Creative Disruption Psychosocial Scholarship as Praxis

Thinking and doing through a diverse set of theories, methodologies and writing registers, this edited collection explores the potential of creative disruption as psychosocial praxis. Moments of disruption – planned and unplanned – are everywhere in the fragile terrain of society, from micro-level gestures of resistance and refusal at the local scale to globally disruptive phenomena such as climate and ecological breakdown and pandemics. The authors of this collection ask instead: how might the disruption we encounter open up junctures for creative and ethical psychosocial engagement?

This collection introduces new and emerging voices in psychosocial scholarship from within and beyond academia and the clinic, which brings unique perspectives that have been historically discarded, marginalised or neglected within mainstream academic knowledge production. The contributors examine disruption as a catalyst for discomfort and discontent, drawing from black feminism, whiteness studies, theories of racialisation, queer theory, disability studies, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, and more. The authors explore questions of power, knowledge, memory, embodiment and the potential of multidisciplinary approaches in nurturing disruption.   

1. Introduction.- 2. Dancing the Dance of Disruption.- 3. Echoes of the Other Language: Responding from Another Place.- 4. Being Black Freud: A Creative Heuristic Exploration of The Psychological Impact of Black Activism.- 5. Doing Love in Research.- 6. Playing with Brexit.- 7. On Creative Destruction: Getting to Understand an Object Through Play.- 8. Long Covid and the Politics of Disablement.- 9. Involuntary Attention as Creative Disruption: Meeting the Urban Wild with Neurodivergent Strategies.- 10. The Clinician as Killjoy (Without Killing Joy).- 11. Creative Disruptions With/In Psychoanalysis.- 12. The Heart of Rhythm: Congolese Music as Creative Disruption.- 13. Nonprofits, Black, and White Women’s Power Dynamics Through an Antebellum Lens: A Critical Fabulation Exploration.- 14. Waking Up from Whiteness.- 15. Collaborative Fragmentation: Matrixial Experiments in Writing-as-Encounter.- 16. Afterword: Epistemic Disruption, the Creative and Liberation.

Guilaine Kinouani is the director and founder of Race Reflections. She is a psychologist and group analyst working across equality and justice. She has taught critical psychology and Black studies. She is the author of Living While Black (2021) and White Minds (2023). Her PhD at Birkbeck examines whiteness in the clinic.

Hannah Reeves is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck and a Senior Research Assistant with the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Her work explores human-nonhuman mingling in urban landscapes ethnographically. She has previously been a visiting scholar with the Centre for Environmental Humanities, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Clau Di Gianfrancesco is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck exploring how participatory theatrical practices such as Theatre of the Oppressed can drive social change, particularly concerning gender and sexuality.