The Black Researcher as living and bodily archive: Racial trauma, resistance, and community transformation with Guilaine Kinouani
Although the whiteness of the curriculum and the violence of the archive continue to come under vast amount of scrutiny and criticism from all academic fields (Teo, 2002; Hartman, 2008; Peters, 2015), there has been little interrogation of their possible consequences in terms of both psychological and physical health for researchers and scholars who are racialised as Black.
Yet those whose work and studies involve delving repeatedly into these cultural and historical reservoirs, must routinely witness the atrocities contained therein. The loud silence of empty spaces speaking of purposefully erased stories. The normalisation of dehumanisation, commodification and pathologisation. A key role for the community at large.
In this process, their bodies as living and community archival devices (Kinouani, 2024) will become permeated, imprinted, and often altered by the scholarly encounter.
In The wretched of the earth, Fanon (2004), establishes the devastating pathology of white supremacy and white domination during decolonial wars. Further, he observes that the (post) traumatic effects of white violence on the intellectual colonial subject, which relied heavily on epistemic means, was more transformative and enduring in terms of identity and psychological disturbances.
The invisibilisation of whiteness-related risks associated with scholarly work highlights structural anti-Blackness. If Black intellectual work within white institutions likely pauses risks of racial traumatisation, spaces that centre resistance, and safeguarding for the Black body and the black mind need to exist. This is the purpose of this intervention. To illuminate mechanisms of harm, risks, and mitigation, but also to re-cast the role of the Black researcher in relation to the community, using African epistemology.
Guilaine Kinouani is an award-winning writer, psychologist, group analyst, and thinker. She is the founder of Race Reflections. She taught critical psychology, social sciences and Black studies at Syracuse before her PhD at Birkbeck. Her first book Living While Black (2021) exposes the impact of racism on Black minds and bodies. Her second book, White Minds (2023) is a psychosocial exploration of the quotidian workings of whiteness. In her upcoming co-edited collection: Creative Disruption: Psychosocial scholarship as praxis (2025), contributors explore power, knowledge, memory, embodiment and the of potential of multidisciplinary approaches in fostering epistemic disruption. Guilaine’s current thesis examines whiteness and the afterlives of colonialism and enslavement in the clinic using Afro-analytics, a frame she is developing to rethink racial trauma, inheritance, transmission and associated issues of communication and embodiment within the Black diaspora.
Schedule:
- 12pm – welcome, lunch and networking
- 1pm – talk and discussion to follow
