Psychosocial News - October 2016
Round-up of news, events and publications in October 2016
News
Professor Stephen Frosh visited the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in September as a Visiting Professor there, and to give a public lecture on ‘Psychoanalysis and Social Violence’. His visit coincided with the closure of the university due to student demonstrations over fee increases (but he still managed to give his lectures).
Dr Margarita Palacios has been invited to open the academic year at the Latin American Institute of the Free University of Berlin, Germany. She will be giving a talk about her current research, “The Aesthetics of Memory: Ruins, Visibility and Witnessing” on the 3rd of November, 2016 to all incoming students and faculty of the Institute.
Margarita has also been nominated External Examiner for the PhD dissertation of doctoral student in the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna in her role as expert in themes of Aesthetics of Memory and Latin America. The viva takes place the 8th of November, 2016.
Events:
Dr Margarita Palacios has been invited to present a paper at the Conference for Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics at the University of Leeds on Thursday the 21st of October. The title of her presentation is “Affects and the Politics of Memorialization”.
Dr Gail Lewis will be talking about how it might be possible to be black and a woman in these post-Brexit, post-Obama times at the Association of Psychosocial Studies annual event, 'Questions of Presence', on 2 December.
The Bloomsbury Humanitarian Debates, hosted by the Department of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London, in collaboration with London School of Hygiene and SOAS, kicks off this term with the Department of Psychosocial Studies' Dr Bruna Seu and Glen Tarman, former International Advocacy Director at Action against Hunger, on “Blocks in public responsiveness to humanitarian crises and development issues – challenges for NGOs” on October 27th.
Dr Jan Etienne (GEDS/Psychosocial) is speaking in Tottenham on 1 November at a Black History Month special, 'Learning in Womanist Ways', as part of the Birkbeck's Big Ideas series.
Publications
Ruth Sheldon’s monograph Tragic encounters and ordinary ethics: Palestine-Israel in British universities, is now out with Manchester University Press.
Ruth also has a new article in The Sociological Review: “Formative sociology and ethico-political imaginaries: opening up transnational responses to Palestine–Israel”.
We are thrilled to announce the imminent publication of Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions, due out in late October 2016. The book is co-edited by Sandeep Bakshi (University of Le Havre), Suhraiya Jivraj (University of Kent), and Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck) and will be published by Counterpress, Oxford. The book is the culmination of almost ten years of transnational collaboration and joint thinking and of an AHRC Networking project.
Dr Bruna Seu has a new article out, “‘The deserving’: Moral reasoning and ideological dilemmas in public responses to humanitarian communications”, in The British Journal of Social Psychology.
Blogs
There were three blog posts by Psychosocial researchers over the summer: Viviane Green on training mental health professionals in China, Bruna Seu on guilt, pity and shame in humanitarian and human rights communications, and Silvia Posocco on remembering genocide in Guatemala.
Some students and researchers in the Department have started a discussion group and blog on understanding post-Brexit Britain psychosocially: Psychosocial Thinking.