Scanlon and Adlam (2022) build upon the story of the meeting of Diogenes and Alexander in the ancient Corinthian marketplace to conceptualise the agora as a protected psychosocial space in which there can be encounters and conversations and learning from experience between in-groups and out-groups and the operation of force and power can be interrogated.

Nation states of the contemporary Global North tend to be agoraphobic: public protests are discouraged and increasingly criminalised; spaces that threaten to operate as agoras are quickly shut down. Other spaces, which seem agora-like but in which there is no meaningful encounter or truth-telling, we might think of as 'holographic agoras'.

Members of this roundtable work in various roles in a forensic mental health Medium Secure Unit (MSU) in South London. This is a setting in which the operation of power might at face value be supposed to be overt and manifest. Patients who often have committed very serious acts of violence are detained here behind high walls and locked doors - often for many years. However, there are power dynamics that are harder to speak to (if not necessarily any more subtle).

We will speak to our experiences of developing and seeking to implement two systemic interventions to create agora-like spaces within the MSU in which the dynamics between in-groups and out-groups could be explored: a weekly 'BLM Community Circle' facilitated space for Black patients to explore their shared heritage and a monthly 'Unit-Wide' Reflective Practice Group for staff.

We invite the audience to think with us about the difficulties of creating and sustaining such spaces and how our experience may connect to other agoras - existing, closed down, or yet to be created.

Conference themes:

Psychosocial approaches to learning and teaching

The de-humanization and pathologization of distress

Institutional mindlessness

Trauma and repetition