2023
Unruly Therapeutic Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room
A Book to Life Event 2: Thurs 30 March 7pm – 9pm GMT on line
A Dialogue – Unruly Conversations in Living Room
Hosted by The Relational School
The panel: Dr Gail Lewis, Dr Eiman Hussein, Omikemi, Dr Dzifa Afonu, Dr Akima Thomas OBE.
Detailed panel bios can be found: here
Purchase the book here with 30% discount code: WN866
Unruly Therapeutic Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room
A Book to Life Event 1: Unruly Therapeutics – a book launch.
Friday 3 March 2023
Hosted by BAATN and The Relational School
The invitation: Panel members will share their responses to Unruly Therapeutic then open up the space for further reflections, curiosities and wanderings related to the unruly therapeutic.
The panel was hosted by Lara Sheehi
- Deborah Malmud : is a Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. and Publishing Director of Norton Professional Books imprint.
- Eugene Ellis – Director of BAATN
- Anthea Benjamin
- Natasha Holmes
- Robert Downes, Chair of The Relational School
- Lynne Layton
- Beth Kita
- Carnella Gordon-Brown
Detailed panel bios can be found: here.
Video recording via this: link.
Purchase the book here with 30% discount code: WN866
Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Space-Making And Living The Change We Want To Be – Boston College Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics
Thursday Feb 23rd 2023.
This presentation/conversation will explore how Black feminisms provide a foundation from which it becomes more possible to speak and write of interconnection – spirited life, soul, natural mystics blowing through the air – and of our engagement with all of this in therapeutic practice. Gail Lewis is the respondent to Foluke’s presentation.
Video recording via this: link.
Further information via this: link.
STAYING WITH THE UNKNOWN with Foluke Taylor, SERAFINE1369, Florence Peake and Nancy May Roberts
Wednesday 8TH March 2023, 17:00-18:30
Words Collect In My Mouth – A Series of Online Talks from Yewande 103. March 8th on line.
2022
Presentation: Mixed. Race. Relationship. And Other Names for What Cannot Be Said.
For the College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists.
Fri 18th Nov 2022
An internet search for ‘mixed-race relationships’ reveals an area of interest and curiosity for many. Researchers, government departments, conspiracy theorists and therapists are out there reporting trends and predictions and offering various targeted training and advice. This presentation explores this interest in how ‘race’ operates in relationships and asks what ‘mixed-race’ as a categorical assignment simultaneously makes visible and obscures? By seeking to know more about what we mean (and understand) when we speak of ‘mixed-race’ relationships, we are invited to think about how these understandings inform and impact therapeutic practice. The presentation will draw on Black feminisms (scholarship and praxis with a long history of navigating with, and in excess of ‘race’) – to reflect on some of the conversations that ‘mixed-race’ relationships point us toward and how they can support a more race-relational understanding of the therapeutic
Online Screening and Q&A: FOUNTAIN by Alexandrina Hemsley, Yewande 103
Wednesday 9th of November 2022: link
We welcome you to this very special online event which includes a chance to experience FOUNTAIN, the new film work by interdisciplinary artist Alexandrina Hemsley (Founder and Creative Director of Yewande 103), in the comfort of your own home.
The screening of FOUNTAIN will be followed by a discussion chaired by Mercy Nabirye, Founder and Director of Kauma Arts, in conversation with Alexandrina Hemsley, and Foluke Taylor, Writer and Psychotherapist.
Questioning “Diversity” in Psychoanalysis for the Race & Culture Committee at the Guild of Psychotherapists
Saturday, July 2, 2022
Lara Sheehi – Liberation, not representation: “Diversity” and stabilizing coloniality
Foluke Taylor – Following Broken Water: Decolonial continuities and therapeutic emergent-cy
This is the third in a series of seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists. The series is intended to open up conversations about psychoanalysis by initiating Transatlantic Dialogues between academic research and clinical practice.
In this instance, both speakers are clinicians, researchers, teachers and activists, and their talks address the seemingly intractable problem of ‘diversity’ in psychoanalysis – within the profession, the theory and the therapeutic relationship.
Video recording via this: link.
Other-Wise: Re-imagining the Space and Context for a Therapeutic Curriculum
21 March 2022 for The Relational School
Drawing from their own particular carrier bags of theory and practice, (see Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Literature) Foluke and Robert will share some of what they have gathered to inform unravellings and reckonings from within the enclosure(s) of race. Working with a definition of race as ‘technology’* they introduce various other-wise technologies of thought and practice aimed at extending the reach, register, resonance, disruption and inclusivity of the therapeutic project. Drawing from their chapter: Re-imagining the Space and Context for a Therapeutic Curriculum – A Sketch.
Follow the link for the chapter and more of the Other Wise: link.
Black Feminisms in the Consulting Room
This is a conversation between psychotherapists Foluke Taylor and Gail Lewis, both of whom try to live their lives through the ethical guidance of Black feminism. Taking Black feminisms, in the plural, to combine descriptions and theorisations of the racist, mysogynist, heteronormative structures of power that condition the lived realities of black and other people racialized as minority; but to also offer directions in living in, through and beyond the strictures of these structures of power. In this, and rooted in a privileging of the emotional as a site of knowing, Black feminisms are seen as offering poetic languages and structures from which alternative forms of ‘personhood’ can be generated and lived.
From this starting point, and with reference to a small number of quotations from what could be a vast array of authors (e.g. essayists, poets, musicians, psychotherapists), Foluke and Gail converse with each other about why and how Black feminisms have much to offer the ‘consulting room’ and why it should be taken up as gift full of resources by psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic communities of practice.
This was part of a Confer series called Women on the Couch.
Video recording via this: TBC.
2021
Sensing the Planet
31 October-1 November 2021
These Shoots Need to Grow: An invocation by Asadua. Turning Sour into Sweetness. Featuring Barby Asante, Hannah Catherine Jones, Femi Oriogun Williams, Foluke Taylor and Seah Wraye
This was a gathering on climate justice and the intersections of race, art and ecology. Timed to take place just before the intergovernmental climate conference COP26, Sensing the Planet highlighted issues of race and environmental harm as well as the role played by the UK, most prominently the south-west of England, in histories of slavery, empire and climate breakdown. It also championed the role of interdisciplinary artists in imagining new futures built on principles of sustainability and justice.
Video recording via this: link.
2020
13 Oct 2020
When Being Yourself is Revolutionary: A dialogue between Precious Agbabiaka & Foluke Taylor
In this, our 8th edition of Sitting With Discomfort, Precious Agbabiaka & Foluke Taylor discuss Black female experience. Each reflects on how we as Black women are seen by and treated in society. How do we break beyond the moulds that are created to contain us in order to explore and envisage a truer sense of ourselves?
Follow the link for the video: link.
Race, Imperialism and the Contradictory Clinic
24th September 2020
This discussion focuses on the relationship between race, imperialism and psychotherapy, exploring both the oppressive legacy of the clinic and how its contradictions can lead to a transformative and liberatory practice.
The panel was facilitated by Dr. Lara Sheehi, and will include the following contributions:
1. Therapeutic Crossings: Moving Clinical Space : Foluke Taylor
2. The intersection of migration and mental health : Sohail Jannesari
3. The race-d Poor as essential workers in urban America: Some observations from living in the Pandemic : Dr. Annie Lee Jones
Click on the link for the video: link.
Further information about the panel: link.
Welcome 