feeling
“In the material world, infrastructure underlies productivity — it speeds some processes and slows down others, setting agendas, producing isolation, enabling cooperation. The infrastructure of feeling is material too, in the sense that ideology becomes material as do the actions that feelings enable or constrain.”
— Ruth Wilson Gilmore
In the last years my work has been to process my experiences of indifferent systems, and the knowledge generated from them. At the core of this reflection, has been an attempt to deeply interrogate the social, psychological and physical effects of relational defeat, and connect them to their political significance. I have been searching for methods that help us to notice, question and rearrange the conditions through which we relate to ourselves and one another, and studying how such methods are themselves organised around questions of power, doubt and certainty, healing and its absence.
I am a Level I certified facilitator of The Resilience Toolkit and I have achieved Level II Politics of Trauma course with Staci K Haines I am a level one practitioner in Narrative Therapy and have completed an advanced training in the Tree of Life with PHOLA, have completed an immersion with the Center for Collective Wisdom and am on my journey to becoming a birth worker with Abuela Doulas. I was a member of Healing Justice London’s Movement Medicine cohort.
I am interested in how these methods intersect with poetics and other forms of polticised, relational and embodied knowing, making and sharing together.
In this inquiry I have more questions than answers.
Redrawn diagram of psychologist Shelley E. Taylor’s Tend and Befriend model of the stress response, tracing the relationships between threat, tending, affiliation, social connection and collective protection as alternatives to fight-or-flight responses.