Psychosocial Studies Research Seminar: Working-through Collective Wounds in the Brazilian Uprising
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 28 Russell Square
No booking required
Department of Psychosocial Studies Research Seminar: Working- through Collective Wounds in the Brazilian Uprising
Dr Raluca Soreanu
My talk looks at moments of collective creativity in the Brazilian uprising, when being together in the square counts as public mourning or as working-through collective wounds. Starting with June 2013, Brazil has known an unprecedented wave of street manifestations, which have surprised social and political thinkers both by their amplitude and by their capacity to create collective symbols. While a lot can be said about the different forms of creativity of this movement, I focus on the moments that function as an opening for working-through traumatic residues. Here, the reflection on the collective traumas of the times of the Brazilian military dictatorship is crucial for understanding the mobilisation that started in 2013. I ask questions about the unmourned deaths of the military dictatorship, as well as the unmourned deaths of the democracy that followed. Ultimately, I am interested in how collectives search for meaning. I look at how collective symbols emerge, and at how symbols function in cycles of morbid repetition, or in cycles of working-though and healing of collective traumas.
I propose a dialogue with SÃndor Ferenczi for articulating my propositions on symbolisation, trauma, and mourning. Ferenczi was a social and political thinker, as much as he was a psychoanalyst. His ideas can be 'collectivised' and allow us to speak of the traumas of groups, collectives, and societies. I transpose Ferenczi's conception of the 'confusion of tongues' to the collective domain as 'registers of recognition'. What traumatises and re-traumatises the collective is the investment in maintaining confusions across different registers of recognition.
While working with psychosocial vignettes collected in the streets and squares of Brazil, where tear gas was mixed with the smoke of the fire barricades of the protesters, I constantly return to a reflection on the politics of recognition/ misrecognition that passes through the acts of protest I analyse. What I hope to evoke in these vignettes is a symbolising crowd.
Raluca Soreanu is Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, with a project on Synchronic Entanglements and New Social Imaginaries, looking at activism in Brazil and the United Kingdom, and at the creativities of collective action.
All welcome.