This course creates space for those navigating the slow violence of misrecognition. It’s for people who leave rooms feeling smaller than when they entered, whether because of race, culture, neurotype, accent, experience, or refusal to conform to dominant scripts. But it’s also for those who care about changing the air in the room: educators, facilitators, leaders, and practitioners who want to make their spaces braver, more dignified, and less performative. We begin not with correction, but with witnessing and not with solutions, but with story.
What do we notice when we enter a space? What’s permitted, policed, praised, or ignored? We begin by naming microaggressions and misattunements not just as moments but as patterns and map their emotional and narrative cost. We reference Fanon, Ahmed, and our writing on the dissonance of being “seen but not recognised.”
This week explores voice, tone, and misinterpretation. What gets labelled “angry,” “too much,” or “unprofessional”? We explore the demand for politeness under white institutional norms and draw on our teachings on power, silence, and interruption.
How do we hold microaggressions in therapeutic, educational, or organisational settings without being pulled into battle or burnout? We explore psychological splitting, the slow burn of disbelief, and the grief of never quite arriving. Texts from Audre Lorde, Mari Ruti, and our own reflections on subthreshold trauma support our inquiry.
In our final week, we focus on reclaiming story and shifting dynamics. What does it mean to centre ourselves without re-explaining? How do we repair, not in the room as it is, but in the communities and containers we co-create?
In a time when words like “inclusion” and “belonging” circulate easily, the actual experience of many is one of erasure through politeness, tokenism masked as welcome, and gestures of diversity without shifts in power. Microaggressions aren’t minor, they are accumulations of mis-seeing. This course draws on our own narrative research and ethnographic and therapeutic insights to ask: what does it take to rewrite the room, without needing to rewrite ourselves?
A 4-week facilitated learning space, combining structured reflection, live discussion (90 mins weekly), and asynchronous journalling or dialogue for those who prefer to process quietly. Materials include curated excerpts from Sara Ahmed, Frantz Fanon, and from your own work on epistemic injustice, affective dissonance, and power in the therapeutic encounter.
We centre nuance, not defensiveness. Listening, not performance. There is room for both rage and restraint.
