This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi. Lara us Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University, and the secretary and president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology. She is also co-editor of Studies in Gender & Sexuality and of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara also serves on the advisory board to the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride.

Stephen Sheehi is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies and Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project at William & Mary, where he is also Professor of Arabic Studies in the Asian and Middle East Studies Program, Arabic Program, and Asian and Pacific Islander American Studies Program. Stephen is also the author of Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine (with Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar), Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860-1910, and Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims and Foundations of Modern Arab Identity.

Lara and Stephen describe how their work has changed since the pandemic, and unpack the frequently overlooked pitfalls of face-to-face communication and the sanitisation of our daily human experiences. 

We discuss the framework guiding their research into and documentation of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation—threaded with insight from Palestinian clinicians while centering the stories of non-clinical Palestinians.

Lara and Stephen help clarify the origins of not only colonial psychology, but the revolutionary work of psychiatrist and Marxist Frantz Fanon, arguably the architect of what is now called liberation psychology.

We also go over cases of colonial psychological warfare as well as the methods used by Israel's settler colonial state to disrupt and destroy Palestinian life.

You can follow Lara on Twitter @blackflaghag and buy the Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine from Routledge, and wherever fine books are sold.

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