ABSTRACT

The central theme of this book is the operation of intersecting discourses of power, privilege and positioning as they are revealed in fraught encounters between in-groups and out-groups in our deeply fractured world. The authors offer a unique perspective on inter-group dynamics and structural violence at local, societal, cultural and global levels, dissecting processes of toxic ‘othering’ and psychosocial (re-)traumatisation.

The book offers the Diogenes Paradigm as a unique conceptual tool with which to analyse the ways in which those of us who come to be located outside or on the margins of dominant social structures are, in one way or another, the inheritors of the legacies of centuries of oppression and exclusion. This analysis offers a distinctive psycho-social redefinition of trauma that foregrounds the relationship between the inhospitable environments we generate and the experiences of un-housedness that we thereby perpetuate.

Written in an engaging and accessible style, Psycho-social Explorations of Trauma, Exclusion and Violence directly addresses pressing global issues of racial trauma, human mobility and climate disaster, and offers a manifesto for the creative re-imagining of the places and spaces in which conversations about restructuring and reparation can become sustainable. This is an essential and compelling book for anyone committed to social justice, especially for all practitioners working in health, social care and community justice settings, and researchers and academics across the behavioural and social sciences.

part I|90 pages

Un-housed minds

chapter 2|16 pages

The Diogenes Paradigm

chapter 3|16 pages

Citizens of the world? 1

chapter 5|17 pages

Agoraphilia and agoraphobia

Negotiating fraught encounters in open spaces

part II|41 pages

Inhospitable environments

chapter 6|18 pages

“Who watches the watchers”?

(Dis)organised responses to psycho-social traumatisation

chapter 7|21 pages

The inhospitable planetary environment

‘Climate migration’, pandemic and biosphere destruction

part III|45 pages

Reclaiming the agora

chapter 9|18 pages

Practices of disappointment

Going along with stuff less and getting out more