APS Reading Group: Nini Fang’s ‘Feeling/ being out of place: psychic defence against the hostility environment’

Please join us for our second in a series of monthly online reading groups where we will be coming together and discussing topical articles drawn from The Journal of Psychosocial Studies.

Like everyone, APS members are working under very altered and potentially isolating circumstances and it was with great regret that the we had to postpone our 2020 conference on The Psychosocial Body at the beginning of June. However, we believe that psychosocial thinking is needed more than ever in these times and we have therefore devised a free online programme which includes our summer reading groups and a scaled down online two-day webinar .

Abstract:

What is it like to be an immigrant worker in a ‘hostile environment’ in the UK? How does the form of discursive environment, which sees immigration as a social epidemic, impact on an immigrant worker’s experience of their cultural (dis)localities and subjectivity? In this article, I draw on my personal, psychoanalytically informed voice to explore these questions, by foregrounding the materiality of the hosting environment as the place in which the present relational matrix takes place, in which the internal dynamics of object relations are lived in the present sense, and the idiosyncratic expression of selfhood assumes forms.

The materialised reality of the place matters not least because it is drenched in power relations but also as it is where an immigrant worker seeks to live. The hostile host, in this sense, sees immigrants not simply as its guests (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000), but as unwelcome yet persistent guests to be yoked to their place of otherness and inferiority. By presenting vignettes of my encounters with the Home Office, I call into question the existential conditions of the immigrant worker and the potentiality for object-relatedness on relational grounds problematically punctured by hostile rhetoric. Could an immigrant’s sense of locality ever be anything but – evoking Said ([1999] 2013) – ‘out of place’? To address this, I will explore ‘out of place’ not simply as an emotional, lived experience, but also as a state of being that is embodied, psychically worked on and strategically evoked in resisting the power of the hostile host.

Author biography:

Nini Fang is a lecturer at Counselling, Psychotherapy, and Applied Social Sciences (CPASS) at University of Edinburgh. A lover of bubble tea and democracy at heart, she left her home country Taiwan and came to sunny Scotland in 2012 to train as a psychodynamic counsellor. She enjoyed the weather so much she decided to stay on and did a doctorate, which she finished in 2016 at Edinburgh. Her thesis looked at depression through Scottish theorist Ronald Fairbairn’s work. Her thesis opened her up to psychosocial inquiry towards locating the individual psychic processes within the social, cultural, and political environments. Her being an immigrant worker in the UK has ensured that there is no shortage of psychosocial inspiration and she will be kept on her toes writing.

These reading groups are free to attend and open to all. The reading group will be held on the last Friday of every month. All registered attendees will be sent a link to join a Zoom call before the event.

Other events are currently in the planning stage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or sign up as a Member to keep up to date with everything. Members will continue to receive copies of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies as a further benefit of subscription to the Association.