Psycho-social Explorations of Trauma, Exclusion and Violence (The New International Library of Group Analysis)

Product Description The central theme of this book is the operation of intersecting discourses of power, privilege and positioning as they are revealed in fraught encounters between in-groups and out-groups in our deeply fractured world. The authors offer a unique perspective on inter-group dynamics and structural violence at local, societal, cultural and global levels, dissecting processes of toxic ‘othering’ and psychosocial (re-)traumatisation. The book offers the Diogenes Paradigm as a unique conceptual tool with which to analyse the ways in which those of us who come to be located outside or on the margins of dominant social structures are, in one way or another, the inheritors of the legacies of centuries of oppression and exclusion. This analysis offers a distinctive psycho-social redefinition of trauma that foregrounds the relationship between the inhospitable environments we generate and the experiences of un-housedness that we thereby perpetuate.Written in an engaging and accessible style, Psycho-social Explorations of Trauma, Exclusion and Violence directly addresses pressing global issues of racial trauma, human mobility and climate disaster, and offers a manifesto for the creative re-imagining of the places and spaces in which conversations about restructuring and reparation can become sustainable. This is an essential and compelling book for anyone committed to social justice, especially for all practitioners working in health, social care and community justice settings, and researchers and academics across the behavioural and social sciences. Review "This book inspires a feeling of relief. It brings together the most pressing issues of our time―climate change, genocide, exclusionary nationalism and deep-rooted dehumanising racisms―in profoundly original ways that address power relations, exclusions, ‘unhousedness’ and (re)traumatisation. It faces the pain they engender while refusing familiar, patronising tropes of otherness. Its perceptive, and sometimes poetic, scholarship brings deep hope that other, genuinely psychosocial ways of living and relating are possible, despite disagreements and disappointments along the way." - Ann Phoenix, Professor of Psychosocial Studies, UCL, UK"This is a profoundly disturbing book in the best sense. Chris Scanlon and John Adlam are known for their highly regarded psychosocial studies into the concept of the mind that is unhoused by trauma i.e those experiences that dismember and dissociate people from communities, creating communities of the excluded. In this rich work, they revisit and reconsider their work, with a lens informed by a deepening awareness of the costs of cruelty; whether by white people to people of colour, men to women and all of us to the very earth we stand on. Scanlon and Adlam stand up for the value of disturbance and dissidence, in a world where what can be said aloud seems to be constrained and people who say the ‘wrong’ thing can be excluded or cancelled as if they should not exist. We can learn from getting closer to the unloved and unloveable and we must do so, if we are not to fragment our minds, our communities and the earth itself. All those who work with excluded should read this book, if only to remind themselves that they are part of the group that excluded the people they claim to want to help. It is not always comfortable to look in a mirror but I think we can all be grateful to Scanlon and Adlam for holding up this particular glass." - Dr Gwen Adshead, consultant forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Broadmoor Hospital, UK"Here we are given a mirror. In it we see something disturbing and yet hopeful about ourselves. We are confronted with the realization that healing occurs when we see that pain belongs to the collective rather than to the individuals who carry it on our behalf - a deeply knowledgeable, intensely wise, and fiercely ethical exploration of today’s predicament. Also one that points toward hope amidst the wre