The Association for Psychosocial Studies

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

Digital Mediation and Working Through in Times of Denial, Disavowal and Splitting: On the Un/Representable
2022-09-14 09:30 - 2022-09-15 15:00 | St Mary’s University Twickenham London, Waldegrave Road, Twickenham, London, TW1 4SX, United Kingdom
An International Workshop
Organised by Dr Orit Dudai and Assoc. Prof. Jacob Johanssen – Supported by the Association for Psychosocial Studies
The goal of this workshop is for presenters to share work-in-progress and engage in collegial discussion with each other and attendees. Places are, therefore, limited.
We live in a time that is characterised by increasing political polarisation, fake news, conspiracy theories and other forms of extremism. Recent political developments, such as the post-Trump moment, have been credited with an increase in political paranoia and conspiracy theories that have spread far and wide on the internet. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram exhibit high levels of misogyny, sexism and racism and are described as lacking in empathy, compassion and love. Traditional media, such as tabloid and broadsheet journalism or television news, also find themselves part of “culture wars” and torn between different political positions.
This symposium will explore what role psychoanalysis in combination with other disciplines, such as media and communication studies, philosophy and sociology, can play in analysing such phenomena, as well as finding possible solutions for them.
Do we need a new form of empathy or spirituality? To what extent are moments of denial, disavowal and polarization necessary? Can they revitalize political culture and society more generally? What are their limits? What solutions can be found? How are they intrinsically connected to questions of digital mediation and representation? How are they represented in film and popular culture? What tensions are revealed between what can be represented and what remains unrepresentable?

Speakers
Dr Jack Black (Sheffield Hallam University)
Dr Alfie Bown (Royal Holloway University)
Dr Orit Dudai (Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts)
Assoc. Professor Jon Hackett (St. Mary’s University)
Assoc. Professor Jacob Johanssen (St. Mary’s University)
Dr Anthony Faramelli (Goldsmiths)
Dr Thi Gammon (Independent Scholar)
Dr Steffen Krüger (University of Oslo)
Dr Em. Sandra Meiri (Open University, Israel)
Dr Mark Murphy (Independent Scholar)
Professor Raya Morag (The Hebrew University)
Professor Candida Yates (Bournemouth University)

Psychosocial Cartographies
2022-06-17 09:00 - 2022-06-18 17:00 | Prague, Czech Republic
Cartography, the art and science of mapping space, has a history which cannot be separated from issues of power, control and alienation. Indeed, mapping the Americas, Asia and Africa was integral to colonial projects to dominate the land as well as all that inhabited it. As thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault demonstrate throughout their oeuvres (cf. “On Violence” from The Wretched of the Earth and “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punish), controlling a space directly impacts the psychic development of those who inhabit that space. This is to say that mapping always already has implications that are psychosocial in nature.
There is also an important, if often overlooked, history of psychosocial approaches to cartography. Examples of this include: Fanon who was, in the words of his mentor François Tosquelles, first and foremost a thinker of space; Fernand Deligny’s work with non-verbal autistic children mapping how they inhabit space in order to establish therapeutic relationships with them; Félix Guattari famously approached his understanding of the unconscious via cartography, a practice indebted to Deligny; and Jean Oury, Guattari’s long-time collaborator and the founder and director of La Borde Clinic, whose approach to psychotherapy began with a phenomenological mapping of the clinic. Different from psychogeography and the dérive, the afore mentioned practitioners actively mapped space in order to radically rework it, disalienating the institutional arrangements and the individuals within.
Today, be it in relationship to issues of racialisation, digital networks, urban studies, climate change, political transformations, prison abolition, clinical work in hospitals or care in the community, the need for a psychosocial understanding of cartography is perhaps more urgent than ever. This conference will seek to elicit psychosocial approaches to mapping space in order to inform how we might address the spatial concerns that structure contemporary issues of race, geography, psychotherapy, ecology and politics.
This two-day conference will involve a blended (in person and online) programme of panels, experiential interventions and a keynote presentation by Anne Querrien.
https://www.psychosocialcartographies.com/
Email question to Anthony Faramelli at a.faramelli@gold.ac.uk

Psychosocial Studies Online Reading Group: Invisible Trauma Women, Difference and the Criminal Justice System
2022-06-10 16:00 - 18:00 | Edinburgh
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 | Edinburgh
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.

6 months on from COP26 Psycho-Social Reflections: What have we learnt?
2022-05-04 - 2022-05-07 | Edinburgh
The Association for Psychosocial Studies and the Climate Psychology Alliance are jointly hosting a two-day, international online event reflecting through a psychosocial lens upon the lessons learnt 6 months after COP26.
Two parallel events will be taking place – one in the Western Time Zone and one in the Eastern Time Zone. Sessions in both regions will mirror one another, with the events being a mixture of live and pre-recorded sessions.
Keynote Speakers:
Paul Hoggett – From COP15 in Copenhagen to COP26 in Glasgow
Shelot Masithi – Climate Change and Thirs
This event aims to:

Face together the realities on the ground as a result of the failure of COP26 to effectively tackle disastrous levels of global heating.

Increase understanding and enable dialogue between different climate-affected groups and places across the globe.

Identify and support emergent processes that strengthen individual and community resilience in their engagement with climate crisis

Support the development of psycho-socially informed perspectives and practices around climate change and its impact upon physical and mental wellbeing.
Keynote speeches will be delivered by Paul Hoggett and Shelot Masithi. More information about their speeches can befound here.
Across the two-days and two time zones, there will be four panel discussions focusing on different aspects of the climate emergency and how different nations/actors have responded.
For a detailed overview of the event, please visit the event website. The website will be updated on a regular basis, with a section dedicated to useful resources linked to the event.

Psychosocial Studies Online Reading Group: Citizens of the world?
2022-03-25 17:00 - 19:00 | Edinburgh
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 | Edinburgh
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 | Edinburgh
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 | Edinburgh
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 Online Conference: Psychosocial Bodies
2021-07-01 - 2021-07-10 | Edinburgh
Agenda and Zoom Link Booklet
Psychosocial Bodies Conference Booklet
Dropbox folder with conference presentation slides

Recordings of Keynote Talks
Invited Speakers:

Ezimma Chigbo
Professor Derek Hook
Professor Elelwani Ramugondo

APS 2020 Conference Committee: Lindsey Nicholls, Poul Rohleder, Julie Walsh, Deborah Wright, University Of Essex; Anthony Faramelli, IoE UCL; Sarah Shorrock, UCLan

Psychoanalysis Culture & Religion: Times of Conspiracy Theories & Fake News
2021-06-10 15:30 - 17:30 | Edinburgh
Abstract
We live in a time that is characterised by increasing political polarisation, fake news, conspiracy theories and other forms of extremism. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram are often characterised by misogyny, sexism and racism and as lacking in empathy, compassion and love.
This seminar will explore what role psychoanalysis in combination with religion can play in analysing such phenomena, as well as finding possible solutions for them. Recent political developments, such as the Trump presidency, have been credited with an increase in political paranoia and conspiracy theories have spread far and wide on the internet. Contemporary forms of conspiracy thinking, such as QAnon, have led to the establishment of communities which, to a degree, have quasi-religious characteristics.
This seminar asks how our contemporary age can be analysed through the prism of post-Freudian psychoanalysis and religious studies. Do we need a new form of spirituality? What can a psychoanalytic understanding of religion offer in analysing the phenomena described above? What can psychoanalysis and religion learn from each other in the present moment? How do religious understandings of hope, love and compassion figure in times of seeming uncertainty, mistrust and fantasies?

Speakers:
Peter Tyler (St. Mary’s University): Nietzsche and his Influence on Freud and Jung
Mark Murphy (St. Mary’s University): Freud, Lacan and their Approach to the “Mystical”
Anthony Faramelli (Goldsmiths): The Alt-Right and Religion: The Death Drive in American Evangelicalism
Registration
Please note: This session will replace the monthly Reading Group that usually happens on the las Friday of every month.
As always, these reading groups are free to attend and open to all.
All registered attendees will be sent a link to join a Zoom call the day of the event.
Keep Up to Date
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 Conference:
Registration for the APS 2021 Psychosocial Bodies Conference is now open. All information can be found here.

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

Psychosocial Perspectives on Contemporary Fascism webinar
2021-05-13 16:30 - 18:00 | Edinburgh
With Jacob Johanssen, Fiona Murray and Anthony Faramelli. Chaired by Nini Fang and hosted in partnership with University of Edinburgh

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

Bion, the Curiosity Drive and Inquisitive Thinking
2021-04-17 10:00 - 14:00 | Edinburgh
An on-line workshop offered by Institute of Group Analysis (London) and the Association of Psychosocial Studies (APS)

Free of charge.
Saturday 17th April 29th 2021 10:00– 14:00
Presenter: Philip Stokoe, Psychoanalyst & Organisational Consultant.
Chair: Dr Rachel Gibbons, Psychoanalyst, Group Analyst and Consultant Psychiatrist

Philip Stokoe will present a discussion of the work of W.R. Bion in the context of his own recent book The Curiosity Drive: Our Need for Inquisitive Thinking. Philip will discuss the implications of this thinking for how we might understand the healthy organisation.

Philip Stokoe is a Psychoanalyst in private practice working with adults and couples, and an Organisational Consultant, providing consultation to a wide range of organisations.
He worked in the Adult Department of the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust between 1994 and 2012, he was the Clinical Director from 2007. During his career, he has been responsible for the creation of innovative services; designing a treatment system for very dangerous adolescents held in a Youth Treatment Centre; developing a model for understanding organisations called the Healthy Organisation Model from which, he created an innovative intervention for teams and organisations, the short course intervention, which combines teaching and consultation; he designed the Primary Care Psychotherapy Consultation Service (PCPCS), and these ideas have led to a radically different approach to training psychiatric nurses, which has been running at City University. He also designed two Masters courses and was the co-designer of the Couple Psychotherapy Training at the Tavistock Clinic.

The Curiosity Drive: Our Need for Inquisitive Thinking, which forms the base of this presentation, was published by Phoenix Publishing House in November 2020.

The programme will comprise presentations followed by breakouts and plenary discussions

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0lf-ipqjgoHNXSPEeVRULKNsETP4heGs0v

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

APS Reading Group: On Disappointment: promoting ordinary conversation for, an in, extraordinary times
2021-03-26 17:00 - 19:00 | Edinburgh
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 | Edinburgh
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.

Screening and Discussion of ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ
2021-01-29 16:00 - 18:00 | Edinburgh
We are working with the collective Other Ways to Care for a screening of the short film ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ and a discussion with director Sol Prada
ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ (approx. running time, 22 minuets) is part of the investigation of the director Sol Prado, activist in psycho-social disability and ex-irregular migrant, focused on the case of the island of Leros, Greece. This project formulates a study, which mixes theoretical references with videogames techniques, applications to calm the anxiety and distress and videos of ASMR (Autonomous meridian sensory response), a typology of distributed online contents that stimulates emotional dependence when creating audiovisual stimuli. This short film investigates how desires production is a new way of social regulation, which uses images (among other stimuli) to achieve controlled sedation, subject to the mirages of happiness which are related directly to the merchandized consumption of experiences.
These reading groups are free to attend and open to all. All registered attendees will be sent a link to join us on Zoom before the event.
Abstract:
The short documentary ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ [Enclosed] takes us to the Greek island of Leros, a museum of lockdown before the era of lockdown.
Occupied by Italians between the First and Second World Wars, the island became a prison for political detainees during the Greek military dictatorship. In the 1970s, the island was re-functionalized as a psychiatric mental hospital. At present -a symptom of its time- it houses a refugee camp, set as a kind of “Chinese box” in a tourist destination of sun and sand.
The origin of the project can be found in the diary that the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari wrote during his stay on the island in 1989. In it, he denounced the conditions of confinement of psychiatric patients; a reflection of the treatment that European society accords to mad people. The short film is a study based on the director’s personal experience, in which she mixes theoretical references with video games, anxiety calming apps and ASMR videos; artefacts designed for the evasion and dissociation of personal discomfort from the social causes that produce it.
The piece silently and elegantly addresses the architecture of the lockdown, the dead time and the uncertain future. Like a kind of cursed luck, ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ reveals and deciphers through Leros the sensations that would spread to the common sense of the world population during the 2020 pandemic.
Author biography:
Sol Prado is an artist, film director and textile designer. She grew up in Carapachay, Buenos Aires and has resided in Barcelona since 2015, where she arrived to study the MACBA Independent Studies Program and established herself as a designer for the Gratacós textile company. Her artwork addresses madness and psychosocial diversity; faith and religion – which she abandoned after twenty after an evangelical education -; exile and migration. With the gaze of an archivist, her work tends to seek unseen identities, lives that are not counted. Currently, she collaborates with the International Errorista and is part of the board of directors of ActivaMent, a self-managed group of people with psycho-social diversity.
ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ [Enclosed], her debut as a director, premiered as the opening performance of the Loop Festival and has been screened at Olhar do Cinema (Curitiba), ZINEBI (Bilbao) and the Malaga Festival, among others.
Other Ways to Care is a collective that emerged around the will to imagine care alternatives drawn out of activist and collective practices that confront, discuss and move beyond the neoliberal project, or in other words the increasing privatisation and individualisation of mental health care. We draw inspiration from minor psycho-political histories and from politically and socially situated practices of care which operate beyond the medical model and technological models of health and distress.
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 | Edinburgh
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 | Edinburgh
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 | Edinburgh
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 | Edinburgh
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.

AGM and Relaunch of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies
2019-12-18 17:00 - 20:00 | Edinburgh
We are delighted to celebrate the publication of the double re-launch issue of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies. The journal will henceforth be published by Policy Press. This move to a professional academic publishing platform reflects the strength of the journal and growing national and international recognition of the unique place it occupies in the field of psychosocial studies.
More info here

Psychosocial Methodologies: Politicising Research with Narrative and Free Association
2019-07-01 10:00 - 2019-07-03 16:00 | Edinburgh
A course for psychosocial researchers taking place at UCL Institute of Education and supported by the Association for Psychosocial Studies and the University of Birmingham

Course tutors: Claudia Lapping, Ian McGimpsey, Felipe Acuna, Mohamed Elshirazy
Dates: Mon 1st, Tues 2nd and Weds 3rd July, 10 am – 4pm
Location: UCL Room: B06 Drayton House, 30 Gordon Street, WC1H 0QB

Registration:
UCL students – as usual
Non UCL students: Please contact Claudia Lapping: c.lapping@ucl.ac.uk

Overview: Whenever we are teaching or discussing psychosocial approaches to the analysis of data, we come up against a question: how does a psychoanalytically informed approach differ from narrative analysis or discourse analysis? In this course we want to address this question very directly. We will do this through a combination of theoretical and practical exercises to explore the production and analysis of instances of narrative and/or free association. We will discuss:

The meanings of ‘narrative’ and ‘free association’ within a variety of literary, qualitative research and psychoanalytic frameworks, and in popular culture
Contrasting approaches we might use in identifying or producing ‘narratives’ or ‘free associations’ in the process of research
And the way conceptualisations of ‘narrative’ and ‘free association’ might have implications for the analysis of research data

Some key axes of difference include the ways in which different approaches think about language, subjectivity, the unconscious and the possibility of understanding or (mis)recognition between researcher and researched.
Why is this important? We believe these issues are central to the politics of research, and to the relation between politics and trauma. We have a hunch that narrative and free associative approaches pull in slightly different directions in relation to both the production of subjectivity and the formulation of political strategy and tactics in the field of social research.
Background reading:
Bollas, C. 1999, ‘Wording and Telling Sexuality’, pp. 158 – 166, in The Mystery of Things, Routledge
Butler, J. 2005, Giving an Account of Oneself, Fordham University Press
De Certeau, M. 1988, ‘Walking in the City’ pp. 91-110 of The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press
Fink, B. 2007, ‘Working with Dreams, Daydreams and Fantasies’, pp. 101-125 in Fundamentals of psychoanalytic technique: A Lacanian approach for practitioners, W. W. Norton and Company
Freud, S. 1958, The Interpretation of Dreams, London: Penguin Books (See esp.: Chapter V1 ‘The Dream-Work’ pp. 381-2, ‘The Work of Condensation’,pp. 283 – 411, and ‘The Work of Displacement’ pp. 415-9.)
McQuillan, M, 2000 (ed.), The Narrative Reader, Routledge
Zizek, S. 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso

The 'READING’ CONFERENCE 2019
2019-05-16 10:00 - 2019-05-17 17:00 | Birkbeck College, WC1E 7HX
ASSOCIATION OF PSYCHOSOCIAL STUDIES ‘READING’ CONFERENCE 2019.
At Birkbeck, University of London, Thursday 16th and Friday 17th May 2019
The Psychosocial – reflections and developments

The APS Reading Conference 2019 will create an innovative space for developing the field of psychosocial studies. Over two days, you will have the opportunity to participate in discussion of contemporary and foundational psychosocial texts as well as symposia and workshops exploring cutting edge psychosocial ideas and research on contemporary politics and culture. Our aim is to open up spaces for us to listen to each other and for new ideas and projects to develop.

To register for the conference, please follow this link:
APS Reading Conference 2019

Conference Fees:

£50 – waged non APS members
£40 – waged APS members
£20 – unwaged

Conference Format:
The conference has an innovative format, including:

SCHEDULED SPACES FOR GROUP DISCUSSIONS
To share and discuss ideas from the sessions and to make links to your own work and generate ideas for the future.

READING SESSIONS
To read key texts together: these will be made available to all registered participants prior to the conference, so that the session can focus on discussion. There will also be an opportunity to respond in writing to key texts prior to the conference, using an online conference file sharing system.
Sessions will be lead by:

Ann Phoenix reading ‘On the Postcolony: a brief response to critics’ by Achille Mbembe (2005)
Stephen Frosh reading ‘Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others’ by Lewis, G (2009)
Candida Yates reading ‘Something to Do with a Girl Named Marla Singer: Capitalism, Narcissism, and Therapeutic Discourse in David Fincher’s Fight Club’ by Layton, L. (2011)
Kate Kenny reading ‘The explosion of real time and the structural conditions of temporality in a society of control: durations and urgencies of academic research’ by Lapping, C. (2017)
The Activist Research Collective reading ‘Borderline personality disorder, discrimination, and survivors of chronic childhood trauma’ by Andrea Nicki (2016)
Sasha Roseneil reading ‘’Part 1: General Introduction’, Introduction to Group Analytic Psychotherapy: Studies in the Social Interaction of Individuals and Groups’, by Foulkes, SH (1948)
Paul Stenner reading ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’ by Winnicott, D. (1953)
… and more …

CREATIVE PANELS AND WORKSHOPS EXPLORING ART, POLITICS AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

Critical Psychotherapy and Psychosocial Studies: Psychogeotherapy, Risk and Theatre
The Unconscious in the Social World
The Image and the Psyche in Psychosocial Studies
Our Music, Our lives: the emotional and affective experience(s) of popular music
The Group as a Liminal Space: Recognition and Reparation for Political Trauma Survivors
Contributions to Psychosocial Thought and Practice from Latin America
Inconsolable Positions of (neoliberal) Critique in Psychosocial Research
Waiting Times: Psychosocial thoughts on time and care
Feminine Desire and the Postcolonial Condition
The Racialisation of Sexual Violence: some thoughts on discursive repression and projection
Protest
The Body
See it – say it – sort it: Resistance, surveillance and silencing
Same As, Similar to or Different From: negotiating relationships in narrative research

Please register soon to secure a place: APS Reading Conference 2019

Annual General Members' Meeting and Panel: Mental Health and The Emotional Work of the Gig Economy
2018-12-14 15:30 - 18:00 | University of Westminster, Boardroom, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HW, United Kingdom
3.30-5pm: Panel on Mental Health and The Emotional Work of the Gig Economy
Speakers:
Sally-Anne Gross and Dr George Musgrave (University of Westminster): Can Music Make You Sick?

In recent years there has been a growing body of research that has begun to examine the dark side of our relationship to music. The media understandably concentrate on the more sensational aspects of rock and roll; membership of ‘27 Club’, or the recent public declaration of critically acclaimed dubstep producer Benga as suffering from schizophrenia (Hutchinson, 2015). There is then a tension emerging between the notion that artistry is positive both for the economy and for well-being, and a growing awareness that a musical career is a risky business.
‘Can Music Make You Sick?’ surveyed over 2,200 musicians working in the United Kingdom, and interviewed more than 25 musicians and industry professionals, to explore how they are emotionally experiencing working in the music industry in the United Kingdom. This paper presents findings from this project, which seeks to ask challenging questions of music, and specifically musical ambition and aspirations, in the current climate of precarious labour and hyper competition. Is it possible that musical aspirations are potentially making artists sick?

Jack Newsinger (University of Nottingham): Resilience in austerity cultural policy and practice
Resilience is a key theme in austerity Britain, prominent across government policy, popular discourses, business and management thinking and academia. This paper is about the deployment of the concept of resilience in cultural policy and practice. It is based on an extensive engagement with literature, an analysis of cultural policy discourse, and qualitative data drawn from 23 in-depth interviews with freelance cultural practitioners. I adapt Robin James’s (2015) concept of resilience to show how arts leaders and practitioners generate performative narratives that seek to publicly represent their capacity to adapt to austerity, and we explore the different versions of resilience thinking that these narratives mobilise. I argue that resilience in cultural policy and practice draws upon psychological conceptions of resilience which unwittingly produces a discursive surplus which becomes reinvested in institutions, providing subsequent justification for the processes of post-crisis austerity itself.

5-6pm: Annual General Meeting (for APS members)

6pm: Drinks (open to all)

Free registration:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/association-for-psychosocial-studies-agm-event-mental-health-and-the-emotional-work-of-the-gig-tickets-52064771132?utm_term=eventname_text

Psychosocial Methodologies: Politics and Change
2018-06-18 08:00 - 2018-06-20 17:00 | Edinburgh
Psychosocial Methodologies: Politics and Change

UCL Institute of Education in association with the Association for Psychosocial Studies and the University of Birmingham

Dates: over 3 days
Monday June 18th10am – 5pm
Tuesday June 19th 10am- 5pm
Wednesday June 20thand 10 am – 1.15pm

Tutors: Claudia Lapping, Ian McGimpsey, Maria Jose Lagos, Felipe Acuna

Venue:
UCL Institute of Education, Rooms tbc
20 Bedford Way
Bloomsbury, London
WC1H OAL

Registration:
UCL students – as usual.
Non UCL students: Please contact Bob Grist: r.grist@ucl.ac.uk
For any queries about the course, please contact Claudia Lapping: c.lapping@ucl.ac.uk

Psychosocial Methodologies: Politics and Change

This experimental, intensive, two and a half day course will explore different ways of understanding politics and processes of change. Drawing on selected texts from key theorists in the fields of psychoanalysis, social and cultural theory (e.g. Butler, Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Laclau and Mouffe, Zizek) we will engage with a series of concepts each of which functions as a lens for the analysis of politics or processes of change. Each text provides a slightly different framework for identifying both what counts as change, and for the construction of interventions that might help to provoke or direct subjective and/or political change. Methodologically, these frameworks orient us for the empirical examination of discourse, language, affect or desire, time, regulatory technologies, and relations to individual and institutional o/Others. Sessions will explore:

Processes of subjective and political change
What is sayable? Processes of repression or disguise in discourse
The ethics of researching traumatic events
The event and the limit experience
The question of memorialisation
Trauma, Repetition and memory
Time, politics and the Other

In the sessions we will discuss the frameworks set out in the selected texts and, importantly, explore how these might be applied in the analysis of a concrete instance or piece of data related to a specific political moment. We see the course as an invitation for participants to take part in a project exploring this political moment with us. Through engaging in this project, which involves concrete processes of analysis, we will gain insights into both psychosocial methodologies and the event that is the object of the data we are exploring. As such, participants should be prepared to engage in discussions of recent concrete events that involve loss and the precarity of human life, distributive injustices, and symbolic violence. Participants will be asked to prepare through detailed readings of the core texts in advance of the session.

Key Texts – Relevant chapters and extracts will be specified!
Butler, J. 2004. ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’ in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso
Deleuze, G. (1990/1969) Deleuze Logic of Sense. Twenty-First Series of the Event (pp. 169-175) and Twenty-Third Series of the Aion (pp. 186-193). London: Bloomsbury Academic
Deleuze, G. (2004). Difference and repetition. London: Continuum – Extracts
Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through. In Freud, S. (2003). Beyond the pleasure principle. Penguin UK.
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In Freud, S. (2003). Beyond the pleasure principle. Penguin UK. – Extracts
Foucault, M. (2000/1978) Interview with Michel Foucault. In Power. Essential works of Foucault 1954-1984 (pp.239-297). Edited by James D. Faubion.
Gerson, S. (2009). When the third is dead: Memory, mourning, and witnessing in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90(6), 1341-1357.
Lacan, J. (2006). Logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty. In B. Fink (Tr), Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The first complete edition in English (pp. 161–175). London: W. W. Norton and Company
Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. Section of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Verso – Extracts
Wiegman, R. (2000) ‘Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures’, New Literary Histories, 31: 805-825
Zizek, S. 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso – Extracts

Annual Conference: ‘Psychosocial Reflections on a Half Century of Cultural Revolution’
2018-04-05 08:00 - 2018-04-07 17:00 | University of Bournemouth
Venue:

University of Bournemouth

Date:

5th-7th April 2018

Call for papers

Deadline: 22nd January 2018
Send your abstract of 250–300 words to: APS2018@bournemouth.ac.uk

*Due to popular demand, we have added a new open stream for those who wish to submit proposals for papers, panels or artistic presentations on:
“Current and Future Directions in Psychosocial Studies”

‘Psychosocial Reflections on a Half Century of Cultural Revolution’

Join us to reflect on revolutionary relationships and revolutionary politics which challenged authority then and which influence us now.
The cultural forces and the political movements of 1967 and 1968 aimed to change the world, and did so. Recent development of some populist and protest politics could be seen as a continuation of the revolutionary movements in the 1960s. Hedonistic themes that recall the summer of love suffuse contemporary life, and self-reflection and emotional literacy have also become prominent values, linked towards human diversity and the international community.
We invite you to offer psychosocial analyses of the development and legacy today of the ‘revolutions’ in love, sex and politics. This could be via explorations of contemporary issues in politics, culture and artistic expression, or through historical studies. All proposals for papers must indicate how they address both psychological and social dimensions of their topic.

Send your abstract of 250-300 words to APS2018@bournemouth.ac.uk
Deadline: 22nd January 2018.
(Existing submissions, notified by 1st November).

Send your abstract of 250-300 words to: APS2018@bournemouth.ac.uk

Topics could include:

What happened to hate in the Summer of Love?
Lennon vs Lenin: did 1967 and 1968 announce two divergent trends in contemporary culture, and what has happened since to the psychosocial forces they expressed?
What are the meanings of ‘liberation’ today?
New inequalities in post-industrial societies
The resurgence of religion
The Six Day War, intifadas, and intractability
The planetary environment: fantasies and politics
Trajectories of feminism
The changing nature of ageing
‘The personal is political’ and other rhetoric in historical context
Free minds and free markets
The ethics of freedom: for example, where now for freedom of speech?
From the Manson Family to the Islamic State
Pop music’s global conquest and musical hybridity
Changes in artistic practice, creativity and commodification
The transformation of media
The digitisation of everything
Higher education: democratisation and marketisation
The potential and limitations of theories of narcissism as a major tool for understanding late modern/postmodern cultures
New narcissisms in the 21st century
Therapeutic culture and its critics
Where are they now? Biographical narratives of the revolutionaries
States of mind in pivotal moments: San Francisco 67, Paris 68, and since
The sense of entitlement: narcissism or social justice?
The decline of deference and its consequences
The hatred of government and authority
The sexualisation of culture
Controlled decontrolling or repressive desublimation? Elias and Marcuse on cultural liberalisation
Our bodies ourselves: shifting patterns and perceptions of embodiment.

Annual General Meeting
2017-12-15 16:00 - 18:00 | Edinburgh
The Annual General Meeting of the Association for Psychosocial Studies.
All members and interested parties welcome.

Friday 15th December, 4.00->6.00pm

Committee Room 3; 30 Bedford Way (Institute of Education/UCL) London WC1H 0AL.
