What does Palestine reveal about the Psy disciplines?

This is an online event featuring Dr Lara Sheehi in conversation with HJL's Racial Justice Researcher Dr Tarek Younis. In the context of the ongoing and urgent need to strengthen and sustain Palestinian solidarity & the fight for racial justice, they will discuss what Palestine reveals about the politics of the psy-disciplines in the Global North.

The discussion will explore:

• The way Palestinian solidarity is repressed through liberal logics of “neutrality” and “psychological safety for everyone”. In particular, the experience of of manufactured atomisation/isolation in Palestinian solidarity.
• What it means for Zionist mental health practitioners to profess their racism freely against Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims, and the liberal acceptability/support for a settler-colonial project in the psy-disciplines more broadly.

Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar, and the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and co-editor of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She is currently working on a new book, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto, 2025).

Dr Tarek Younis is the Racial Justice Researcher at Healing Justice London and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Middlesex University. He researches and writes on Islamophobia, racism in mental health and the politics of psychology. He teaches on the impact of culture, religion, globalisation, and security policies on mental health. As a registered clinical psychologist, he primarily attends to experiences of racism, Islamophobia, and state violence in his private practice. His book is called The Muslim, State and Mind: Psychology in Times of Islamophobia.

We will have closed captioning (live transcriptions) available. If there are any access needs you’d like us to consider, please email [email protected].

Host or Publisher Healing Justice LDN