Awry: Journal of Critical Psychology

Reaching Back to Move Forward

Michael Arfken — 2025-07-28

This is the introduction to this issue of Awry: Journal of Critical Psychology.

Marxism & Psychology Conference - 2010

Ian Parker — 2025-07-28

This is an introduction to the plenary sessions at the 2010 Marxism & Psychology Conference at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Marxism & Psychology Conference (2010)

John Cromby — 2025-07-28

This is the Alienation Plenary from the 2010 Marxism & Psychology Conference.

Marxism & Psychology Conference (2010)

Raquel Guzzo — 2025-07-28

This is the Ideology Plenary from the 2010 Marxism & Psychology Conference.

Marxism & Psychology Conference (2010)

Louis Holzman — 2025-07-28

This is the Methodology Plenary from the 2010 Marxism & Psychology Conference.

Experimental Writing on Genocidal Times

Ali Lara — 2025-07-28

This editorial note to the second special issue Awry2, the Awry section devoted to experimental writing and form, introduces the three articles in the issue by two gestures. The first one is to create the political frame for these special issue as one centered on the current genocide suffered by the people of Palestine. The argument is that experimental writing unsettles the rigidity of the forms and that these forms, in academia, Palestine and the rest of the world, at all levels, are established by colonization, power, capital, whiteness. Thus, writing otherwise becomes a political responsibility. Our second framing gesture is to point to the common ground of our three contributions, they all seem to be expanding the experimentation from the writing to the doing, thinking, dreaming, and other aesthetic domains of revolution. The experimentation expands through the proposition of solid busviscus adventures with concepts, methods, and political reflections commented also in this intro. So, we act in aro ki te tanga - in collective memory and healing—a practice that refuses erasure, insists on testimony, and nurtures futures beyond violence. In genocidal times, we write to digest and carry our experiential - the pain, resilience and resistance of those targeted by colonial and state violence.

Even if we don’t get to see it, we’re gonna die trying

Sonia Sanchez — 2025-07-28

Drawing from oral histories with radical community organizers, in this piece I curate a collage of excerpts discussing wildest liberation dreams, respond in poetry and prose, and offer prompts to scaffold liberation envisioning. This is a slice of a larger, praxis-oriented oral history, archival, and auto ethnographic research project, in which I amplify approaches to political organizing that aim beyond inclusion toward transformation, and intentionally build connections across fronts of struggle. The 10 New York City-based organizers and oral history narrators steeped in this work are largely queer and either first- and second-generation, Black, Xicana/Mexican, Asian, White Dominican, and Indigenous migrants, or are (non-immigrant) Indigenous to lands occupied by the US. I play with form to attend to the emotional and analytic dynamic of the conversations, the powerful feelings narrators’ responses elicited in me, and the shifting meaning of the ‘I don’t knows’ that peppered discussions of liberation dreams. It is my hope that this curation of responses and shimmers of hope continue awakening feelings and inspiring collective expansion of the ever-emerging horizon of liberation/liberatory strivings.

Diagrammatic Attention

Amitabh Rai — 2025-07-28

Through a transcendental empiricism of perception, diagrammatic attention becomes available as an opaque (non)dialectical method for undoing binaries and reposing paradoxes within the material and intensive force, sense, and value of racial heteronormative capital. Each convolute is a node in an emergent and continuous diagram of different ecologies of attention, each with its own but resonant ‘emergent strategy.’ The main concerns throughout are the Hegelian problem of mediation and its relation to contemporary emancipatory politics, experimental modes of writing (about) affect (diagrammatic attention), the problem of revolutionary becoming, the relationship of the diagram to representation, the relationship of contemporary participatory art to racial capitalist financialisation, the historical and transcendental relations among ontological entanglement, embodied correspondence (resonance), and dialectical engulfment.

Finger(s)-Millet-Fieldwork-Photo:

Priya Rajalakshmi Chandrasekaran — 2025-07-28

Inspired by the textual performativity in Sara Ahmed’s (2019) What’s the Use? and women farmers’ “use” of finger millet as crop and grain, this paper experiments with “using” photographs taken in fields and homes in Uttarakhand, India. As method, I practice forms of what Michael Marder calls “non-conscious intentionality,” which embodies (more-than-) vegetal animacy and intelligence. This entails emulating forms of animacy, spatial extension, openness, reciprocity, and rhizomatic growth often dissuaded in scholarly writing. How might I interact with images of (more-than-) finger millet as fellow collaborators and continue a process of learning I experienced “in the field”? Can using finger millet as digital image dislocate cognitive ruts and unstick ways of thinking whose intransigence reproduces the temporal, spatial, intellectual, interpersonal, and personal disjuncture between “field” and “page”? My intention is not to disavow the ways power circulates through me but to disrupt my scholarly habits and taken for granted ideas.