The Association for Psychosocial Studies

Psychosocial Studies: Reading Group: Navigating sameness and difference in research
2022-10-28 16:00 - 18:00 (Europe/London)
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.

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.

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.

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.

Performing (Post) Pandemic Grief: Prof Fintan Walsh
2025-02-19 16:00 - 17:30
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).
