PsySSA’s 30th and PAPU’s 10th Anniversary Congress: Invited Address by Prof Nadera Shalhoub-Kervokian and Prof Lara Sheehi
The Psychology of Anti-Colonial Resistance: Praxis from the Flesh
by Prof Nadera Shalhoub-Kervokian
Genocidal violence in Gaza, the colonized scattered and shredded body parts bring into focus the violent enmeshment of Palestinian ashlaa’/flesh within the geo-politics of psychology. The violent dismemberment of bodies testifies to state terror and its psychological warfare. By understanding how people of Gaza make sense of scenes of brutal dismemberment and death in their everyday lives, amidst a genocide, I offer an anticolonial resistance psychology and praxis from the flesh. My talk is a call to read the inscriptions of dismembered, wounded and dying flesh/body/land in their racial command. I will conclude by insisting that an anti-colonial resistance psychology invests in life and liveability against the permanence of otherness, in which racialized people are turned into the exploded, shattered, decomposed, unidentified no-bodies. It is a psychology that insists on re-assembling the wholeness of life, a psycho-political effort to rebuild new spaces of love in a struggle for a dignified humane life.
The Psychology of Anti-Colonial Resistance: Praxis from the Flesh
“On Refusing Psychic Intrusions”
by Prof Lara Sheehi
In engaging with Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s theorizing, I will discuss psychic intrusions and the various ways anti-colonial resistance refuses them. I will take up how to conceptualize the arduous, yet life sustaining struggle that allows for this refusal to happen just as consistently as the intrusion insists on making itself felt. In this talk, I will highlight how refusing the terms of settler colonial psychic intrusion by refusing its hollow attempts at “repair” is not out of recalcitrance, but rather as an ethical imperative that guides the possibility of another mode of being and staying in (or importantly, opting out of) relation. Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst, Avgi Saketopoulou, in speaking of exigent sadism reminds us: “In refusing repair, exigent sadism is not indifferent to the other’s gesture: what the exigent sadist seeks to do, rather, is to stage an encounter that stands to rearrange the terms by which the relationship proceeds.” Using this as a springboard, I will explore how the mere presence of Palestinians is enough to stage that encounter in the settler colonial matrix, a Palestinian in presence, then, becomes the register by which repair is refused. Maintaining and sustaining, presence, in the face of genocide; in the face of dismemberment, erasure, subjugation, intrusion and coercion is enough to stage the encounter of which she speaks. The promise of this potential mounts a libidinal excitation that has the urgent potential to withstand the pressures of the deathscape that threatens to subsume us all.
Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on trauma, state crimes and criminology, surveillance, gender violence, law and society. She studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gendered-based violence, violence against children in conflict-ridden areas, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization and social control. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the author of numerous books, among them “Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study” published in 2010; “Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear”, published by Cambridge University Press, 2015. She just published two new books” the first examines Palestinian childhood entitled: “Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding”, and a new edited book entitled: Understanding Campus-Community Partnerships in Conflict Zones”. The second is a co-edited volume on the sacralization of politics. She is also completing a co-edited volume on Islam and gender-based violence. She and has published articles in multi-disciplinary fields including British Journal of Criminology, Feminist Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, State Crime, Violence Against Women, Social Science and Medicine, Signs, Law & Society Review, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. As a resident of the old city of Jerusalem, Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a prominent local activist. She engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over Palestinian children’s lives, spaces of death, and women’s birthing bodies and lives.
Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar, and the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. 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. Lara is on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and 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, 2025).
Urmitapa Dutta is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Greeley Peace Scholar Program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Through her scholar activism, she strives to bear witness to and dismantle everyday violence. Dr. Dutta’s journey began in the Northeastern borderlands of the Indian state, where she grew up navigating contested terrains of borders and belonging. She has extensively studied the dynamics of coloniality, identity, power, and resistance while accompanying communities facing ethnoracial persecution in Northeast India. At the heart of this work is a fierce commitment to centering the struggles of those relegated to the margins of national and global imaginaries. Dr. Dutta has contributed to decolonial perspectives in psychology that span theorizing “from below,” dissident pedagogies, and community-engaged research as a form of solidarity praxis. She has written extensively about critical qualitative methods as interventions to combat marginality and exclusion, notably through participatory action research, feminist ethnographies, counterstorytelling, and insurgent poetry. She also currently serves as Associate Editor of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology.
