(M)otherlands (looking for who made this mess)

Conversations in June Jordan’s Living Room : with Foluke Taylor, Dr Gail Lewis, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Nydia A. Swaby, Eddie Bruce Jones & Robert Downes.

Venue: Zoom. Date: Wednesday January 15th 2025 7pm – 9.30pm London time. Reserve your place here: TICKETS.

This event is open to all and not only therapeutic practitioners.

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Rather than paying for a ticket to attend the event, we ask that you make a donation to Protect Black Women.   Your donation will go towards offering black women therapeutic support.   

In honour of Unruly Therapeutic’s second year of life, a panel have been invited to work with and share their response to chapter 8 of Foluke Taylor’s Unruly Therapeutic – Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room. They will each respond to the chapter and its themes and offer a response from the ‘gestures‘ left in their bodies and the ‘much more than words‘ that this particular chapter evokes. The panel have been invited to respond in their own idiosyncratic way. Foluke has also been invited to make her own response to the chapter, to annotate, extend, be in dialogue with what she wrote then and to speak of what comes to mind now.

What would it mean for us to take the words “mother” and “therapy” and drop them in the ocean? Whisper or sing them into the sea, walk them across a river or—where that is impractical—hum them into a bowl of water? Could we ask water—this early felt experience of mother—about the wounds that we have attributed to her? We watch ripples, listen for resonance, study reflected light. We experiment; read water; hum divination; practice (m)otherwise.

What would it mean to be curious beyond the contribution of a particular mother to my personal grief and psychic trouble and bring into view the context of before and beyond?

Foluke Taylor – Unruly Therapeutic

As a participant, you are also invited to respond to the chapter in writing, via video or audio recording, via image making, via poetry (modality of your choice). Contributions will be shared on this page if you send your response to: trschair@gmail.com

Offerings so far:

  • Lenya Samani Meditations on Mother, after Foluke Taylor (Unruly Therapeutic).

The book chapter that we will be working with will be forwarded to you on booking your place.

You can purchase the book here: BOOK. An audio book is also available.

The reading/study list: (a gathering of the writers/thinkers/creators that the panel walk with)

The Playlist: “books leave certain sounds“, writes Dionne Brand.

The panel have been invited to share the music that comes to them in response to this chapter.

About the author:   

Foluke Taylor is a therapist, writer and author. Published work includes a biomythography How the Hiding Seek  (2018) and her most recent book, Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room (2023, W.W. Norton). She has contributed to a range of academic and professional journals and authored several chapters within edited collections. As a doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths College, Foluke’s work engages creative writing and Black feminisms to explore poetics and abolitionist possibilities within therapeutic practice. She is co-founder of Protect Black Women—a Community Interest Company that provides access to low-cost counselling and other support for Black women. Foluke is inspired and energised by collaborative and collective projects and values the many opportunities she has had to experiment across disciplines and co-create with others. She is a fan of practices that make room to nurture the emergent—in particular those which recognise the ongoing knowledge-generating potentials of spaces such as dancefloors, living rooms, and kitchen tables.  

About the panel:  

Gail Lewis :  is Visiting Professor at Yale University and Reader Emerita in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. Gail has written, but is trying to become a writer; Gail likes to speak, but is still seeking her tonalities; Gail sometimes feels lonely, inept and scared; but Gail is brought into being in and by the company, care and joy of black/women of colour feminisms and queer knowings and livings.

Some of Gail’s ‘tryings’: An interview with Gail Lewis by Brenna Bhandar & Rafeef Ziadah, editors of Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collectiver Action and Radical Thought, available from Verso & ‘Where might we go if we dare’: moving beyond the ‘thick, suffocating fog of whiteness’ in feminism Gail Lewis & Clare Hemmings

Gail’s publications include ‘Race, Gender and Social Welfare: encounters in a postcolonial society’ (2000), Polity Press; ‘Citizenship: personal lives and social policy’ (2004), ed. Polity Press; ‘Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others’ (2009) Studies in the Maternal; ‘Unsafe Travel: experiencing intersectionality and feminist displacements’ (2013) Signs: journal of women in culture and society; ‘Where Might I Find You’: Popular Music and the Internal Space of the Father’, (2012) Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society; ‘Questions of Presence’, (2017) Feminist Review, Issue 117; Once More With My Sistren: Black Feminism and the Challenge of Object Use. (2020) Feminist Review. Gail believes that open and honest conversations across differences, including intergenerational conversations, are the pressing issues of this moment of hate-filled crisis. 

Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs : is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities has held space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Alexis’s co-edited volume Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016) has shifted the conversation on mothering, parenting and queer transformation. Alexis has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press (Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in 2016, M Archive: After the End of the World in 2018 and Dub: Finding Ceremony, 2020.) Unlike most academic texts, Alexis’s work has inspired artists across form to create dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts and more. (more about Alexis can be found here). In August 2024 Alexis’s latest book Survival is a Promise – The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde will be published.

Nydia A. Swaby : is a Black feminist artist-researcher, writer, and curator. Her practice engages archives, autoethnography, photography, the moving image, and the imagination to explore the gendered, diasporic, and affective dimensions of Black being and becoming. Nydia is a member of the editorial board for Feminist Review and co-edited its Archives issue. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS and has previously worked at the ICA and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Nydia was a Caird Research Fellow jointly based at Royal Museums Greenwich and UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. She is currently a Whose Heritage Curatorial Fellow at Royal Museums Greenwich and contributes to the advisory board for the Atlantic Worlds Gallery at the National Maritime Museum. Nydia’s artist film daughter(s) of diaspora was recently screened at the Singapore International Photography Festival. Her book, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, was published by Lawrence Wishart in October 2024 as part of LW’s Radical Black Women series.

Nydia’s website.

Eddie Bruce Jones : is Professor of Law and Head of the School of Law, Gender and Media at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Race in the Shadow of Law: State Violence in Contemporary Europe and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-Funded Project “Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive: Humanities, Law and British Indentureship”. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute of Race Relations , the advisory board of the Centre for Intersectional Justice in Berlin, the Editorial Board of the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law and advisory board of the European Law Open. He is an Essays Editor at the literary magazine, The Offing. Eddie’s website and writing.

Robert Downes : practices as psychotherapist, supervisor, educator, occasional writer and student engaged in critical psychological study and practice drawing from a range of traditions: queer theory, black studies, critical theory, intersectional feminisms, relational psychoanalysis alongside the spiritual teachings and practices of the Diamond Approach and a 23-year long dialogue and extensive hedge school study with friend and collaborator, Foluke Taylor, with their project Otherwise. Robert is currently a member of the organising committee for The Relational School in London and has taught on trauma at the NAOS institute, psychotherapy trainings at Metanoia and body psychotherapy at the Minster Centre. He writes into and offers experiential learning into decommissioning whiteness. Published work includes Listening in Colour: Creating a Meeting Place with Young People Robert Downes, Sue Lee, Foluke Taylor-Muhammad (Young People in Focus 2002); Reimagining the Space for a Therapeutic Curriculum – a Sketch, (co-authored with Foluke Taylor in Black Identities and White Therapies: Race Respect and Diversity. PCCS 2021); Queer Shame: notes on becoming an all-embracing mind in Queering Psychotherapy, Edited by Chance Czyzselska, Confer Books 2022.

Venue: Zoom.

Date: Wednesday January 15th 2025 7pm – 9.30pm

Check times in your time zone : time zone

Reserve your place here: TICKETS.