This paper explores the psychosocial dimensions of the permanent polycrisis, focusing on how transgenerational embodied shame in the Irish Catholic diaspora destabilises mother and daughter relationships. This practice-based research examines the impact of embodied shame within the Irish Catholic diaspora in London. In investigates how transgenerational shame shapes the mother-daughter relationship through psychoanalysis, philosophy, film, performance, and embodied practice to reimagine the maternal relation as transformative.

Philosophically grounded in Luce Irigaray’s concept of “shared air,” which views breath as a medium of relational exchange. The research contextualises these dynamics within colonial histories and state control over female bodies. By addressing silences, bodily traces, and inherited trauma, it highlights the urgency of engaging with “histories that hurt” (Ahmed) in the present.

Central to this project is its durational and participatory nature, demonstrated through embodied workshops that foster communal reflection and nonjudgemental engagement with shame. Participants are invited to connect with their own breath and relational rhythms, creating a shared space to physically, emotionally, and intellectually confront the legacy of maternal shame and its lingering affects. Interweaving archival research from Ireland and London with embodied methodologies, this practice bridges historical narratives with embodied, creative responses to trauma, shame and crisis.

Through the durational nature of the practice, the project mirrors the conference’s ethos, fostering collective encounters and sustained reflection as vital tools for psychosocial repair. The session will include an embodied circular reading, offering participants a direct experience of the methodologies underpinning the research, while inviting collective reflection on shame, crisis, resilience, and relational transformation.

This research contributes to psychosocial studies by reframing the destabilization of modernity through embodied and relational practices. It envisions maternal relations as sites of co-becoming, offering a reparative response to the polycrisis through collective engagement with shared histories and transformative futures.

Interpersonal violence may represent a point of acute crisis for the perpetrator, victim, and their wider social milieu in terms of family, community, and society. The emergence of homicidal, or other significant, violence come into being through a condensation of conscious and unconscious dynamic factors bringing to light the systemic pressures of objective violence into a subjective act. A myriad of interpersonal dynamic factors may become active including, but not limited to, an exposure to the existential fear of death, dialectic tension between the role of victim and perpetrator, and paradoxical responses to attachment and care experience.

Recent high-profile cases, in the UK criminal courts, have demonstrated the way that various agencies, within the criminal justice system, have a duty, in the face of individual and group level violence, to maintain a capacity for thought and open reflection – crucially in an impartial and independent manner. This can be challenging, on a background of increasing levels of objective violence and restricted resources, as well as in the face of violence that can be destructive to the process of thought, even for onlookers beyond the victim and perpetrator. Maintenance of reflective space, in the face of this frightening onslaught, is essential, however.

In this paper, through the use of an illustrative case vignette drawn from my role as an expert psychiatric witness, I will try to demonstrate the importance of this process – in the face of attacks on thinking – and to offer a reflection in terms of the role and challenges faced by various agents in the criminal justice system in discharging this duty. Ultimately, I suggest that, while challenging, we have a duty to face the trauma of interpersonal violence in a reflective manner to promote healing for the victim, their communities, the perpetrator, and society more broadly.

As an Indian, my sense of self is continually challenged by colonial and racial projections that reduce me to fixed understandings of being ‘brown’ or ‘Indian.’ The positioning of the racialised ‘other’ as a passive recipient of projections reinforces the colonial paradigm of objectification, where the object is bereft of subjectivity. By splitting and projecting parts of oneself onto the object, the subject, in turn, grapples with a reduced sense of self. This dynamic sustains structures of dominance and subjugation, as observed in the rise of far-right violence across the United Kingdom. In the face of such dehumanising objectification, how does one experience one’s subjectivity?

Psychotherapeutic theories that assume a prior separation between the self and the other risk reproducing this colonial paradigm. Decolonial analyses of psychoanalytic theory reveal the conflation of childhood with dependency (and primitiveness), normalisation of domination and violence as primary relational modes, and universalisation of the human mind as existing prior to socio-cultural experience (Nandy 1983; Swartz 2023; Tummala-Narra 2022). This foregrounds the broader crisis of relationality inherent in modernity/coloniality that fragments the self, implicit in the very theories we draw upon for healing.

In this presentation, I examine my experiences in the therapeutic encounter as a psychotherapist and the fractures in relationality I have experienced as I draw on psychoanalytic theoretical concepts. I draw upon my cultural encounters with music, oral histories, and lived experiences to inform my analysis of the paradox of psychotherapy as both a response to and a symptom of social rupture, recognising its embeddedness in modernity/coloniality. In line with the conference theme, this work highlights the mutual entanglement of the psyche and the world, linking everyday objectification, relational alienation, and systemic violence, thereby addressing crisis as systemic, relational, and multi-layered.

This paper will examine the migration of the antisemitic hashtag, #JewGoal, from the FIFA video game series to online discussions of real-world football. By analysing 1,364 public tweets of the ‘Jew goal’ hashtag on the social media platform ‘X’ (formerly Twitter), it details how this seemingly innocuous hashtag, originating in the FIFA video game community, has become a vehicle for antisemitic rhetoric, drawing upon historical stereotypes and cultural symbols. Focusing on the hashtag’s deployment across diverse contexts—including commentary on individual players, team performances, and football rivalries—while also highlighting the normalization of antisemitic language within online communities, the paper draws from Lacanian theory in order to investigate the enjoyment and motivations underpinning the perpetuation of online antisemitism. Utilizing Lacan’s concepts of jouissance and llanguage, it is argued that the hashtag’s prevalence stems from an inherent enjoyment in its application across various antisemitic tropes, regardless of contextual relevance. This enjoyment, linked to the formation of in-group identity and online othering within gaming and football fan cultures, underscores the hashtag’s function as a marker of belonging, fostering a sense of community through shared knowledge of the term’s offensive origins. Challenging traditional approaches to understanding and addressing online hate speech, and moving beyond content-based analyses to emphasize the affective and unconscious dimensions of online communication, the paper reveals how the enjoyment underpinning the hashtag’s adoption can advocate for a deeper consideration of the libidinal investments driving the perpetuation of antisemitism in digital spaces. In the context of rising political polarization and the growing influence of far-Right ideologies, the paper situates the hashtag within a broader psychosocial landscape marked by crisis, highlighting its role in exacerbating social divisions and perpetuating digital violence.