Course

Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Space-making and Living the Change We Want to Be

Ended Mar 3, 2023

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Full course description

Thursday, February 23rd, 2023 | 6:00-7:30PM (ET) - Fully Online Lecture

Eligible for 1.5 CEUs for Psychologists, LMHCs, and Social Workers. 

Cost:

This event is free to the public. Please use the promotional code ETHICSERIES22 to register at no cost.

This event is $25 for practitioners seeking CEs for this lecture. As per the credentialing bodies, we can only grant CEs for attendance of live events. Please pay and register for the lecture so that we may keep track of your attendance. You CE registration status may not be changed after the event.

Description:

This presentation/conversation will explore how Black feminisms provide a foundation from which it becomes more possible to speak and write of interconnection – spirited life, soul, natural mystics blowing through the air – and of our engagement with all of this in therapeutic practice. Foluke Taylor will draw from her book Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room (W.W. Norton February 2023) to offer examples of this and to explore possibilities for practitioners interested in Black feminist infused practice. The book, as an ensemble of Black feminist texts and artifacts woven through with genealogies of becoming a therapist, invites conversation. For this event, Foluke will be in conversation with psychoanalytic psychotherapist Gail Lewis, and together, they will discuss and expand upon some key ideas and principles of a Black feminist ethic.

Questions to be addressed include:

  • What do we miss when we try to fix, settle, and keep ourselves in order?
  • In what ways is unruly an essential mode for therapeutic projects seeking to survive and remake an anti-black world?
  • How are we, as practitioners engaged in therapeutic work, making more living room – space for the emergent and the what is not yet but must be – and why is this important for therapeutic practice?

Learning Objectives:

  1. Identify key characteristics of a Black feminist ethic as underpinning and guide to therapeutic practice.
  2. Discuss the value of staying with what feels unsettled and of ‘unfixing’ methodologies that make space for the unknown as well as the experience of not knowing.
  3. Analyze emergent processes in relational work and the development of therapeutic capacities able to meet, hold, and counter the effects of structural violence and anti-blackness.

Timeline and Requirements:

The course will take place on Thursday, February 23rd, 2023.  This lecture is presenter-led and is a fully online experience. The lecture will be conducted synchronously online via Zoom from 6:00-7:30PM (ET). 

CE Sponsorship: 

University Counseling Services of Boston College is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. As a co-sponsor of this program, University Counseling Services of Boston College maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Participants will be eligible to receive 1.5 CE units from University Counseling Services of Boston College. 

This program has been approved for 1.5 Social Work Continuing Education hours for relicensure, in accordance with 258 CMR. NASW-MA Chapter CE Approval Program Authorization Number D 91588.

The Lynch School of Education and Human Development is providing sponsorship for CEUs for Licensed Mental Health Counselors (LMHC). Participants will be eligible to receive 1.5 CE units. These credits are accepted by the Massachusetts Board of Registration for Licensed Mental Health Counselors (Category I contact hours in Content Area I).

Participants must attend the lecture in full and complete the post event survey to be eligible to receive CEs.

This lecture does not offer CEs for other clinicians not listed above. 

Fees and Policies:

This event is free if you are NOT seeking CEs towards your license. If you plan on seeking CEs for this lecture, the cost is $25. Once you have registered for the class, your CE registration status is fixed and cannot be adjusted at a later time.  

Payment is due by credit card at registration. Registration closes February 23rd at the time of the lecture. Refunds will be granted only up to the time of the lecture. 

Additional offerings from the Lynch School Professional & Continuing Education Office can be found on our website. 

Presenter:

Foluke Taylor is a *therapist and writer (where the asterisk signals black feminist modes that create and hold open spaces for the emergence of the yet-to-be and for the therapeutics that call this into being). She is the author of How the Hiding Seek (2018), an experiment in creative writing as intermediary for what might be conceived as separate – human and nature, us and them, mind and body, now and then, fiction and nonfiction. She spent several years growing up in The Gambia before returning to live in the city of London where she was born.

Respondent:

Gail Lewis is an author, academic and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. She was a member of the Brixton Black Women's Group and one of the founder members of the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent, Britain’s first national organization for black and other women of color. She organizes her thinking through the category ‘experience’ which she conceives as a vector of both the felt senses in conjunction with social, structural and cultural processes, and an analytic in the production of meaning and knowing otherwise. She is currently writing a book on Black feminism in Britain and has written on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state and citizenship, psychoanalysis and Black feminism, and the psychosocial dynamics of racialized-gendered experience.