Cracks and Rhizomes—Can We Save Ourselves from Ourselves?

Bayo Akomolafe in Conversation with Social Therapeutic Practitioners

Moderated by Lois Holzman

Any global calls to save our planet must be accompanied by equally passionate and creative ways to save ourselves from ourselves. The need grows for practices that do not fix or resolve, but rather, practices that unground us and dispel the myth that we must know where to go and how to get there. For we cannot know. What we can do is meander in the muck, shed our cognitively-biased skin, unload our obsessively bloated brain.

This uncommon conversation moderated by the Institute’s Lois Holzman features public philosopher Bayo Akomolafe and grassroots social therapeutic practitioners exploring the faces and facets of adaptation, coercion, individualism, and psychotherapies of interiorized pathologies, while offering up the practice of a therapeutics that is world-historic community healing.

“In the shadow of psychology’s crumbling alliances” (as Bayo says), we query social therapeutics -- a 50-year (rhizomic) practice of bringing into being-and-becoming an antidote to the normalizing goal and oppressive impact of scientific psychology and its underlying dualistic, medical model understandings of emotion, suffering, healing, and individual, communal and species transformation.

We seek to deepen an understanding of healing as a collective performance of pointless relational meandering. Can we imagine, play and create further possibilities for emancipatory practice?

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Discussant Bios

Báyò Akómoláfé is a Nigerian-born poet, philosopher, psychologist and public intellectual, rooted in Yoruba traditions. He was recently appointed the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Macalester College, is a Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, a Member of the Club of Rome, an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, the inaugural W.E.B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence at the Schumacher Centre for a New Economics, and the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at the Aspen Institute. Báyò is founder of The Emergence Network and curator of “We Will Dance with Mountains,” an exploration of “post-activism.” His pedagogical mantras, (among them) "the times are urgent, let us slow down, “and “the revolution will not be psychologized,” invite responses that break from colonial logics of crisis response. He advocates for exploring "edges of the intelligible,” where new possibilities for social justice and healing can emerge An outspoken critic of scientific psychology, Bayo argues that psychology’s reframing of “trauma” as individualistic and intra-psychic “is already the political project of dissociation from our co-emergence with ecology.” He points to how "psychology polices the cracks" by placing anything that “breaks conventional notions of sanity into categories that contain rather than transform.” A prolific essayist, he is the author of several books -- These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home; We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak; and the forthcoming An Ocean of Milk: A Parable of Love in Three Numbers.

Lois Holzman is a developmental psychologist and co-founder of the East Side Institute, an independent research and education center for social therapeutics and performance activism. She is the chief organizer of its International Class in social therapeutics that has graduated 183 alumni since 2004. She is founder of the Performing the World conference, nurturing practices of performance activism since 2001. She serves as Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Vygotskian Practice at University of North Carolina at Greensboro and received the American Educational Research Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award from its Cultural Historical Research division. Over 50 years, Lois has helped build grassroots organizations whose activity challenges the epistemological and political biases of the social sciences by advancing a "non-knowing growing," playful/performatory alternative. A postmodern “collaborator” of the early-20C Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, her Lev Vygotsky Revolutionary Scientist, and Vygotsky at Work and Play, offer examples of Vygotskian-inspired projects -- in the therapy clinic, in classrooms, medicine and organizational development. The author of 10 books that draw on discoveries from the rhizomic “development community” and independent organizing efforts in the US and globally, they include: Unscientific Psychology: A Cultural-Performatory Approach to Understanding Human Life; The End of Knowing; Schools for Growth; and The Overweight Brain: How Our Obsession with Knowing Keeps Us from Getting Smart Enough to Make a Better World. They introduce social therapeutics as a Wittgenstein/Vygotskian remix – a methodology that colleagues have adopted and evolved. Holzman’s latest book is A Developmentalist's Guide to Better Mental Health: Navigating Everyday Life Dilemmas.

Featured Social Therapeutic Practitioners:

We introduce Bayo to social therapeutic practitioners -- conceptual revolutionaries — who, in their day-to-day lives, explore play, performance and group creativity and the practice of a non-oppressive therapy. They come from different nations, occupations and levels of formal education, and advance forms of radical practical philosophy in a host of endeavors. They share a method that identifies the unit of transformation as the group—the community, i.e., as a “tool-and-result” process through which building the environment where people can get help with their emotional pain, is itself the group’s cure. The pointless, generative, collective creative activity of community healing produces fugitively unclassifiable (unknowable) emotionality – “our subjectivity.”

Jennifer Bullock – founder and director of the Philadelphia Social Therapy Group – leads a group and family social therapy practice. With the Global Play Brigade, she facilitates emotional development workshops, including WhatsApp teen therapy groups. Jenn is a health and wellness enthusiast – tends an organic garden, teaches community yoga, and cares for a coterie of four-legged loved ones.

Rita Ezenwa-Okoro is founder of the Street Project Foundation in Nigeria and Executive Director of the Global Play Brigade. As lead visionary of Street Project Foundation, Rita brings arts/activism programming to “at-risk” young people. Rita’s award-winning Street Project initiatives, such as Creative Youth Boot Camp and its digital-media and filmmaking projects, propel a flowering of boisterous activism through the arts.

Thecla Farrell – originally from Trinidad – produced and performed in community/political theatre, became a social therapeutic coach with Life Performance Coaching Center, and currently leads a variety of emotional developmental groups, including multi-family groups. She co-leads a WhatsApp emotional support group for girls living outside Kampala, Uganda, as part of the Let The Girl Be! initiative organized by Institute Associate, David Kawanuka.

Jessie Fields, MD – an internist with a medical practice in Harlem -- is a poet, community organizer and developer of the Institute’s initiative Creating Our Mental Health. She brings emotional wellness activities to soup kitchens, immigration service centers, churches and sanctuaries. Playing and performing with poetry, jazz and playful meaning making, she supports participants to create environments that are generative of “our” (i.e., “we-built-this-for-us”) mental health. This group activity fosters connection, love and camaraderie and is a practical challenge and push back to the stigma of “mental illness.”

Steven Licardi, LMSW – a peripatetic spokesperson for neurodiversity–is an accomplished spoken-word poet and science fiction writer, performance activist and social therapist. Throughout, he champions those pathologized and oppressed by institutionalized psychiatry and psychology and uses storytelling to assist communities in “dismantling historical narratives of mental health and madness.”

Hugh Polk, MD is a “barefoot community psychiatrist” trained in the waning days of community psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and later with Institute co-founder Fred Newman. Hugh helped build the Bronx Center for Social Therapy serving poor communities in the South Bronx, and since has practiced in hospital and university settings and developed a social therapeutic group practice. He has regularly joined colleagues with their clipboards at street fairs and housing projects to create conversation on psychiatric diagnoses and mental distress. Hugh blogs at MadinAmerica.com.

Ishita Sanyal is founder and director of Kolkata-based, Turning Point, a community mental health initiative she built from the ground-up after her brother was diagnosed with serious mental illness and had nowhere to turn. Turning Point is now a beacon across India, modeling a community-building, developmental approach. Using performance and play and social therapeutic group building, the center helps members become more physically, socially and economically independent. Ishita is the recent recipient of the Shane J. Lopez Award for Professional Contributions in Positive Psychology by the American Psychological Association.