Robert Beshara

The International Conference on Radical Humanism invites scholars to submit proposals for papers, which critique bourgeois, liberal, and/or Eurocentric humanism(s) from the perspectives of Indigenous studies, Black studies, and/or postcolonial/decolonial studies and using concepts from Marxism, anarchism, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and/or Africana, Asian, and Latin American philosophies.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Tommy J. Curry, Ph.D., Texas A&M University and Patricia Trujillo, Ph.D., Northern New Mexico College.



Proposals are due by March 1, 2019.



The 2019 International Critical Psychology Praxis Congress, a transdisciplinary event bringing together global scholars, activists, and practitioners who desire to imagine a worldcentric critical psychology from the perspective of the damnés, will be held at Northern New Mexico College in Española, NM on September 27-28, 2019.



The theme of the Congress is psychosocial non-alignment to modernity/coloniality. Non-alignment is a reference to the Global South’s Non-Aligned Movement. The Global South is both a politico-economic and a geographical designation that refers to transmodern cultures in the continents of South America, Africa, and Asia. Furthermore, the Global South signifies ‘outsiders within’—that is, decolonial subcultures in the Global North.



Papers must be written in the spirit of both praxis, which for Paulo Freire (1970/2018) means “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (p. 51), and what Angela Davis (2016) dubs “the intersectionality of struggles” (p. 19, emphasis added). The goal of the Congress then is to bridge the North-South divide in critical psychology, a function of ethnocentrism, through solidarity and dialogue.



To fulfill this goal, papers must explicitly address non-aligned theories, philosophies, histories, and/or practices from the Global South vis-à-vis one of the following 12 topic areas:



1. Theoretical resources for critical psychology



a) Marxism / Anarchism / Critical theory

b) Psychoanalysis

c) Feminism

d) Post-structuralism / Speculative realism

e) Postcolonialism / Decoloniality

f) Critical philosophy of race



2. Practical applications of critical psychology



a) Clinical practice

b) Activism / Law

c) Radical research

d) Pedagogy / Dialogue

e) Ecology / Spirituality

f) Ethics /Aesthetics / Politics



Please email paper proposals as Word attachments, including title, 250-word abstract and brief bio to Robert K. Beshara (robert.beshara@nnmc.edu) using the following Email subject line: Submission for the 2019 ICPPC. Kindly indicate which of the 12 topic areas you are interested in. Also, state whether or not you would be interested in presenting a poster if your paper proposal is rejected. To propose a pre-constituted panel of three, please send the individual abstracts and other information in a single attachment.



Notifications will be made on May 1, 2019.



Early registration ($125): May 1 - June 30, 2019.

Regular registration ($150): July 1 - August 31, 2019.

Late registration ($175): September 1-28, 2019.



The registration fee for non-NNMC attendees: $50. There is no fee for attendees from the NNMC community, but registration is still required.



Any information related to the Congress will be posted to the Critical Praxis Cooperative website under 2019 ICPPC: www.criticalpsychology.org

The 2019 International Critical p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶ Praxis Congress, a transdisciplinary event bringing together global scholars, activists, and practitioners who desire to imagine a worldcentric critical p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶ from the perspective of the damnés, will be held at Northern New Mexico College in Española, NM on September 27-28, 2019.

The theme of the Congress is psychosocial non-alignment to modernity/coloniality. Non-alignment is a reference to the Global South’s Non-Aligned Movement. The Global South is both a politico-economic and a geographical designation that refers to transmodern cultures in the continents of South America, Africa, and Asia. Furthermore, the Global South signifies ‘outsiders within’—that is, decolonial subcultures in the Global North.

Papers must be written in the spirit of both praxis, which for Paulo Freire (1970/2018) means “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (p. 51), and what Angela Davis (2016) dubs “the intersectionality of struggles” (p. 19, emphasis added). The goal of the Congress then is to bridge the North-South divide in critical p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶, a function of ethnocentrism, through solidarity and dialogue.

A Critical Introduction to Psychology is the first scholarly book, in which fifteen critical psychologists analyze chapters from popular Introduction to Psychology textbooks. In their critiques of mainstream (Euro-American) psychology, the authors of this edited volume also envision a pluriversal, transdisciplinary psychology, which is inclusive of critical voices from all over the world.

In this provocative and necessary book, Robert K. Beshara uses psychoanalytic discursive analysis to explore the possibility of a genuinely anti-colonial critical psychology. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial approaches to Islamophobia, this book enhances understandings of Critical Border Thinking and Lacanian Discourse Analysis alongside other theoretico-methodological approaches.

Using a critical decolonial psychology approach to conceptualize everyday Islamophobia, the author examines theoretical resources situated within the discursive turn, such as decoloniality/transmodernity, and carries out an archaeology of (counter)terrorism, a genealogy of the conceptual Muslim, and a Žižekian ideology critique. Conceiving of Decolonial Psychoanalysis as one theoretical resource for Critical Islamophobia Studies (CIS), the author also applies Lacanian Discourse Analysis to extracts from interviews conducted with US Muslims to theorize their ethico-political subjectivity and considers a politics of resistance, adversarial aesthetics, and ethics of liberation.

Essential to any attempt to come to terms with the legacy of racism in psychology, and the only critical psychological study on Islamophobia in the US, this is fascinating reading for anyone interested in a critical approach to Islamophobia.

The Nartist Manifesto was written on 09/28/2011 (Chicago, IL) and revised on 03/03/2020 (Santa Fe, NM). I read the manifesto in public at the Southside Hub of Production (S.h.o.P.) in Hyde Park (Chicago,
IL) on 11/06/2011. The Nartist Manifesto grew out of my frustration with the politics of art scenes around the world (i.e., the movers & shakers who get to define what constitutes ‘art’ or ‘good’ art). The Nartist Manifesto grew specifically out of an angry poem, it was my way of channeling my frustration into something playful because who writes
manifestos these days anyways?

This article retraces the advent of psychoanalysis in Egypt and the way in which it has failed to differentiate itself from medical and academic models, remaining dominated by the figure of the persecuting Master outside its ranks and the paternal Master within them. It then goes on to discuss the arguments typically set forward to explain resistance to psychoanalysis in Egypt and the Arab world in general, and this with an aim to both relativizing and exploring such positions. Such resistance can indeed be identified not only within the sphere of the demand for analysis.

This essay argues for the relevance of Engaged Buddhism to critical psychology.
The teachings of Vietnamese Zen master, Thích Nhất Hạnh or Thầy (teacher), as an
embodiment of Engaged Buddhism, are an amalgamation of the wisdoms of both the
Theravāda tradition and the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) School of Mahāyāna
Buddhism, which was founded by Nāgārjuna and which emphasizes the principle of
Śūnyatā (emptiness) - a principle eloquently immortalized in the Heart Sūtra. From
the Mahāyāna perspective, we inter-are because the self is made only of non-self
elements, which include not only the Five Skandhas, but also everything in the
universe from the Big Bang onwards. The doctrine of anattā (non-self) encourages
neither psychosis nor irresponsibility; in fact, it stands for the exact opposite, as is
clear from Hạnh’s philosophy of interbeing with its radical emphasis on a
worldcentric ethic, which is foundational for Engaged Buddhism as liberation praxis.
Thầy’s words encourage us to see how profoundly interconnected we are with all
sentient beings and everything else, which is a much needed practical philosophy in
times like these when we are faced with ecological disasters, such as climate
breakdown and environmental racism.

In this essay, translated from French and with an introduction by Robert
Beshara, Hussein Abdel Kader traces the history of psychoanalysis in Egypt after
touching on the contributions of the Pharaonic and Arab civilizations to psychology.
Originally published in 2004, Abdel Kader ends the essay with a critique of the
International Psychoanalytic Association and a reflection on the relationship
between psychoanalysis and religion, particularly in the Global South.

Lacanian psychoanalysis has been a theoretical resource for
critical psychology since its formal inception in the 1970s.
In this essay, I critically review some of the major Lacanian
psychoanalytic accounts of racism, particularly over the last
30 years, in an attempt to expand these accounts through a
liberatory framework. My two-fold aim with the theoreticomethodological
praxis that I am calling liberation psychoanalysis
is: (1) to decolonize Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis
and (2) to historicize racism within a psychoanalytic
reading that is dialectically materialist. Decolonizing psychoanalysis
does not entail canceling it; on the contrary,
metonymic decolonization is the name for critical yet sympathetic
readings of modern fields of knowledge (e.g., psychoanalysis)
from a Global Southern perspective, the ultimate
goal of which is worlding.

This essay offers a critique of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, which is read not only as a modern field but also as a colonial project. The attempt is not to reject psychoanalysis altogether, for it contains within itself the potential for its own liberation. Rather, the aim of the critique is expanding psychoanalysis beyond its comfort zone within modern epistemology by way of the decolonial theorizing of Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

This paper draws from my radical qualitative research on the link between Islamophobia/Islamophilia and (counter)terrorism in the US. For my book, Decolonial Psychoanalysis, I interviewed 19 US Muslims asking them about not only their experiences with Islamophobia but also, and more significantly, how they resist it. My conclusion, based on the analysis, is that US Muslims resist Islamophobia in at least two distinct ways: epistemically and ontically. These forms of resistance constitute what I call “actual liberation”.

In this essay, I start with addressing the question of "has Islamophobia reached a tipping point in the United States"? Then I apply Lacanian social theory, drawing on Slavoj Žižek's analysis of anti-Semitism through the seven veils of fantasy, to Islamophobia in an effort to conceptualize the complex psychosocial phenomenon as a fundamental fantasy, which ideologically sustains the 'war on terror' discourse. Finally, I end with a brief remark on the possibility of Islamophobia as a counter-discourse.

In this essay, I use Lacanian film theory to critically analyze two biographical films—Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. (2018)—released in theatres around the same time that portray, using the rags-to-riches trope, two British recording artists who share a South Asian ethnicity.

Decolonizing everyday Islamophobia entails both reflecting on and transforming the epistemology of (structural and interactional) Islamophobia through a radical humanist ontology. A manifestation of this ontology is an antiterrorist ethic of resistance, which involves a nonviolent praxis: a gesture of love. A gesture of love from the oppressed is the transmodern/ decolonial corrective to the (counter)terrorism dispositif. This essay is written for scholar–activists, particularly critical psychologists, who desire working within a radical humanist framework in their struggle against everyday Islamophobia.

In the spirit of praxis, I connect Lacanian theory with the practice of making a
video. Lucky in Savannah, which is an experimental adaptation of “Lucky’s speech” from Samuel Beckett’s (1954/1984) masterpiece, Waiting for Godot—"[t]he prototype of a modernist text” according to Slavoj Žižek (1991). For Žižek (2017), Beckett—rather than Shakespeare—is “a kenotic writer, a writer of utter self-emptying of subjectivity, of its reduction to a minimal difference” (p. 300). Will Greenshields (2017) argues that Žižek goes further than Lacan, and even performs an anti-Žižekian move when choosing Beckett over Joyce: “While for Joyce the beginning and end were so close as to be indistinguishable…for Beckett there is such a thing as a beginning, a bare minimum, and if the truly revolutionary act is to be achieved, one must return to it” (p. 13). For these reasons, it is certainly worthwhile to consider Beckettavec Žižek and others (cf.
Greenshields, 2017; Moder, 2015). In my video, I employ a Beckettian aesthetic
informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, which leads me to the following question: Is Lucky's speech an example of “full speech” par excellence (Lacan, 1953), or is it a Real manifestation of the sinthome as "the meaningless letter that immediately procures jouissense, ‘enjoyment-in-meaning,' 'enjoy-meant'" (Žižek, 1991)?

In this article, I dissect an excerpt from George W. Bush's address to a joint session of Congress and the American people wherein the former President of the United States (POTUS) uttered the (catch)phrase the 'war on terror' (WOT). To accomplish this dissection, I apply Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) together with Lacanian psychoanalysis among other critical tools. My aim here is to deconstruct/recode the WOT discourse in the hope of opening up possibilities for alternative, and more constructive, counter-discourses on the social problem of 'terrorism' that afford multiple subject positions beyond the (counter)terrorism binary. As an Orientalist ideology, the WOT indexes the larger archive of Amer-ican exceptionalism and can be traced back to the rise of the neo-conservative movement in the 1980s. This analysis is particularly relevant in the context of the current political climate in the United States, where the WOT rhetoric continues to normalise the logic of Islamophobia.

In the following mini-study, quantitative content analysis was used to investigate differences in the United States print media's coverage of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Four articles were analyzed, two from the corporate media and two from independent sources. The four articles did not disagree on the existence of terrorism, but they differed in terms of their assumptions regarding the cause(s) of terrorism as well as in terms of how the terrorist subject is configured discursively. Blaming Islam in general, or all Muslims, in relation to terrorist acts perpetrated by a few criminals can have drastic results, such as Islamophobia.

In this article, I will use the two truths doctrine from Buddhism to explicate transformative social change as a transmodern moral framework for critical psychological research. The two truths doctrine, a teaching from the Madhyamaka, or Middle Way, school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by Nāgārjuna, nondualistically collapses the ontology of transformation (absolute truth) and the epistemology of social change (relative truth) in the name of soteriology. At their core, dualistic problems and reductionist solutions are based upon the reification of concepts, which can result in devastating effects, such as the objectification (and oppression) of research participants—not mentioning moral relativism. This article attempts to offer a transmodern moral framework for qualitative and theoretical researchers in critical psychology outside the confines of the modern–postmodern debate.

This paper explores the theoretical fruits of the marriage between Social Constructionism and Buddhist psychology, particularly vis-à-vis reality, selfhood, and social change. In Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmannn's 1966 classic, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, the authors called for a " sociological psychology, " which this paper addresses by building upon some of the insights from Engaged Buddhism, specifically the Order of Interbeing. The paper's chief aim is to understand the psychological construction of reality via a Buddhist psychology of knowledge in order to imagine what the next cultural paradigm shift might look like. The author of this paper imagines a transmodern and ecocentric global culture as informed by the major changes that have been happening since 2007.

If emotions are the link between the body and the mind, it makes sense why unregulated negative emotions (e.g., fear and anger), particularly when repressed by those who are suffering from trauma, understood as dukkha, can make them feel dissociated. The practice of mindfulness can serve as a bridge between the body and the mind; in combination with other holistic approaches, mindfulness can help trauma sufferers regulate their negative emotions, hence, allowing them to experience higher degrees of emotional resilience. To explicate the importance of working with negative emotions references will be made to the mind-body problem since it lies at the philosophical foundation of all the social sciences. Also, the relationship between the mind/consciousness and the body/the unconscious vis-à-vis selfhood will be discussed in relation to psychoanalysis, Buddhist psychology, and mind-body medicine.

I am teaching an online seminar through GCAS titled Critical Psychology as Radical Praxis. It's in 4 sessions and begins on July 06, 2019. For more information and to sign up, please visit: https://gcas.matrixlms.eu/user_catalog_class/show/4305?title=Critical-Psychology-Foundations-and-Overview

In this essay, I start by addressing the question of “has Islamophobia reached a tipping point in the United States”? Then I apply Lacanian social theory, drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of anti-Semitism through the seven veils of fantasy, to Islamophobia in an effort to conceptualize the complex psychosocial phenomenon as a fundamental fantasy, which ideologically sustains the ‘war on terror’ discourse. Finally, I end with a brief remark on the possibility of Islamophobia as a counter-discourse.

In this paper, the researcher examined a case study from Facebook: a question posted publicly by a contemporary American writer and philosopher, whom we shall refer to with the pseudonym FR, and the comments he received on his question from his virtual friends and followers. The data was analyzed using grounded theory in three broad stages: open coding, higher order themes, and theoretical sensitivities. The nature of the question and the answers were psychological, so it was commonsensical to evaluate the advice that FR received and to try to identify FR‘s mental condition based on the available clues, that is, the phrasing of FR‘s question and the comments his question received on Facebook. Based upon the researcher's interpretation of the qualitative data the following theory was generated: Facebook friends can play the role of mental health amateurs; however, it is our responsibility to be discerning as receivers of such lay psychological advice. An argument is made for Face...