Unhoused Minds and Inhospitable Environments: Communities in Conversation

“At a time of cultural devastation, the reality a courageous person has to face up to is that one has to face up to reality in new ways” (Jonathan Lear, 2008) 

 A change of government does not mean a shift in the dominant discourse. No Samson has yet risen to shake the four pillars that hold up the roof of power in this country: 

• the securitisation and criminalisation of the homeless and migrant (those whom Patrick Declerck called ‘les naufragés’ – ‘the shipwrecked’) 
• nationalism and xenophobia (and the irreversibility of ‘Brexit’) 
• denial of climate disaster (which includes ‘gradualist’ policies of carbon emission reduction postponed into an endlessly receding future) 
• austerity and the unthinkability of tax rises to fund public services in late capitalism 

In our opening discussion we will bring the lens of our ‘Diogenes Paradigm’ to bear upon these psycho-social phenomena.  

The Diogenes Paradigm concentrates our attention upon power differentials, relations of domination and fraught encounters between in-groups and out-groups.  

We explore experiences of unhousedness, displacement and unsettlement in multiple complex intersections between imperialism, globalisation, race, class, climate disaster, and human mobility. 

In this Anthropocene Age, we argue, concepts historically deployed to consider the nature of belonging and membership are no longer fit for purpose, if we are to rise to Jonathan Lear’s challenge. 

We invite all who attend this event to convene as a learning community as we attempt to reclaim the idea of ‘vagabondage’ and to be part of new conversations around what a hospitable policy of #welcometheboats would look like; what ethical and conceptual premises it would be founded upon; what structures and practices would sustain it.   

Host or Publisher The Severnside Institute for Psychotherapy