APS Reading Group: No room at the inn? Re-imagining social inclusion at the intersections between climate change, globalisation, homelessness & human migration

Abstract:

There are two dominant and competing ways of conceptualising the psychosocial dynamics of social inclusion. In ‘Metropolitan’ systems, if you’re the wrong side of that line which denotes who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’, you’re excluded and oppressed, but you can ‘come in from the cold’ if you accept the terms of the invitation. In ‘Cosmopolitan’ systems, there are different accounts and practices, but essentially there’s a ‘comprehending circle’ involved, in which all are included by being drawn in towards the centre. Climate disaster threatens to overturn these paradigms. I build upon Latour’s work on the new politics of globalisation, as well as upon my previous (co-authored) work concerning Diogenes of Sinope, who coined the term ‘Kosmopolitēs’. The figure of Diogenes may stand for a third position: a monadic figure beyond system and order. This third position illuminates fraught encounters between imperialist in-groups and colonised out-groups in late modernity. The Keeling Count at Mauna Loa is a register whose implications suggest that, in the Anthropocene, we are all unhoused. Latour’s ‘migrations without form or nation’ of ‘climate, erosion, pollution, resource depletion, habitat destruction’ threaten to make migrants of us all – or, to remind us that once we all were migrants.

Article available here and will be circulated with the Zoom link.

Author biography:

John Adlam is a group psychotherapist and independent researcher. He works for the most part in the National Health Service, where he is Consultant Adult Forensic Psychotherapist at Bethlem Royal Hospital and Principal Adult Psychotherapist at Springfield Hospital. He previously worked in the Outreach Service of the Henderson Hospital Democratic Therapeutic Community, for the last seven years of that community’s existence before it was cynically closed down in 2008. He is a founder member of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and a former Vice President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. He is co-editor of the two-volume set Violent States and Creative States: From the Global to the Individual (2018); also of Forensic Music Therapy (2012) and The Therapeutic Milieu Under Fire: Security and Insecurity in Forensic Mental Health (2012). He is at the moment working on a new book co-written with Christopher Scanlon on the theme of ‘Unhoused minds and inhospitable environments’.

Twitter: @Diogenesquely Weblog: Barrelblog.org

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