Monograph. His current research interests are in processes of acknowledgement and recognition after social violence and in questions of social identity. He is co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies.
Stephen is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, an Academic Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, a Founding Member of the Association of Psychosocial Studies, and an Honorary Member of the Institute of Group Analysis. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.
This event is free – but please make a donation if you can to help cover our costs so that we can continue to make events like this accessible to all.

APS Reading Group: Spaces of Refuge: Guattari and Institutional Psychotherapy
2023-02-24 16:00 - 18:00
For our February Reading Group Rachel Wilson and Anthony Faramelli will be presenting their recently published article exploring the psychosocial pressures associated with seeking refuge and their argument as to why the “ethico-aesthetic” clinical practices found in Institutional Psychotherapy offer a grounded way to house those in need of asylum.
The article is available to download for free here
Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/association-for-psychosocial-studies-february-online-reading-group-tickets-533876618337
Abstract:
Félix Guattari’s work is most commonly discussed (and overshadowed by) his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze. This minimisation allows for a misrepresentation of Guattari’s work that minimises the fact that his theoretical writings were always couched in a grounded clinical practice. A practice which constitutes a politics of the sector.

Guattari’s prescient final text, Chaosmosis, argues that the conditions of Capital responsible for the current social-psychic-ecological crisis of migration demand modes of analysis capable of grasping their complexity, ones grounded in the ethico-aesthetic. It is a text that draws directly from the therapeutic practice that he, Tosquelles, Oury, and others in the Institutional Psychotherapy (IP) movement developed in their clinics. This work entailed the inclusion of aesthetic practices that work to deterritorialise the institution, shifting from carceral sites and creating therapeutic spaces of care and refuge.

This article explores the centrality of an ethico-aesthetic approach to the understanding of therapeutic space within the sites and clinical practice of Institutional Psychotherapy. Looking especially at daily life and the inclusion of aesthetic practice, it examines the particular notion of asylum that emerged in these sites that so informed the clinical and critical work of Guattari and Deleuze, and draws connections to the current global crisis of migration in the necessity of such sites to the forced segregation between those deemed mad and sane.

All registered attendees should automatically be sent a Zoom link. The link will be re-sent the day of the event.

Author biographies:

Rachel Wilson is a Recovery Coordinator in an accommodation service for people with high support mental health needs operated by the charity SHP. As a researcher, Rachel’s work is situated at the intersection of radical forms of psychotherapy, aesthetics, filmmaking and the histories of institutional analysis. She is currently conducting her doctoral studies in the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. Rachael is also a researcher at the Centre for Institutional Analysis and a member of the Network for Institutional Analysis.

Anthony Faramelli is an organisational consultant and a lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London where he co-directs, with Janna Graham, the Centre for Institutional Analysis. Anthony’s research is situated at the intersection of psychosocial theory, recent French philosophy and postcolonial theory, with a focus on Institutional Psychotherapy and the work of Félix Guattari and Frantz Fanon. Anthony is also a member of the Executive Board of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and a member of the Network for Institutional Analysis.

Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

Psychosocial Studies: Reading Group: Navigating sameness and difference in research
2022-10-28 16:00 - 18:00
Association for Psychosocial Studies Online Reading Group
Navigating sameness and difference in research; a critical discussion on reflexivity
Michelle Elliot and Lindsey Nicholls
Friday 28 October 2022, 4 – 6pm
We are incredibly happy to invite you to join us for the first APS online reading group of the year! We are starting this academic year with Lindsey Nicholls and Michelle Elliot’s incredibly important work on reflexivity when researching sensitive topics and/or marginalised communities.
The articles are available to download for free here and here
Abstract:
In researching sensitive topics and marginalised communities there has been an increasing pressure for researchers to be the ‘same as’ the participants. This may protect vulnerable communities from objectification and external scrutiny encoded in ‘normative’ views of a society. A researcher who is the ‘same as’ the researched community is considered to have sufficient authenticity and legitimacy to do the research.
Critical, feminist and reflexive approaches to social science research demand consideration of research objectives, intentions and implications. The tension between advancing understanding of diverse communities and the interpersonal and intrapersonal transitions and the dynamics of the researcher – participant relationship requires an exploration of similarity and difference to ensure an ethically sound research approach.
The presenters will invite discussions on the complexity of establishing authentic and reflexive relationships with the participant communities. The challenges may include exploring/acknowledging unconscious bias and being aware of interpersonal insights and errors that occur in the development, implementation and learning from the research.
The presenters consider if a critical reflexive inquiry can promote a real and reciprocal exchange between researcher and participants. The presenters suggest that overly simplistic ‘identification with’ participants can avoid the painful realities of difference that are important to explore and understand. The intersubjective space can be explored through acknowledgement of sameness and difference, in privilege, power and/or the sense of subjugation.

How can researchers critically reflect on their intentions (conscious and unconscious) for doing the research?
How does intersubjectivity lend itself to understanding research into the human condition?

All registered attendees should automatically be sent a Zoom link. The link will be re-sent the day of the event.
Author biographies:
Dr Michelle Elliot (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in the Division of Occupational Therapy and Arts Therapies at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. Themes of criticality, reflexivity and narrative are explored across her teaching and scholarship.
Dr Lindsey Nicholls has a senior academic post at University of Essex. Her doctoral work explored a psychoanalytic understanding of care through the lived experiences of therapists and their clients. She has published work on the use of psychoanalytic theory in research methods (reflexivity) and co-authored a book on psychoanalytic thinking in occupational therapy.

Psychosocial Studies Online Reading Group: Invisible Trauma Women, Difference and the Criminal Justice System
2022-06-10 16:00 - 18:00
Anna Motz, Maxine Dennis, Anne Aiyegbusi
We have a very special event for the final reading group of the summer. Anna Motz, Maxine Dennis, Anne Aiyegbusi will be presenting their new book: Invisible Trauma : Women, Difference and the Criminal Justice System
A sample chapter can be downloaded here
You can order the book from the publisher’s website here

Abstract:
There is an expectation that women will be nurturers and carers. Women who have been judged violent, destructive and criminal and who are detained in the criminal justice system can find themselves perceived through a distorted lens as unwomanly. This book explains how they become hypervisible in their difference, while the histories of trauma and suffering that are communicated through their offending and other risk behaviour remain hidden, and so are unseen.

Bringing together authors uniquely placed as experts in their fields, Invisible Trauma argues that it is essential to trace the traumatic roots of women’s violence and criminality. Powerful intergenerational factors perpetuate the cycles of offending and trauma re-enactment that current sentencing practice overlooks. The authors present a psychoanalytically informed account of the development of violence and other offending, identifying pathways for change to address trauma within the lives of these women and their children, and also to create a responsive, effective and sensitive workforce.

Invisible Trauma highlights the role of emotional, social and cultural forces in traumatising women who come into contact with the criminal justice system and uncovers areas of their lives that are all too often hidden from view. It will be invaluable to those working in clinical and forensic psychology, mental health nursing, psychotherapy, social work, medical practice and women’s health, as well as frontline practitioners in the criminal justice system, the health service and third sector organisations and for anyone with an interest in racism, equality and social justice.
All registered attendees should automatically be sent a Zoom link. The link will be re-sent the day of the event.

Author biographies:
Anna Motz is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working with adults and adolescents, and also a consultant clinical and forensic psychologist with extensive experience of assessing and treating people who have long-standing difficulties with violence against themselves and others. Anna Motz is also the author of The Psychology of Female Violence: Crimes Against the Body (Routledge, 2008) editor of Managing Self Harm: Psychological Perspectives (Routledge, 2009) and Toxic Couples: The Psychology of Domestic Violence (Routledge, 2014.)
Maxine Dennis is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst (British Psychoanalytic Society) and is Groups Lead in the Adult Department, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. She is also a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Essex Clinical Psychology Department where she organises and contributes to the teaching on diversity and psychotherapy. Currently she is Chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council Task Group on Ethnicity, Culture and Racism.
Anne Aiyegbusi is a Mental Health Nurse, Forensic Psychotherapist and Group Analyst. She manages a clinical network for personality disorder at West London NHS Trust and is a Director of Psychological Approaches CIC. Anne has extensive experience of working with women who have histories of self-harm, trauma and offending; and of working with racism in forensic and psychotherapeutic contexts. Anne is a member of the Board of Trustees at the Institute of Group Analysis where she is also a member of the Diversity in Training Group, prioritising issues of ‘Power, Privilege and Position’.

Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

Psychosocial Studies and Journal of Psychosocial Studies Online Reading Reading Group: On not being able to read
2022-05-27 16:00 - 18:00
Myna Trustram
Please join us for our monthly online reading groups where we will be coming together and discussing topical psychosocial articles. This month we are incredibly lucky to have Myna Trustram present her essay “On not being able to read” published by the Journal of Psychosocial Studies.
The essay can be accessed and download free of charge by clicking here

Abstract:
This experimental essay sets out an imaginative and cognitive space in which I might explore my bizarre and troubling experience of not being able to read. I open a book that I suspect will reveal things I want to know and I am unable to go beyond a few paragraphs. It is not due to a lack of time or dyslexia; it is about the emotional world that I enter when I read.

The essay is not a flowing narrative because my mind does not think in that way about the problem; rather, it is a collection of notes for an unthought work. This is, actually, how I read – never quite going all the way. I write the essay not to solve the problem but to see if I can make something of it, which means encountering it and so feeling it all the more.

All registered attendees should automatically be sent a Zoom link. The link will be re-sent the day of the event.

Author biography:
Myna Trustram worked in England for many years as a historian, museum curator and academic. In 2021 she stopped paid work and now focuses on being a writer. Myna writes short experimental essays in which she calls upon literary and academic forms to consider themes such as mourning, childhood, separation and emptiness. Myna has publications in Victorian social history, museum studies and now this more adventurous form that calls upon psychoanalysis and the psychosocial.

Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

Psychosocial Studies Online Reading Group: Citizens of the world?
2022-03-25 17:00 - 19:00
Chris Scanlon and John Adlam
Please note that we have moved the start time back to 5pm, after working hours, to accommodate those who will be participating in industrial action ending on 25 March.
This month we have a very special reading group. Chris Scanlon and John Adlam will be presenting their new book: Psycho-social Explorations of Trauma, Exclusion and Violence: Un-housed Minds and Inhospitable Environments.
Chapter 3 of the book is available to download for free here

About this event:
In our recently published book we explore the operation of discourses of power, privilege, and position as they are revealed in relations of domination and toxic ‘othering’ as between privileged in-groups ‘in possession’ and oppressed and dispossessed out-groups. We analyse and critique the inhospitable environments generated by these societal in-groups at local, societal, cultural, and global levels. We particularly foreground the complex intersections between empire, doctrines of supremacy and racism, human mobility, and climate disaster, which the present war of aggression being waged against Ukraine so catastrophically aggravates.

In the chapter this group will study, we develop our exploration of how excluded monadic outsiders experience the (in-)hospitality of the in-group; and the extent of their scattered and essentially ambivalent relationships with the out-group. We build on our Diogenes paradigm using vignettes from the life of the early Christian saint, Simeon Stylites, and we show how his almost suicidal asceticism disturbed his fellow monks beyond even their own considerable endurance.

Like Diogenes, Simeon’s position in relation to a societal in-group was to consider that the only place he can take his stand is at the very edge of it. We explore how from this positioning both men earned and built what trust came their way by virtue of their truth-telling about the relations of domination to which they were exposed. We extend our discussion of the problematic nature of this liminality by exploring the relationship between the modern in-group, in the form of the State and its ‘metropolitan’ systems of care, and the various contemporary, out-groups who are experienced as (and vilified and silenced for) being ‘out-of-place’.

Psycho-social explorations of trauma, exclusion and violence: Un-housed minds and inhospitable environments

You can order the book from the publisher’s website here

Endorsements

“This book inspires a feeling of relief. It brings together the most pressing issues of our time – climate change, genocide, exclusionary nationalism and deep-rooted dehumanising racisms – in profoundly original ways that address power relations, exclusions, ‘unhousedness’ and (re)traumatisation. It faces the pain they engender while refusing familiar, patronising tropes of otherness. Its perceptive, and sometimes poetic, scholarship brings deep hope that other, genuinely psychosocial ways of living and relating are possible, despite disagreements and disappointments along the way.” Ann Phoenix, Professor of Psychosocial Studies, UCL

In this elegantly argued, carefully documented work, Chistopher Scanlon and John Adlam offer a refreshing critical angle on some of the most pressing forms of social traumatization and exclusion. Going beyond ‘dispossession’, ‘necropolitics’, and ‘states of exception’ as means of characterizing the social injury wrought by inhospitable neoliberal sovereigns, they deploy a deeply critical, practice-based lens to looking at the suffering in our world produced by colonial and racist structures, mechanisms of dispossession and unhousedness, and ecocidal policies that are exacerbating a global migration crisis. The authors mitigate their disappointment at the persistence of oppression by proposing a blueprint for solidarity around anti-oppressive social action. Prof Michael O’Loughlin, Adelphi University, New York, co-editor Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society.

Starting from homelessness and ending with ‘race’ this is a study of abjection and shame and of its refusal, the refusal to go quietly into the night and accept your place on society’s outermost margins. Scanlon and Adlam examine the vexed relations between those who are cast out and those who, simply by occupying the position that they occupy, do the casting. This wonderfully imaginative and principled book draws upon a startling diversity of sources to explore the paradoxes and predicaments of structural violence. Prof Paul Hoggett, Co-Founder of the Climate Psychology Alliance.

All registered attendees should automatically be sent a Zoom link. The link will be re-sent the day of the event.

Author biographies:
Chris Scanlon is a psycho-socialist consultant/researcher, group analyst, consultant general adult and forensic psychotherapist, and associate lecturer in psycho-social and organisational studies at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust. c.scanlon@btinternet.com Twitter: @CHRISTOPHERSCA8
John Adlam is an independent researcher, group psychotherapist and consultant psychotherapist. He is a founder member of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and a former Vice President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. john.adlam1@btinternet.com Twitter: @Diogenesquely
Chris and John were both colleagues at the Outreach Service of the Henderson Hospital Democratic Therapeutic Community before that Service’s abrupt and scandalous closure in April 2008.

Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

Psychosocial Studies Online Reading Group: The Aesthetics of Decoloniality in Psychotherapy
2022-02-25 16:00 - 18:00
Anthony Faramelli
Please join us for our monthly online reading groups where we will be coming together and discussing topical psychosocial articles. This month APS’ own Anthony Faramelli will be presenting his article “The Aesthetics of Decoloniality in Psychotherapy: Institutional Psychotherapy and Fanon’s Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm”
The article is available to download for free here

Abstract:
This article will examine how colonialism and racism stratifies space, with particular focus on aesthetic production and the way in which an individual’s freedom is dependent on the “ambience” of the space they occupy. The analysis will be grounded in Algerian colonial psychiatry and anti/de-colonial psychotherapy. Through an examination of Frantz Fanon’s application of Institutional Psychotherapy in Blida-Joinville Hospital, this article will argue that Fanon’s decolonial politics and his commitment to dis-alienation were reliant on the (re)construction of space within the hospital so as to increase what Félix Guattari would later refer to as the “coefficient of transversally”. By implication, this article’s argument intends to use Fanon’s spatial approach to psychotherapy in order to elicit a reading of Institutional Psychotherapy en masse as having, at its heart, a focus on spatial and aesthetic production.

All registered attendees should automatically be sent a Zoom link. The link will be re-sent the day of the event.

Author biography:
Anthony Faramelli is a psychosocial researcher and practitioner whose work is grounded in issues of coloniality and the theories and practices of institutional analysis. His current research projects examine digital cultures and the Alt-Right, psychotherapy’s aesthetic practices, and the resistant networks formed by Latin American diasporic communities. Anthony is the author of Resistance, Revolution and Fascism: Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics. He is currently completing a monograph titled The Mass Psychology of Fascism in the Age of Machines: Digital Media and Control in the 21st Century.

Dr Faramelli is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures and the Co-Programme Leader of the BA in Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. He also serves on the Executive Board of the Association for Psychosocial Studies, the Editorial Board of The Journal of Psychosocial Studies and is a member of the Network for Institutional Analysis.

Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

Psychosocial Studies Online Reading Group: Psychosocial meaning making in carcaeral spaces
2022-01-28 16:00 - 18:00
A case study of prison and mental health care practis
We are incredibly happy to invite you to join us for the first APS online reading group of the year! We are starting this year with Andrew Sheppard’s incredibly important work on carceral spaces in prisons and mental health care, published in The Journal of Psychosocial Studies.
The article is available to download for free here

Abstract:
Prisons represent sites of psychological distress and suffering. In this article, the implications of this, and the need for the maintenance of a psychosocial perspective, are explored. A psychogeographic overview of the prison environment is provided to consider the way it is constituted at different levels: the macro-social, meso-social and micro-social levels. Two vignettes are presented, which illustrate the process of loss and emergent self-destruction accompanying an enforced identity change followed by the radical means of stabilisation that may be adopted in opposition to this process. The essential nature of personal narrative construction ‐ this process of sense making ‐ is considered alongside the forcing impact of the social environment, as well as wider social pressures, and their impact on the dynamic process. In closing, a limitation of the employed methodology ‐ focusing on individual experience ‐ is remarked on: if these psychological processes take place through an act of modulation in response to a social field, how does the social field in turn respond to these modulations? In closing, I argue that through maintaining a psychosocial focus, researchers and clinicians discharge an ethical duty to maintain the attention of society on the suffering of some of its most vulnerable members.

All registered attendees should automatically be sent a Zoom link. The link will be re-sent the day of the event.

Author biography:
Andrew Shepherd is a Consultant Forensic psychiatrist – secure hospital and prison settings and an Honorary Clinical Lecturer at the University of Manchester. Andrew has on-going research and teaching interests in psychoanalysis, the lived experience of mental disorders, and the enactment of mental health at institutional boundaries.

Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

Psychosocial Studies Online Reading Group: Reanimating the Plague
2021-11-26 16:00 - 18:00
Lizaveta van Munsteren and Tom Fielder
Special introduction by Silvia Posocco
After a long summer hiatus, we are incredibly happy to invite you to join us at the monthly APS online reading groups where we will be coming together and discussing topical articles drawn from The Journal of Psychosocial Studies.
This month Lizaveta van Munsteren and Tom Fielder will be presenting their article, “Reanimating the Plague”, which is drawn from a special issue of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies on the Covid-19 pandemic. Silvia Posocco will briefly introduce the article, contextualising it within the special issue it is drawn from.
The article is available to download for free here

Abstract: The idea of ‘plague’ has returned to public consciousness with the arrival of Covid-19. An anachronistic and extremely problematic concept for thinking about biopolitical catastrophe, plague nevertheless offers an enormous historical range and a potentially highly generative metaphorical framework for psychosocial studies to engage with, e.g. through Albert Camus’ The Plague and Sophocles’ Oedipus The King. It is moreover a word which is likely to remain firmly within the remit of public consciousness as we move further into the Anthropocene, to face further pandemics and the spectre of antibiotic resistance. A return to plague also opens up the question of a return to psychoanalysis, which Freud is often cited as having described as a ‘plague’. Psychoanalysis is, like plague, a troubling and problematic discourse for psychosocial studies, but, like plague, it may also help us to work-through the disorders and diseases of Covid-times. In fact, if the recent pandemic has reanimated the notion of plague, the plague metaphor may in turn help to reanimate psychoanalysis, and we suggest some of the analogical, even genealogical resonances of such an implication.
All registered attendees should receive a link to join a Zoom call when registering for the event. A reminder email with the link will also be sent out the day of the event.

Author biographies:
Lizaveta van Munsteren (Zeldzina) is a psychologist with many years of clinical experience both in private practice and institutional settings. She completed her education in Russia and in the UK and currently is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research is dedicated to the vicissitudes of psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia 1930-1980. Apart from her clinical practice experience, Lizaveta is PGTA at UCL and TA and Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. Lizaveta is also a member of the Editorial Board of Vestigia journal.
Tom Fielder is a PhD researcher in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck. His research engages psychoanalysis, history, literature and politics, and is focused on the question of how to think about Brexit. He has published academic articles in History of the Human Sciences and the Journal of Psychosocial Studies.
Dr Silvia Posocco is a social anthropologist with interdisciplinary research interests in gender and sexuality studies and violence, conflict and genocide studies. She have studied ethnographically insurgent movements in Guatemala, the archives of transnational adoption across sites and temporalities, and most recently, forensic archives, bioinformation and cultures of evidence.

Stay in touch
More events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

APS Reading Group: Maggie Long’s “Derry Girls”
2021-05-28 16:00 - 18:00

APS Reading Group: Book Launch, Nigel Williams’ Mapping Social Memory: A Psychotherapeutic Psychosocial Approach
2021-04-30 16:00 - 18:00

APS Reading Group: On Disappointment: promoting ordinary conversation for, an in, extraordinary times
2021-03-26 17:00 - 19:00
Please join us for our monthly online reading groups where we will be coming together and discussing topical articles drawn from The Journal of Psychosocial Studies.
This month Christopher Scanlon’s article, “On Disappointment, Failure and Forgivness: promoting ordinary conversation for, and in, extraordinary times?”
A free copy of the article is available to download here
Abstract
To be disappointed is to be human, to be disappointing is also to be human. This article will invite reflection upon the under-theorised phenomenon of disappointment and its relationship to ‘failure’, to ‘hope’ and perhaps even ‘forgiveness’ (or the lack if it). The central premise is that to engage with ‘disappointment’ in our internal relatedness, and in our interpersonal and social relationships may enable us to re-connect with our own and others’ humanity – and not to do so is to remain stuck, aggrieved, resentful and locked into cycles of reciprocal self- and other-destructive violence and recrimination. The article will seek to explore disappointment as a ‘disturbance of groupishness’ (Bion, 1961, emphasis added), ‘a location of disturbance’ (Foulkes, 1948/1983 emphasis added) and a way of structuring the traumatised organisation-in-the-mind (Armstrong, 2005; Scanlon, 2012). The article will conclude with an invitation for psycho-social practitioners to leave our psycho-social retreats (consulting rooms, libraries, classrooms and the like) and, once again, to engage more deliberatively with conversations in ‘public spheres’ (Habermas, 1968).

Author biography:
Christopher Scanlon is an Independent Psycho-socialist Researcher and Consultant, a Training Group Analyst of the Institute of Group Analysis (London) and the Irish Group Analytic Society (Dublin) and Lecturer in Organisational Consultancy, Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust/University of Essex. Chris is also on the Executive Board of the Association for Psychosocial Studies.
Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything . Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

APS Reading Group: No room at the inn? Re-imagining social inclusion at the intersections between climate change, globalisation, homelessness & human migration
2021-02-26 17:00 - 19:00
Abstract:
There are two dominant and competing ways of conceptualising the psychosocial dynamics of social inclusion. In ‘Metropolitan’ systems, if you’re the wrong side of that line which denotes who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’, you’re excluded and oppressed, but you can ‘come in from the cold’ if you accept the terms of the invitation. In ‘Cosmopolitan’ systems, there are different accounts and practices, but essentially there’s a ‘comprehending circle’ involved, in which all are included by being drawn in towards the centre. Climate disaster threatens to overturn these paradigms. I build upon Latour’s work on the new politics of globalisation, as well as upon my previous (co-authored) work concerning Diogenes of Sinope, who coined the term ‘Kosmopolitēs’. The figure of Diogenes may stand for a third position: a monadic figure beyond system and order. This third position illuminates fraught encounters between imperialist in-groups and colonised out-groups in late modernity. The Keeling Count at Mauna Loa is a register whose implications suggest that, in the Anthropocene, we are all unhoused. Latour’s ‘migrations without form or nation’ of ‘climate, erosion, pollution, resource depletion, habitat destruction’ threaten to make migrants of us all – or, to remind us that once we all were migrants.
Article available here and will be circulated with the Zoom link.

Author biography:
John Adlam is a group psychotherapist and independent researcher. He works for the most part in the National Health Service, where he is Consultant Adult Forensic Psychotherapist at Bethlem Royal Hospital and Principal Adult Psychotherapist at Springfield Hospital. He previously worked in the Outreach Service of the Henderson Hospital Democratic Therapeutic Community, for the last seven years of that community’s existence before it was cynically closed down in 2008. He is a founder member of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and a former Vice President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. He is co-editor of the two-volume set Violent States and Creative States: From the Global to the Individual (2018); also of Forensic Music Therapy (2012) and The Therapeutic Milieu Under Fire: Security and Insecurity in Forensic Mental Health (2012). He is at the moment working on a new book co-written with Christopher Scanlon on the theme of ‘Unhoused minds and inhospitable environments’.
Twitter: @Diogenesquely Weblog: Barrelblog.org

Upcoming Events
Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything . Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

APS/JPS Reading Group Event: Lita Crociani-Windland - “On transience and other hatreds”
2020-11-27 16:00 - 18:00
Association of Psychosocial Studies and Journal of Psychosocial Studies
Online Reading Group

Lita Crociani-Windland, “On transience and other hatreds”

Friday 27 November 4 – 6pm

We are pleased to invite you to our fifth in a series of monthly online reading groups where we will be coming together to discuss topical psychosocial issues.

Like everyone, APS members are working under very altered and potentially isolating circumstances and it was with great regret that the we had to postpone our 2020 conference on The Psychosocial Body at the beginning of June. In an effort to keep our community engaged during a time when psychosocial thinking is needed more than ever, we hosted an online summer programme that culminated in our two-day conference Psychosocial Thinking in the Times of Covid-19. However, as the pandemic continues to keep most of us in lockdown condition throughout the winter, we have decided to continue our summer reading groups throughout the year.

This month we will be discussing Lita Crociani-Windland’s article, “On transience and other hatreds”. This article originates in a free associative extended reflection on what the author sees as the many faces of our relationship to transience in Western culture. It begins with the image of plastic flowers in graveyards, wild flowers pushed to verges and marginal spaces, women, migrants and transient communities. Our relation to life, death and their relation to movement and limitation are key aspects being reflected on and taken up for further analysis. The result of the free associative experiment is to invite reflections on the Freudian concepts of Eros and Thanatos and revisit the highly controversial question of whether these should be viewed in terms of a dualist or a monistic understanding. What is being presented here is a way of working with free associations outside the consulting room and group processes, using free associations as a reflexive research tool within a psychosocial hermeneutic approach.

The article is available to download and read for free here

These reading groups are free to attend and open to all. Simply click here to register on Eventbrite. All registered attendees will be sent a link to join a Zoom call before the event.

Author biography:
Lita Crociani-Windland is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Psycho-Social Studies at University of West England, Bristol. Following an early career teaching early years and then leading a specialist residential college for young people with moderate to severe learning difficulties and disabilities, Lita first came to UWE to join an innovative Masters of Science degree in Group Relations and Society, just as Psycho-Social Studies was establishing itself as its own distinctive field and the then Centre for Psycho-Social Studies was launched at UWE. She now leads the Psycho-Social Studies and Therapeutic Practices theme, part of the Social Science Research Group.

Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

APS Online Reading Group: Frances Cardona's 'Work Matters: Consulting to Leaders and Organisations in the Tavistock Tradition'
2020-10-30 04:00 - 18:00
The APS and IGA are pleased to co-host this special event.
Francesca will be leading a discussion of issues in her new book. Her presentation will weave in experiences of work from her new book, whose topics include leadership beyond the textbooks, organisational and personal shame and working with succession.
This event is free to attend and open to all. All registered attendees will be sent an excerpt from the book and a link to join a Zoom call before the event.
Author biography:
Francesca Cardona is an organisational consultant and executive coach.
She works in a variety of organisational and cultural contexts, helping leaders and organisations to face issues of change, transition and the emotional dimension of organisational life. Her training and work experience across two different cultures has given her special understanding and insights into issues of cultural diversity. She is currently a tutor on the Professional Doctorate ‘Consultation and the Organisation’ at the University of Essex & Tavistock and Portman Trust and Director of The Executive Coaching Programme at Tavistock Consulting (2019-2020).

APS Reading Group: Nini Fang's 'Feeling/ being out of place: psychic defence against the hostility environment'
2020-06-26 17:00 - 19:00
Please join us for our second in a series of monthly online reading groups where we will be coming together and discussing topical articles drawn from The Journal of Psychosocial Studies.
Like everyone, APS members are working under very altered and potentially isolating circumstances and it was with great regret that the we had to postpone our 2020 conference on The Psychosocial Body at the beginning of June. However, we believe that psychosocial thinking is needed more than ever in these times and we have therefore devised a free online programme which includes our summer reading groups and a scaled down online two-day webinar .

Abstract:
What is it like to be an immigrant worker in a ‘hostile environment’ in the UK? How does the form of discursive environment, which sees immigration as a social epidemic, impact on an immigrant worker’s experience of their cultural (dis)localities and subjectivity? In this article, I draw on my personal, psychoanalytically informed voice to explore these questions, by foregrounding the materiality of the hosting environment as the place in which the present relational matrix takes place, in which the internal dynamics of object relations are lived in the present sense, and the idiosyncratic expression of selfhood assumes forms.
The materialised reality of the place matters not least because it is drenched in power relations but also as it is where an immigrant worker seeks to live. The hostile host, in this sense, sees immigrants not simply as its guests (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000), but as unwelcome yet persistent guests to be yoked to their place of otherness and inferiority. By presenting vignettes of my encounters with the Home Office, I call into question the existential conditions of the immigrant worker and the potentiality for object-relatedness on relational grounds problematically punctured by hostile rhetoric. Could an immigrant’s sense of locality ever be anything but – evoking Said ([1999] 2013) – ‘out of place’? To address this, I will explore ‘out of place’ not simply as an emotional, lived experience, but also as a state of being that is embodied, psychically worked on and strategically evoked in resisting the power of the hostile host.

Author biography:
Nini Fang is a lecturer at Counselling, Psychotherapy, and Applied Social Sciences (CPASS) at University of Edinburgh. A lover of bubble tea and democracy at heart, she left her home country Taiwan and came to sunny Scotland in 2012 to train as a psychodynamic counsellor. She enjoyed the weather so much she decided to stay on and did a doctorate, which she finished in 2016 at Edinburgh. Her thesis looked at depression through Scottish theorist Ronald Fairbairn’s work. Her thesis opened her up to psychosocial inquiry towards locating the individual psychic processes within the social, cultural, and political environments. Her being an immigrant worker in the UK has ensured that there is no shortage of psychosocial inspiration and she will be kept on her toes writing.

These reading groups are free to attend and open to all. The reading group will be held on the last Friday of every month. All registered attendees will be sent a link to join a Zoom call before the event.
Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.

APS Summer Programme 2020
2020-05-29 08:00 - 2020-07-31 17:00
The APS is very excited to be hosting a series of topical events and in an array of formats during the summer of 2020. Please click here for more details and free registration links: APS Summer 2020 Programme.
