Using practice-based research this paper explores the potential for a schizoid methodology. Starting from the assumption that philosophy and other theoretical work within the psychosocial sphere constitute practices, this research uses artistic practice as a technique to avoid the tendency towards universalism common in post-Enlightenment theoretical discourses. Through collage work, this paper asks the question: what would a schizoid methodology look like? This comes with an array of problems and questions due to the divergences in conceptualisations of schizoid states through the history of psychoanalysis. However, whilst an exacting schizoid methodology may not be achievable due to these differences, this explorative research offers new ideas for practice that can be returned to theoretical modes.

Psychic pain is the experience of overwhelming negative affect, coupled with the profound sense of this emotional state being both unbearable and seemingly unsolvable, and it has been observed as an accurate predictor of suicidal attempts (Lewis, 2020). To measure it appropiately and therefore advance suicide-prevention efforts in historically under-represented populations, it is essential to validate culturally-appropriate measuring tools. In Mexican culture, topics related to psychological struggles are usually avoided, leading to lack of awareness, understanding and support for those experimenting such experiences. The present proyect represents the efforts to validate the Psychic Pain Scale (PPS) for its application in Mexican adults (aged between 18 and 30 years), and reflections on the process. The PPS was originally developed in English by Lewis, Good, Tillman and Hopwood (2020), and it’s been discovered to be a valuable measure of subjective distress associated with outcomes related to suicide and several risk factors.

The investigators of this study individually translated each item of the PPS into Spanish, prior to a consensus discussion led by an expert advisor in which various versions were discussed until reaching semantic and grammatical consensus. An independent bilingual psychologist carried out the back-translation into English of the Spanish version to assess consistency between translations. As a pilotage, a qualitative analysis was conducted using the Spanish version and administered through an online convenience-sampling to 30 participants. This pilotage involved clarifying questions prompting participants to use paraphrasing and specification to further understand their interpretations of the items and verify that they maintain their structure in the target language version. With the data obtained, an analysis using grounded theory was conducted creating categories to find patterns, for example "hopelessness", "overwhelm", as well as the translation of internal experiences and mental contents like feelings into thoughts and concrete expriences.

Psycho-social studies, otherwise known as Socioanalytic studies in countries like Australia, is home to social dreaming work. Social dreaming is a practice involving a group gathering for the sharing of dreams to explore, understand and uncover the unconscious of a society or community. This idea creates an impression that the potential for learning is extended in depth and breadth. Still, the question can be asked “Is the learning only in my imagination?”. The dreaming space involves the aspect of reverie where thoughts flow without any ordering, prompting or direction and through a democratic space which is contrary to the traditional instruction of learning that has preconceived outcomes. Some traditional spaces question whether social dreaming practice counts as science. In this study, student leaders came together to co-construct a learning space about their student leadership by participating in social dreaming. This participation showed student-centred and social justice-orientated leadership learning that can be attributed to social dreaming. At the same time, some of the learning is difficult to account for because of the intangible value of social dreaming. A key finding about the student leader’s social dreaming experience is grounded in what they found to be a humanizing experience. The humanizing experience is embedded in contextual application and practice. In the case of this work, the contextual significance of Africa is highlighted through the use of dreams in conjunction with the use of language such as idioms, storytelling and similar practices. The use of language elevates the meaning emerging from the dreams to deepen learning and to create personal affiliations to experiences acquired during social dreaming. As such, learning or not learning from social dreaming experiences becomes an added advantage while self-led actions of student leadership showed up after sharing dreams, and these have indicated social justice outcomes.

The suggested contribution is a collaborative dialogical reading of Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial theory alongside queer and anti-racist autobiographical and autotheoretical practices that focus on undoing and unbecoming. Ettinger’s concept of ‘metramorphosis’ is defined as a process of change in borderlines and thresholds between being and absence, memory and oblivion, I and non-I. Throughout the re-attuning of distance(s)-in-proximity, metramorphosis creates and is constantly re-created within matrixial interlacing effects of relations-without-relating and separation-in-jointness, in-between presence and absence. The transformative quality posited by Ettinger’s matrixial theory resonates with the work of many queer, anti-racist, black feminists, theorists and writers who have similarly troubled universalistic theorisations of subjectivity grounded on colonial and cisheteropatriarchal normativity. In this paper, we investigate the points of connection, friction, and potentiality running through these theories and life-writing practices.

Additionally, by exploring our own experience of collaboration with each other and other colleagues, we explore how collaborative practices in academia may be inhabited by creative disruption and used as psychosocial research methodologies. Our hypothesis is that concepts such as undoing, unbecoming, severality, borderlinking, and fragmentation can also be used as notional compasses for the generation of new practices and methodologies of reading, writing, researching, and relating within the field of psychosocial studies.