Constellating Care

How do people listen and attend to the demanding affective intensities of intergenerational harm? How do they listen to what is not expressed in words? What is the relationship between silenced intergenerational injuries, heteronormativity, ethnoracialised access to citizenship and belonging, and decolonial healing? The Constellating Care project is an ethnography of decoloniality-oriented Systemic Constellation Work (SCW) conducted in the Netherlands, a society shaped by complex colonial histories, diverse migrant communities, and an imperative to doe normaal (just be normal), where SCW has emerged since the early 2020s as a widely adopted healing practice for intergenerational harm. SCW is a form of group therapy in which participants, guided by a facilitator, immerse themselves in intergenerational silences, understood by practitioners to be lodged in individual and collective bodies, in order to heal from cycles of harm. Drawing on queer feminist theory, affect studies, Black Studies, and critical studies of care, therapeutic cultures, and trauma, I argue that in this context healing from intergenerational harm has been organised around the imperative to 'decolonize oneself'. I argue further that intergenerational healing is understood as both a personal responsibility and a fundamental human right, illuminating the tensions and possibilities that arise at the intersection of therapeutic practice, political struggle, and embodied knowledge. This talk contributes to broader conversations about the role of therapeutic cultures in shaping, and being shaped by, contemporary decolonial and social justice movements.

Dr Ana Éclair is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research draws on queer feminist, decolonial, affect, and care studies to examine how histories of colonial violence, trauma, and structural inequality shape bodies, relationships, and memory. At the heart of her scholarship is a sustained inquiry into how silences and the unspeakable are carried across generations, bodies, and intimate relationships. Her current research extends into practices of self-care, therapy cultures, and wellbeing, exploring how they intersect with decoloniality and social justice.

Dr Jennie Gamlin is Associate Professor at the UCL Institute for Global Health and deputy director of the Centre for Gender and Global Health. She teaches Critical Medical Anthropology and Gender and Global Health. Jennie’s current research explores the coloniality of gender and maternal health in Mexican indigenous Wixárika communities, with whom she has worked since 2009. Her current work is exploring how gender was reconstructed in the process of colonialism and independence and how this has shaped reproductive choices, how women give birth and gender dynamics in kinship groups and communities. Jennie’s work engages with Anthropocene questions of indigenous knowledge and knowledge categories as these relate to social, community and human wellbeing. As with her previous research project on structural vulnerability, Jennie’s research seeks to understand encounters between Wixárika ontologies and medical epistemologies shaped by relationships with cosmos, non-humans and environment, and biomedical healthcare structures.