Books by rachel jane liebert
In this first chapter, Terrain, I present the chapters that follow as a response to present-day U... more In this first chapter, Terrain, I present the chapters that follow as a response to present-day US, a neocolonial security state of white supremacy. Situating this within my own response-ability as a descendent of settlers, a white woman, and a psychologist, I follow Gloria Anzaldua's and Frantz Fanon's attention to flesh to introduce my uncomfortable reflexive praxis and explicit political commitments. I then introduce paranoia as my overarching object of inquiry and 'border thinking' as my overarching approach for what is ultimately a decolonizing, feminist experiment with content and form to puncture Psychology's legacy of cosmological violence, reviving the 'psykhe'the breathof our studies, widening our ability to respond to contemporary conditions of intensifying white supremacy, of breathlessness.
Papers by rachel jane liebert
Sociology of Health & Illness, 2021
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 2021
Recent years have seen a renewed interest in integrating creative activities into statutory menta... more Recent years have seen a renewed interest in integrating creative activities into statutory mental health practice in high income countries. In this article we offer an exploratory analysis of an arts project delivered within UK mental health services, Creativity for Enablement and Wellbeing (CREW). Drawing on data collected for a process evaluation of the project, we suggest that conceptualising CREW as liminal and liminoid provides a helpful way to articulate the processes, atmospheres, relationships and practices of the project. Through this theoretical lens we identify CREW as a mode of engagement comprising looseness, possibility and, collectivity, all brought together through a unique community event, the showcase. We explore CREW's mode of engagement through three themes: "carving out a liminal space"; "looseness and experimentation" and "from liminal to liminoid". Implications for service delivery are discussed, focussing on how CREW managed to create a transformative space of liminoid possibility rather than a recovery journey delineated by service-defined imperatives.
Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 2013
Constructed as a barrier to treatment adherence, ambivalence is typically pathologized in qualita... more Constructed as a barrier to treatment adherence, ambivalence is typically pathologized in qualitative research on “bipolar disorder”—seen as something to be feared and eradicated. Here, I critically review this position, arguing that it is constructed through a “lens of risk” that problematically presumes people have a chronic mental illness that requires lifelong pharmaceutical intervention. I then draw on the accounts of three young women who have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder to demonstrate how people’s concerns, questions, and dreams could instead be seen as a site of expertise about diagnostic and treatment practices; in turn using their ambivalence to stitch together an alternative analytic “lens of desire” through which to re-view accounts of bipolar disorder. Overall this article is thus both a commentary on mainstream research practices in psychology and an experiment with how we might look differently; believing that perhaps the real risk associated with people’s am...
Feminism & Psychology, 2015
Wanting to introduce an element of disquietude to the task of addressing "young women's (re)engag... more Wanting to introduce an element of disquietude to the task of addressing "young women's (re)engagement with feminism", in this Special Feature we present 17 pieces from 27 authors; identifying with 17 nations across six continents -
Feminism & Psychology, 2015
Qualitative Psychology, 2017
WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 2010
Social Science & Medicine, 2009
Over the past two decades, evidence and regulatory responses have surfaced regarding associations... more Over the past two decades, evidence and regulatory responses have surfaced regarding associations between selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serious adverse effects, especially akathisia, aggression and suicidality. Given increasing concern about depression prevalence and harm, the dominance of biomedical approaches, and the normalisation of antidepressant use, reports about the potential for serious adverse effects from SSRIs present a dilemma for people working in depression intervention: the drugs are linked to "two conflicting claims" that they may either decrease or increase harm. We present data from in-depth semi-structured interviews with nine professionals in New Zealand working in fields relating to depression and supportive of SSRIs, to investigate the negotiation of this dilemma. We analysed participants' talk about akathisia, aggression and suicidality associated with SSRIs, and found the use of rhetorical strategies that minimised the significance of risks, countered risks with notions of benefit and/or questioned the validity of risks. These discursive resources provided ways of mitigating the dilemma otherwise posed by evidence of adverse drug effects. However in doing so they referenced notions of SSRI benefit that relied upon assumptions about the efficacy of the drugs, risks of untreated depression, and the impact of adverse effects. Overall, our analysis highlights ways in which evidence of serious adverse effects from SSRIs can be rhetorically contained and undermined.
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 2013
By some accounts, prevalence estimates of bipolar have increased 240-fold over the past three dec... more By some accounts, prevalence estimates of bipolar have increased 240-fold over the past three decades, and are twice as high in the United States when compared to worldwide averages. In this article, I argue that these numbers (at least in part) emerge from a circulation of risk in the bipolar milieu-it is now by-and-large one's potential madness that is diagnosed and drugged. I map out how this circulation occurs via a number of psy technologies: kindling, recurrence, diagnostic hypervigilance, early intervention, excess, reproductive counseling, prophylaxis, drug-induced diagnoses, pharmaceutical marketing, and pharmaceutical consumerism. In turn, I consider how these technologies' collaborative biologizing, classifying, and pharmaceutilizing of risk interacts with the U.S. political climate of intensified surveillance and security. I thus use bipolar as a site to explore the reconfiguration of psy assemblages within a shifting context of discipline and terror.
Awry: International Journal of Critical Psychology, 2021
Could experimenting with form help us to counter – even crack – coloniality? We are hopeful. For ... more Could experimenting with form help us to counter – even crack – coloniality? We are hopeful. For us, experimenting with form shimmers with possibilities for (a) decolonising Psychology. Awry2 (“Awry-squared”) is a section dedicated to experimenting with form within Critical Psychology and related fields. Aka, where Awry goes awry. In this Introduction, we summarise some shapeshifting possibilities for knowledge, knowing, knowers when experimenting with form. And we overview how, through Awry2, we are experimenting with making a space for these possibilities to both breathe and be put to the test.
Awry: International Journal of Critical Psychology, 2021
With my White, sick bones-cum-ancestors, I analyse my pedagogical attempts at ‘decolonising Psych... more With my White, sick bones-cum-ancestors, I analyse my pedagogical attempts at ‘decolonising Psychology’ to theorise whiteness and experiment with praxis. While White supremacy is seen and felt by Black, Indigenous and other People of Colour, it is unseen by White people, thereby triggering discomfort and fragility when brought to the surface. But what if White supremacy is both unseen and unfelt by White people, if White discomfort and fragility involve White fusion – a refusing and re-fusing of feeling that otherwise threatens our sense of innocence and mastery? Implicating coloniality, the flesh and the more-than-human, this ‘re/fusal’ suggests that decolonising Psychology requires an embodied, inspirited praxis; letting go of innocence, mastery and re/fusal for an unfamiliar otherworld of response-ability, humility and imagination. These changes may revive the psykhe – breath – of Psychology within coloniality, helping us to conspire with those rising against this state of breathlessness. While this Abstract has reflected on content, I conclude with a ‘Concrete’ that reflects on form, before offering responses from a Maori and Pakeha scholar.
Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2011
Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters (Haraway, 1991,... more Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters (Haraway, 1991, p. 155) All you need to start a movement is to get a bunch of people talking together in a room (L. Tiefer, personal communication, November 2008)
We are a group of critical theorists who read, thought, wrote, and practiced together while livin... more We are a group of critical theorists who read, thought, wrote, and practiced together while living in New York City during the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and recently the US presidential election. While our biographies span multiple geographies, we met as researchers, theorists, teachers, and activists across a diverse number of campuses in the city's largest public university, the City University of New York. This special issue emerged as affect studies provoked our imaginations independently in ways that felt crucial for the development of our respective and reflexive political and theoretical projects. We entered the complexities of using affect studies, inspired especially by the generative tension of theory 'versus' practice. Through a collective process of collision and creativity, we experimented with what affect studies could do for our intellectual and political commitments, affecting subjectivity to politicize affect. In this piece, we introduce this special issue, which advocates for affect studies as a mode of critical inquiry of use to radical projects of queerness, blackness, disability, decolonization, and temporalities of the body, a turn that is dependent on our re-engagement with subjectivity. After reviewing the legacy of scholarship on subjectivity to which our work is both continuing and responding, we discuss the debates around the role of the subject in affect studies and the political dimension of affect before thinking through the contributions of the five pieces in this special issue. Collectively, we are affecting subjectivity through an attention to matter, the non-conscious, and identity, and politicizing affect through an attention to form,
Having undertaken a critical analysis of a transnational program of research to identify and inte... more Having undertaken a critical analysis of a transnational program of research to identify and intervene on the prodrome, a pre-psychotic state, here I experiment with an unsettling, reparative reading of its affective coils—paranoia. Etymologically joining para (beside) with nous (mind), “paranoia” denotes an experience beside-the-mind. I attempt to follow these roots, meeting a non-human figure—Coatlicue—as introduced through Chicana philosopher and poet, Gloria Anzaldúa. In the arms of this goddess, the prodrome points to the vitality and the milieu of paranoia, re-turning it as a capacity, calling for modes of attunement and apprenticeship, and perhaps protecting our psychological and political practices against yet another operation of colonialist capture. Challenging the subject, interlocutors, and form typically adopted by not just Psychology but Affect Studies too, I hope in this performative essay to also lift up the problems and possibilities of Walter Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’ as a means to open the potential decoloniality, and thus response-ability, of these fields within the present political moment.
By some accounts, prevalence estimates of bipolar have increased 240-fold over the past three dec... more By some accounts, prevalence estimates of bipolar have increased 240-fold over the past three decades, and are twice as high in the United States when compared to worldwide averages. In this article, I argue that these numbers (at least in part) emerge from a circulation of risk in the bipolar milieu-it is now by-and-large one's potential madness that is diagnosed and drugged. I map out how this circulation occurs via a number of psy technologies: kindling, recurrence, diagnostic hypervigilance, early intervention, excess, reproductive counseling, prophylaxis, drug-induced diagnoses, pharmaceutical marketing, and pharmaceutical consumerism. In turn, I consider how these technologies' collaborative biologizing, classifying, and pharmaceutilizing of risk interacts with the U.S. political climate of intensified surveillance and security. I thus use bipolar as a site to explore the reconfiguration of psy assemblages within a shifting context of discipline and terror.
This essay is at once a critical analysis, an experiment in form, and -with some irony -a caution... more This essay is at once a critical analysis, an experiment in form, and -with some irony -a cautionary tale. Triggered by the inclusion of prodromal diagnoses in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the recent call by the United States' (U.S.) Obama administration for increased mental health screening, I argue that shifts toward identifying and intervening on one's potential madness, or risk, circulate with/in the contemporary U.S. climate of intensified discipline and terror, and use Bipolar Disorder as a site to critically explore how and with what implications this circulation occurs. Specifically, I weave Massumi's 'political ontology of threat' with the narrative of a woman diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder in order to trace the pre-emptive politics and affective logic of a risk-based approach to madness. I contend that the diagnosing and drugging of potential is a self-perpetuating loop that is personally and politically harmful, and consider alternatives to this burgeoning practice.
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Books by rachel jane liebert
Papers by rachel jane liebert