Sun, May 25, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT - Online event
Forging Solidarities During Institutional Silencing: Navigating Resistance in Academia (ft. Rhea Gandhi, Kartika Ladwal, Lara & Stephen Sheehi)
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Join us alongside Rhea Gandhi, Kartika Ladwal, Lara and Stephen Sheehi in a dialogic seminar and open forum on solidarity, silencing, and resistance within institutions such as academia. The event will consist of one hour of conversation between our invited guests (to be recorded and later distributed), followed by one hour of horizontalized open discussion for all attendees to speak together (unrecorded).
Kartika and Rhea have offered the following abstract from their upcoming paper and talk of the same name, which introduces many of the themes for our discussion:
"The experience of inhabiting marginalised bodies within institutional spaces such as the Western University can be fraught with feelings of otherness and isolation. As women of colour in academia, our encounters with racism are not uncommon. Within the hierarchical structure of higher education, where socio-political inequalities are often overlooked and reproduced in relational encounters, collective discomfort around race frequently manifests in silences. Intolerable feelings of shame and guilt mean that racism is often relationally disavowed to restore psychic equilibrium (Layton 2006).
The inescapable visibility of racial difference results in the violence in these moments being contained in racially marginalised bodies. Kartika was in her second year of working on her doctoral thesis when she was asked to elaborate on her difference. Rhea had just begun working on her PhD and was looking to explore the experience of South Asian trainee counsellors in the same university. Forging solidarities amongst the silences that they each met on their own journeys, a new alliance emerged – one that was political, personal and deeply healing. In this paper, we invite you to reflect with us as we bring our visceral, intimate and troubling encounters with racism within the university as early career researchers, and psychotherapists, using Bollas’ concept of the ‘unthought known’ (1987) to frame our relationship. We also bring our hope, our resistance and our friendship as we grapple with the (im)possibilities for repair within the Academy. Our paper engages with the theme of 'Crisis and Opportunity' to address how affective encounters with prevailing inequalities in institutional spaces, while deeply painful, can also hold opportunities for collective resistance and solidarities to emerge."
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