Beyond Knowing: Exploring The Overweight Brain, A Six-Week Reading and Dialogue Group

Beyond Knowing: Exploring The Overweight Brain
A six-week reading and dialogue group
led by Melissa Meyer and Desire Wandan

Join Melissa Meyer and Desire Wandan this fall for a six-week exploration of Lois Holzman’s The Overweight Brain and its provocative challenge to one of our most deeply held assumptions: that knowing is the key to progress, learning, making decisions, taking action, and creating change.

Through selected chapters, dialogue, and connections to everyday life, participants will explore Holzman’s challenge to the belief that knowing is required in order to grow—and consider how our commitment to being knowers can limit creativity, risk-taking, development, and our capacity to build something genuinely new.

Melissa and Desire will focus on chapters that introduce the concept of “non-knowing growing,” as well as those that explore some of the key influences and discoveries that have shaped social therapeutics, including developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s work on human development and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s revolutionary approach to language and meaning.

Together, the group will read, question, reflect, and experiment with what it might mean to loosen our attachment to knowing—and discover new ways of growing, relating, and creating the world.

This group is for anyone curious about The Overweight Brain, the ideas that inspired it, and the possibilities that emerge when we explore those ideas together. No prior familiarity with the book or social therapeutics is needed.

Zoom Meeting Dates:

Tuesdays, September 8th, 15th, 22nd, 29th and October 6th and 13th (at 3:30PM Eastern US Time - UTC-5).

Leader Biographies

Melissa Meyer is the Institute’s associate director and a social therapeutic coach. She is a lead organizer of Performing the World, a virtual gathering that explores performance, play and improvisation as methods to help communities grow and create positive social change. She is currently a social therapeutic coach in three weekly Developing Across Borders groups -- spaces where people perform as world citizens, invent new ways of being and seeing, and produce new possibilities for each other and their communities.

Desire Wandan is the Media and Tech Producer at the East Side Institute, where he serves as the technical producer (Z-Jay), volunteer coordinator, multimedia producer, and conference host and moderator for the Institute's Performing the World conference. He produces short films, documentaries, and digital media. He hosts the All Power to the Developing podcast, featuring conversations with educators, activists, artists, and organizers exploring human development, culture, and social change.

Des was first introduced to social therapeutics as a student at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn through Barbara Silverman's "Let's Talk About It" youth performance group. That early experience continues to shape his work, bringing together media production, performance, education, and community building.

Outside of the Institute, Des is a dancer, documentarian, and teaching artist whose work bridges Hip-Hop culture, performance, and storytelling. He appeared on Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and contributed videography to the documentary series You Can't Erase Us by Reel Thumb Productions. A lifelong student of Hip-Hop culture, Des works throughout New York using performance, storytelling, and digital media to document history, preserve culture, and create spaces for learning and development.