"This work is all of ours".
This page serves as a resource and a work site for MIP participants for January 30th 2027.
"This work is all of ours".
Introduction:
We are:
Foluke Taylor:
Robert Downes:
The Invitation:
We have been invited to spend some time with you brining our work into dialogue with you and your practice and studies.
We have been studying, collaborating and creating together and separately for 27 years - where friendship is a site of study and becoming.
We invite you to spend some time with the work we have collaborated on, the work we have done individually as well as with others. Links are typed in bold and underlined.
We met in 1999 and began working together in a non-profit project that supported the development of services for young people.
We devised a body of training for counsellors and psychotherapists that resulted in a publication:
The training we provided and the publication were our early adventures into extending and disrupting the therapeutic curriculum to be otherwise, "another arrangement of the possible" in the words of Saidaya Hartman.
We considered:
- The afterlives of enslavement, colonial and settler colonial projects
- This otherwise, 'another arrangement of the possible' has been a thread throughout our work.
Primarily because we both came to the therapeutic project aware of its limitations:
Hyper individualism in the theories, models, treatments.
Neoliberal subjectivities - patients, therapeutic practitioners and neoliberal models of treatment
Questions of who gets to be human
Western one size fits all treatment and theorising
White supremacy
Cis white gendered heteronormativities
We are currently interested in:
What happens when we think of and consider psychoanalysis/therapeutics as cultural work? Via the Unruly......
Over the years we have turned to the company of many to extend where we know from:
Frantz Fanon - sociogeny.
Joy James - captured maternal.
Lynne Layton - Neoliberal subject.
Christina Sharpe - The Wake.
Lara & Stephen Sheehi - Psychoanalytic Innocence
Avgi Saketopoulou - Exigent Sadism
In 2023 Norton Published Foluke's book:
Unruly Therapeutic - Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room
More about the book here.
In a chapter from......., Foluke and Robert practice:
Re-imagining the Space and Context for a Therapeutic Curriculum – A Sketch
Introduction:
We ‘breathe’ with Claudia Rankine into the racial imaginary, the space that she invited artists into to respond to the ways lives are influenced by our understanding and misunderstanding of race. Rankine speaks of how, as we are born into race, racism and white supremacy, our imaginations are not entirely our own - so we join in the imagining as therapeutic practitioners and thinkers. In this chapter, we bring our haunted and compromised imaginations to the task of re-imagining a therapeutic training — one that disrupts the centrality of whiteness, and works to decolonise a curriculum using learning and teaching practices that recognise multiple voices, learning styles, needs and therapeutic traditions. ‘Western’ psychology is among the characters in this reimagined story, but is shaken loose from the position of lone protagonist or hero. This re-imagining insists on the presence of many stories. Neither the revisioning, nor the replacement of the accepted ‘heroes’ of psychotherapeutic thought was sufficient and both possibilities felt suffocating to this project. In the company of speculative fiction as a radical practice (texts that engage the reader to imagine and speculate the possibilities of understandings and makings of the world beyond the white supremacist patriarchal neo-liberal order) and with a mind to Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction, ( Le Guin speaks to the first tool being a container) we were able to breathe and play — to gather rather than classify, stratify, or order, a narrative. We have not imposed temporal structures and limits. This is neither a beginning nor an ending, but rather a sample telling of a training that might disrupt the usual state of affairs; which understands the power of 'imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ (bell hooks) and remains open to whatever possibilities of blackening and queering therapeutic practice and thought, that are revealed. This is not a hero-shaped narrative — starting here and going straight to there — but a carrier bag filled with stories; stories of being, being undone and unravelling from structures that have harmed us all.
Foluke Taylor and Robert Downes as Cece and Niall tell a story of an otherwise training somewhere in the future. This is the introduction to the chapter that has been published in a collection published by PCCS books. ☞ Black Identities + White Therapies: Race, Respect + Diversity. Ed. Divine Charura & Colin Lago. (The chapter can be found here: ☞ A Sketch).
To include:
Substack articles
Complicating the white therapist