‘Doing Psychology’ in Brighton

What do you think 'Doing Psychology' involves? Teaching and learning, researching and publishing? Although these are pivotal components, to me Doing Psychology is so much more. It requires a critical approach to the discipline and a contextual understanding of the University as a locus of knowledge (re)production, exchange, and subversion. Doing Psychology means a connection with the local communities to create synergies of solidarity, resistance, and activism.

All of this is intrinsically psychological and, yes, political. To the horror of academic and practitioner psychologists devoted to a positivist epistemology, I argue that the neutrality, repeatability, and objectivity of psychology as 'science' are simply a delusion. In Hannah Arendt's term of the 'human condition', the 'human' is unique, complex, and exuberant, and the 'condition' is way more than our brain, cortisol levels and reaction times. 

The condition includes all the structural factors that create, perpetuate and worsen inequalities (such as austerity, borders control, institutional racism, etc.). This is not sociology or criminology – as Isaac Prilleltensky points out, what is political is psychological, and vice versa. Here, I will share my views on how and why 'Doing Psychology' is limited within part of the discipline and some universities; and how Brighton might be, although not perfect, at least different.

A critical approach to the discipline

In a context of high-paced, marketised (mental) healthcare and higher education provision, it is tempting to bend to logics of short-term routinised interventions. Taylorism applied to human bodyminds, whilst structures remain (increasingly) enslaved to a capitalist framework. There is profit in systems remaining outdated, inefficient, unfunded. 

Ask the people who work every day in healthcare and higher education how much they feel they are effectively, genuinely, and promptly serving their students or patients (who, by the way, are labelled as customers or clients). Do they feel they are doing the right thing? Is this how they dreamed of working? The results may be much more dissatisfying than the pompously faked achievements of student and service user satisfaction rates (see Walker et al., 2022; Hanna et al., 2022; Graber et al., 2020).

In order to help, change and heal others – be they students or patients – Psychology first needs to liberate itself from the binding toxic roots of its capitalist patriarchal global-North Western past and present (Martín-Baró, 1994). Psychology does not need to break humans down into smaller parts, seek balance and label symptoms. Such 'behaviour' is already a 'symptom': a symptom that Psychology is ill and unequipped to heal humans, that it suffers a deep inferiority complex towards 'hard' sciences.

Like a tyrant, Psychology hangs on, desperately and ferociously, to its position of power in fear (Bigliazzi, 2017). But fear is nothing more than another device of the ego to avoid actual change. It keeps everyone enslaved: the tyrant and the people, the oppressor and the oppressed, the academics and the students, the psy professionals and the patients. Nobody is really free, and nobody is able to free anyone else until we stop relying on ideas, concepts of how things should be. 

Instead, we should listen more to the experience of beings, look at things as they really are, at people for who they really are, at Psychology for what it really is: a tool, not an aim. Truth, healing, and liberation are a pathless land; psychology is just a way, an interesting (and potentially generous) one, not the only or best one, especially the way it exists now.

University as a place of tension

The rigour, homogeneity, rationality of a discipline that creates order is constantly challenged by the exuberance, heterogeneity, irrationality of mere existence which is chaotic and constantly unfolding. Panta rei or Tao; both ancient western and eastern philosophies agree that everything flows and unfolds. At University we watch. We watch the flux, we observe, analyse and discuss parts of it, we combine, share, dismantle samples of it, we subvert and change perspectives. But we are so obsessed with 'getting it right' or 'getting it all' that we lose sight of the simple inescapable fact that it cannot be 'got' in the first place.

So, we set assessment criteria, deadlines, skills, tasks, learning outcomes, as if they were the most serious things in academic life, buying into the delusion that this is how academic life is supposed to be. We forget that all this is neither academic nor life. Increasing administrative tasks, unbearable workloads, performance indicators for staff, and high fees, strict deadlines, capped marks and high numbers for students are in the way of attending to the only mission any university has: understanding (not only cognitively) life as it is.

University is the place where such tensions between academic discipline and undisciplined existence can be seen in all their magnitude. Universities are caught in the grip of financial liability, benchmarks, accountability, professional excellence. When an institution and a discipline become a place of regulation instead of allowing, profits instead of giving, to reach something ideal instead of letting the real unfold, they just talk about what they want to do but they don't do it. There can't be hope without the right 'action'. And action has long be mistaken in higher education for producing tangible outputs, making objective benchmarks.

In ancient Greece, 'action' was the coming together of people who are interconnected. This form of action is inherently political – not the endless boredom of empty tasks dictated by useless bureaucracy, but the meaningful enriching experience of togetherness, community, and solidarity.

Synergies of solidarity, resistance, and activism 

Students are usually very eager to move between the safe, ordered, and secluded world of academia and the 'real world out there'. The fact that they perceive such discrepancy between theorisation of experience and lived experience is a reminder of how far the discipline and the institutions are from helping, healing, and effecting transformative social change.

At the University of Brighton, we are not immune to this. But we do have the opportunity to develop critical contents and modules that are a resource for such exchange, and sometimes subversion. This happens at all levels with UG modules dedicated to, or incorporating, the impact of socioeconomic status, disabilities, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship status, etc. 

At postgraduate level, we offer the only MA in Community Psychology in the UK which specifically deals with a value-driven approach to Doing Psychology based on social justice, care for the Earth and others, and community (Walker et al., 2022; Kagan et al., 2022; Kagan et al., 2020). This is pursued also using participatory and creative methos for which there is a dedicated PGR Creative Methods Group, supported by the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing.  

Brighton as a town is quite a social laboratory, with a number of community-led initiatives and grass-roots programmes. This allows for students, academics, and psy professionals to engage with non-normative activities and practices free from the constraints of coded, ruled, and standardised job roles. 

Some of our academics in Psychology are dedicated to creating synergies of solidarity, resistance, and activism with local communities, for example: R2R: Room to Rant: Young Men, Health Research and Rap, The Ignite project – Developing a 'health as social movement approach' to children and young people's mental and emotional wellbeing in Worthing, Pathways between LGBTQ migration, social isolation and mental distress: The temporal-relational-spatial experiences of LGBTQ mental health service-users, and Brighton and Hove Common Ambition: Coproducing the Homeless Health Care System. And vice versa – communities participate in academic life by providing plenty of material and resources by means of partnerships, guest speakers, coresearchers (Walker et al., 2022; Johnson, & Monney, 2021).

Solidarity stems from the awareness that universities exist together with the communities they inhabit, that others are the same essence in different forms. Solidarity stems from the acknowledgment that someone's privilege is someone else's oppression, that someone's entitlement to set rules is someone else's voice silenced. With solidarity we bond because we recognise our sameness, and we share it in order to resist.

What should we be resisting? The ongoing delusion that value is determined by the number of articles published, impact factor, bids won, students enrolled, satisfaction rates. That psychology can deal with psyche (soul, spirit) objectively, neutrally, individually. That academia alone can make a difference, when policy makers and communities are not involved. That the pain people experience is rooted in an individual deficit rather than in a collective deficit: a deficit of solidarity.

When solidarity is present, it fertilises the social body which then thrives in resistance and activism. Activism is resistance to injustice and germination of the new possible. Activism is the space for coming together and taking collective action in the ancient Greek sense; a space which is sadly increasingly limited, surveilled, and denied. Activism is political and psychological, and psychology cannot exist without political activism, without people and the physical, mental and spiritual spaces they inhabit.

I hope anyone visiting Brighton, perhaps on the occasion of the European Congress of Psychology, can experience this. Not just look at it, or talk about it, or even just praise it: act in solidarity with it.

Anna Zoli, Ph.D, FHEA, MBPsS, Principal Lecturer in Psychology, Course Leader for MA Community Psychology, School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Brighton. [email protected]

Key sources

Bigliazzi, S. (2017). Introduction: The tyrant's fear. Comparative Drama, 51(4), 434-454. 
Graber, R., Zoli, A., Walker, C. & Artaraz, K. (2020). A death in the family: Citizens' experiences of changing healthcare commissioning practices in South East England. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 30(6), 603-615. 
Hanna, P., Erickson, M. & Walker, C. (2022). UK Higher Education staff experiences of moral injury during the COVID-19 pandemic. Higher education: the international journal of higher education research, 1-18. 
Johnson, H. & Monney, N. (2021). Using the Arts to Support the Arts: A Creative, Community-University Partnership Approach to Building Arts Inclusivity in Economically-Deprived Communities. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 22(3), [2]. 
Kagan, C., Akhurst, J., Alfaro, J., et al. (Eds.). (2022). The Routledge International Handbook of Community Psychology: Facing Global Crises with Hope. Routledge. 
Kagan, C., Burton, M., Duckett, P., et al. (2020). Critical community psychology: Critical action and social change (Second;2; ed.). Routledge. 
Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a Liberation Psychology. Harvard University Press.
Walker, C., Zlotowitz, S. & Zoli, A. (Ed.) (2022). The Palgrave Handbook of Innovative Community and Clinical Psychologies. Palgrave Macmillan.