Joy James and M. E. O’Brien in dialogue, with Lara Sheehi
Online at Common Notions YouTube | Monday, November 18th at 5 PM Eastern
Join us on the Common Notions YouTube for a very special livestream. Advance registration very much appreciated!
Join Joy James and M. E. O’Brien in dialogue, moderated with Lara Sheehi, in exploring care, abolition and revolutionary struggle. In their respective research, all three have grappled with the place of maternal love, caretaking, and interdependent nurturing possible through collective insurrection against white supremacy and capitalism.
Joy James explores this through the Captive Maternal in Black rebellion, maroon sites of revolutionary love. M. E. O’Brien grapples with family abolition through what she calls “insurgent social reproduction,” the revolutionary horizons of abundant care that emerge in collective mass rebellion. Lara Sheehi draws on the decolonial potential of psychoanalysis, in Palestine and around the world. They will explore the intersections and tensions of their work, seeking to illuminate the love made possible only through abolitionist revolution.
Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College, is a political philosopher who works with organizers. She is editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader; Imprisoned Intellectuals; and co-editor ofThe Black Feminist Reader. James's recent books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. Her edited volumes also include Beyond Cop Cities Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons and the forthcoming ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, Afro-Indigenous Futures.
M. E. O'Brien writes on gender freedom and communist theory. She is author of Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care and coauthor of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of The New York Commune, 2052–2072. She co-edits two magazines: Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, and Turkish. Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at New York University, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements. She is currently working in private practice psychotherapy, is a clinical social worker, and in formation as a psychoanalyst.
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. Lara’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. Lara is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and co-editor of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She s currently working on a new book, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto, 2025).