Conference Agenda

Introduced by the Coalition government in 2010, the fiscal policy of austerity was reignited under Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2021 and has continued into the current cost of living crisis. At its centre has been the controversial withdrawal of support to some of society's most vulnerable members.

Today in Scotland over one million people live in poverty, with nearly half of those living in what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation describe as "very deep poverty" (Birt et al., 2023).

Expanding on her research of social melancholia, the collective experience of often-marginalised communities when they are deprived of the opportunity to grieve socio-economic losses in the aftermath of political oppression, Dr Stroud will argue for a psychosocial exploration of poverty and its value in examining the effects of austerity.

The losses generated through austerity measures have not been granted full expression within the public domain (McLean, 2023). It is this very deprivation that Dr Stroud connects to the emergence and sustenance of social melancholia.

Without the opportunity to publicly discuss the structural determinants of poverty, neoliberalism leaves little option but to pathologize those on the receiving end of austerity, claiming that these individuals do not have the grit or motivation to get out, and seek to do so instead by scrounging and cheating the system.

Addressing the conference theme of 'Learning or not Learning From Experience...Psychosocial Approaches to Researching and Experiential Learning', Dr Stroud will draw on her work at Station House Media Unit (shmu), an organisation providing film, radio and journalism training to marginalised communities, to explore how far such spaces can mitigate the effects of the current milieu.

This paper takes a critical lens to the organizational structures and processes that perpetuate the school to prison pipeline (STPP) in American secondary public schools. Unlike most analyses/ that focus upon policies and practices, this author explores the interpersonal and relational dimension of the school’s social system as the ‘experience near’ mechanism that operationalize these oppressive practices. By integrating organizational and developmental object relations theory the author shows how policies, systemic prejudices and biases are enacted relationally consciously and unconsciously in daily interactions that deleteriously impact a BIPOC adolescent’s development of self- identity and thus undermine their future. A school-based intervention is presented demonstrating how this negative developmental trajectory can be interrupted, if not reversed.

The paper elaborates work that was shared in the publication, The School to Prison Pipeline: A Failed Holding Environment (2021, Journal of Psychosocial Studies). This paper takes a deep dive into the “intersubjective field” (Stolorow and Atwood) of the inner -city high school, identifying how these relationships shape youth’s self -identity. The author further describes how a “potential space” (Winnicott, Mitchell) was co-constructed with staff to mitigate the harmful impact of the STPP. Particular attention will be given to the role/function of leadership, the importance of collaboration and reflective practices through case example.

These abstract aims to present a fragment of an ongoing doctoral research that seeks to understand the contributions of the Freirean legacy to the process of teaching and learning in a critical-liberating psychoanalytic listening context. The work is grounded in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and studies on psychoanalytic theory (Bicudo, 2019, Ferenczi, 1990; 1992, Figueiredo, 1994; 1996; 2003, Freud, 1912; 1914; 1916-1917; 1937, Gaztambide, 2019, Nobus 2022; 2023, Pellegrino; 2006, Soreanu, 2018; 2023), among others. The research is methodologically developed through a qualitative research-training approach, offering a free online course on psychoanalytic listening to contextualize and redefine the learning and the very meaning of listening in a critical-liberating perspective. This course, named "SER MAIS” - Popular Workshop of Psychoanalytic Listening," is distinctive in that it integrates activities in the realms of Teaching and Research. The interventions are rooted in an epistemological field that draws from the legacy of psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, Helio Pellegrino, and contemporary thinkers, as well as the pedagogical contributions of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, as well as philosophers and sociologists such as Karl Marx, Paul Preciado, Franz Fanon, Lélia Gonzalez. These authors help us guide this ongoing problematizing educational process. Therefore, this is an interdisciplinary proposal aimed at contextualizing the development of educational practices that create spaces for listening. Finally, for the conference of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and APCS 2024 we intend to present an analysis of some experiences within the SER MAIS, emphasizing the importance of creating a welcoming environment guided by listening and empathy for an affective experience, essential for the educator-learner relationship and the collective production of knowledge, to help us to reflect on questions and themes such as the following: experiential learning; psychosocial methods and methodologies and psychosocial approaches to learning and teaching.

While the need for ethics approval in research with human subjects is well-established, the process is often reduced to a mere formality or focused mainly on preventing harm. This paper argues that such a procedural reduction overlooks rich learning opportunities, drawing on my empirical doctoral project exploring generational transmissions of sociopolitical violence, classified as risky - both politically and emotionally.

Through a reflexive exploration of the intricate ethics approval process and messy fieldwork preparation, analysed through psychoanalytic and psychosocial lenses, the paper illustrates how acknowledging the emotive aspects underlying those seemingly procedural initial experiences can shed light on the subsequent stages of a research. The detailed account demonstrates how understanding changes to the study design, making sense of interview interactions, and identifying themes in participant stories and communications related back to and were informed by the emotional and contextual experiences of that foundational phase. Emphasising the interrelated dynamics of research process, the paper showcases how a psychosocial framework bridged seemingly disparate components across different phases of the study. This framework facilitated further insights into the relationship between these research dynamics and the repeating realities about and of the suppressed and violent histories being studied.

This paper presents an empirical example of a research project that is (a) sensitive or even dangerous; (b) personally invested in; and (c) impacted upon by circumstances requiring repeated revisions. Thus, this paper makes a methodological contribution to better understanding for other researchers who might deal with affectively intense and invested research projects in risky circumstances.