About

Creative disruption…

Moments of disruption – planned and unplanned – are everywhere in the fragile terrain of the social world, from micro-level gestures of resistance and refusal at the local scale to globally disruptive phenomena such as climate and ecological breakdown and pandemic. Disruption often precipitates discomfort, along with the temptation toward containing and smoothing out disruption as we meet it in the field and in the academy. In their historical concern with classification, coding and neat trajectories and conclusions, the white, cisheteropatriarchal ways of knowing that dominate the academy’s epistemic space mandate precisely this regulation of disruption. And yet moments of disruption also open up junctures for creative responses that can elicit new possibilities for ethical engagement with our disrupted world.

A psychosocial perspective offers a meeting place from which to creatively respond to – and perhaps purposefully harness and refigure – the inevitable disruption we encounter. And because a psychosocial analytic is, in a sense, built on creative disruption in its challenge to the binary separation of the ostensibly internal psyche and supposedly external social, many scholars and practitioners from across diverse fields of knowledge production find themselves navigating similar problematics. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinkers who traverse this terrain inhabit an epistemic space, therefore, that necessitates continual recalibration and reorientation of our analytics. As such, a psychosocial praxis insists on creating space for forms of knowledge narrowly construed by certain positivist positions as contentious, invalid or contaminating. The psychosocial’s profound concern with transdisciplinarity, along with the capaciousness of its subject matter and deep commitment to ethics, situates the field as potentially fertile ground from which to creatively respond to disruption and generate ethical modes of creative transformation. But has this provocation been taken up with the commitment it requires thus far?

We, Guilaine Kinouani, Hannah Reeves and Claudia Di Gianfrancesco, are three PhD peers based in the Psychosocial Department at Birkbeck College, University of London. With support from our Supervisor/Colleague Professor Stephen Frosh, we will be putting a collection, exploring these questions together.

The proposed volume, to be submitted to Studies in the psychosocial (Palgrave MacMillan), invites contributions that consider the potential of creative disruption as praxis, with particular attention to disciplinary intersections, meetings and tensions. Therefore, we collectively ask potential contributors to engage with the following questions, while also welcoming more questions concerned with our project of thinking psychosocial praxis with and through creative disruption:

  • What ethical responsibilities come with putting creatively disruptive theories and methods to work?
  • How does a psychosocial positionality demand that we respond creatively to disruption, and in turn creatively disrupt white settler and cisheteropatriachal world orders?
  • What does doing creatively disruptive work require of our ‘habits of being’ (hooks, 1990) in the clinic, the field, the academy, and the world?
  • What might a multi-disciplinary commitment to methodological and epistemic disruption, through the use of the creative, entail?
  • How can modes of failure, rejection, transformation, undoing and unbecoming (Halberstam, 2011) trouble neoliberal demands of productivity, positivity and success that dominate contemporary academic settings?

We welcome contributions that have not been previously published elsewhere. We are open to suggestions of various critical and creative formats that can be published on printed paper, approximately between 2500 and 8000 words.

If you would like to contribute, please contact us via email: creativedisruption2022@gmail.com, by 30th September 2022 with the following, as appropriate:

  • An abstract of up to 500 words
  • A provisional title for your contribution
  • The proposed format for your contribution

This call is open to multidisciplinary scholars who engage with the question of the psychosocial. We are particularly keen to encourage contributions from those who are new to academic publishing, including PhD students, Early Career Researchers, and psychosocial thinkers and practitioners beyond academia. We expect to respond to all queries.

Please feel free to get in touch with us to discuss your ideas and proposed format. Selected contributors will be informed within 6 weeks of the closing date.

We look forward to hearing from you and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Guilaine, Hannah and Claudia.

You can find out more about the editorial team, here.