This event is included in a series of seminars organised in collaboration with the Therapy and Social Change Network.
Life at present is plagued by drama and emergencies. We see rampant inequality and carelessness entrenched, ensuring that essential resources are ever harder to access for many, while environmental disasters now threaten us all, even as warfare and destitution around the globe means more people on the move seeking asylum. One response is evident in the rise of the Right, with its populist nationalism and policies of exclusion. A second involves more inclusive practices of resistance and hope, which nowadays often address the need not just to prioritize care, but to explore its complexities and significance, noting its constant devaluation.
In this presentation I draw upon my latest book, Lean on Me, which argues that the only way to combat the pessimism feeding reactionary movements is by insisting upon our globally entwined interdependence and shared vulnerability. We know that the Covid pandemic spotlighted exactly this global interdependence, along with our lifelong needs for differing forms of care and support. At its height, the pandemic did stimulate heroic efforts from care workers globally, as well as generating a host of grassroots practices of mutual aid for those in need of care and companionship, some still ongoing. However, the recognition of our mutual dependency is always threatened by people’s deep fear and disavowal of dependency, encouraged by the illusory rhetoric of personal autonomy along with market promises of individual fulfilment, irrespective of others. Yet none of us can survive without the care and kindness of others, underpinned by diverse social infrastructures that either enable or curtail the flourishing of all living creatures, and the world itself.
Embracing the interconnected vulnerability of human existence can help us cement our ties to others, near and far, deepening our commitment to a compassionate, inclusive sociality, which places expanded notions of care at the very heart of our politics and democratic survival.
Course Content
Presenter
Lynne Segal is a writer and activist who arrived in London over fifty years ago, from Sydney Australia, just when the women’s liberation movement was kicking off. Immersed in that milieu, she was soon engaged in diverse campaigns for justice, equality, and social inclusion. These provided the motivations for her writing, moving on from contributions to alternative feminist and left magazines to publishing many books, beginning with Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (co-authored with Sheila Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright) and including her last few books, Making Trouble: Life & Politics; Out of Time: The Pleasures & Perils of Ageing; Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy; The Care Manifesto (co-authored with the Care Collective), and her latest book Lean on Me: The Politics of Radical Care. For over two decades she has also been involved in several Jewish groups working for peace in Israel-Palestine, beginning with Jews for Justice for Palestinians.
Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor Emerita, Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London
The Therapy and Social Change (TaSC) Network is a broad affiliation of people interested in exploring the interface between therapeutic ideas and practices and social justice perspectives and actions. We are interested both in the ways that counselling and psychotherapy can be practiced with social justice concerns in mind (for instance, tackling unconscious biases in the consulting room), and also in the ways that therapeutic principles and practices can be extended out to the wider social realm (for instance, developing social and emotional literacy in schools).
