(Postponed) Research Network: Burn-out and Healing Sophie Hoyle and Dr Stephanie Davis

Due to unforeseen circumstances this event will be rescheduled at a later date. We apologise for any inconvenience and we will keep you updated with further news. The other events as part of the Research Network ‘Duties of Self-Care’ public programme will continue as scheduled. In the meantime, thank you for your patience and understanding.

During this Research Network event, part of the Duties of Self Care programme, Sophie Hoyle and Dr Stephanie Davis will discuss burn-out, mental health and networks of healing in the contexts of intersectional activism and anti-psychiatry.

Sophie Hoyle will present some of their work and research relating to lived experiences of psychiatric conditions, trauma and its biomedical treatment, from which they began to explore anti-psychiatry, transcultural psychiatry, and alternative networks of support and healing. Dr Stephanie Davis will be speaking as an activist and an academic, and in particular about QTPOC activism and wellbeing, community, conflict and burn-out. Together they will discuss the necessity of networks of support and healing for the survival of marginalised groups, amid the reduction of mental healthcare services under austerity.

Sophie Hoyle

Sophie Hoyle is an artist and writer whose practice explores an intersectional approach to post-colonial, queer, feminist, anti-psychiatry and disability issues. Their work looks at the relation of the personal to (and as) political, individual and collective anxieties, and how alliances can be formed where different kinds of inequality and marginalisation intersect. They relate personal experiences of being queer, non-binary and part of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) diaspora to wider forms of structural violence. From lived experience of psychiatric conditions and trauma, or PTSD, they began to explore the history of biomedical technologies rooted in state and military surveillance and control.

Dr Stephanie Davis

Dr Stephanie Davis is a scholar-activist, a queer Black troublemaker, and a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of East London. She has a specific interest in the intersections of race, gender and sexuality; critical community psychology; critical pedagogies and decolonising academia. She has previously worked in a community development and activist capacity on issues of sexual health with young people and Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities and on issues facing her local community such as police harassment and gender and sexual diversity. In 2013, she co-founded Rainbow Noir, a social support and organising space for queer and trans people of colour (QTPOC) in Manchester. As an educator she is inspired by bell hooks’ ‘education as the practice of freedom’ and strives to create learning environments with her students that encourage openness, dialogue, debate, and critical thinking. As a scholar-activist she is excited by the possibilities of working both within academia and beyond its boundaries.

Image: Sophie Hoyle, Electronic-Body-Music, photo by Chooc Ly Tan, 2018.