This talk will discuss the ways psychic intrusions are central features of settler colonial logics and how they are used with specific intent to disrupt solidarities. Palestine-Lebanon solidarities will be used as a “case study” to read the psycho-politico-affective forces that demobilize.

About the Speaker

Lara Sheehi (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar, and a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences. She is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Prof. Sheehi’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. Prof. Sheehi is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, co-editor of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and an advisory board member for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and the 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 Press).

This talk is presented by the Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) at UC Santa Cruz and co-sponsored by Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), Anthropology Department, Sociology Department, Politics Department, Center for Cultural Studies, People’s University, and Institute for Social Transformation.

This talk is a part of the year-long speaker series, “Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement.” For more information , please visit the CRJ website: https://crjucsc.com/