We Were Never Meant to Be Held theorizes unholdability as a structural condition of Black Girl/Femme life within U.S. schooling. This paper explores how schools function as afterlives of slavery for Black Girls/Femmes; institutions that claim to care, reproduce captivity and harm. Drawing on Christina Sharpe’s The Wake and the Hold, Hortense Spillers’ “unprotected female flesh”, and Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, the paper develops an emergent Black queer feminist theoretical framework that reads grief as method, revealing why care cannot exist within current conditions of anti-Blackness.

Structured as a triptych inspired by Alice Childress’s play, Wine in the Wilderness, the paper moves through three interwoven narratives —misnamed, misrecognized, and criminalized —to reveal how Black girls/femmes are rendered ontologically illegible and institutionally disposable, and how progressive frameworks become anti-Black grammars of containment. Through counterstory and autoethnography, the text performs theory as art, refusing tidy arcs of resilience and instead insisting on witnessing grief as knowledge-producing.

By centering grief as a generative epistemological practice, this work is a move toward what I call pedagogies of unholdability: teaching and policy logics that misread pain as defiance. The paper concludes with the Maroon Theatre Project, as a fugitive practice of wake work, demonstrating art’s capacity to theorize care, refusal, and world-making in dark times. We Were Never Meant to Be Held is where theory becomes witness, where grief becomes pedagogy, and where Black Girl/Femme life demands new grammars of care.

The literature provides evidence that high autonomy is associated with better mental health. In contrast, low autonomy, excessive demands, and unclear institutional expectations can contribute to stress, burnout, and a decline in quality of life. In the current university context, various transformations characteristic of academic capitalism are being experienced (Jessop, 2017; Schulze-Cleven & Olson, 2017; Morley, 2024), which imply a misalignment with expectations of autonomy within their community (Hjortskov, 2020). To address the adverse effects of these changes, care policies have been implemented to prevent and/or improve the community's mental health (Mason & Megoran, 2021). These measures often adopt therapeutic language that focuses on individuals and renders institutions invisible (Ecclestone & Hayes, 2019). When suffering is interpreted in clinical language that individualises it, the paradoxical effect of positioning subjects as beings who suffer emerges, further weakening their autonomy. In this sense, this aspect of care policies becomes part of the problem rather than the solution.

This presentation develops a conceptual constellation to study suffering from a perspective that expands the theoretical repertoire on subjective suffering. We assume that institutional logics can hinder or promote autonomy, and that the proposed constellation is a resource for identifying obstacles and implementing measures to develop autonomy effectively. We argue that care policies, particularly in universities, require other languages to identify institutional failures and find opportunities for innovation.

To bring about the shift from the individual to the institutional, we consider that subjective suffering requires political negotiation for its processing. We propose a conceptual constellation that articulates autonomy, vulnerability, and recognition to design care measures that integrate political negotiation processes. The constellation is constructed with the concepts of autonomy by Rainer Forst (2005, 2018), recognition by Axel Honneth (2009), and vulnerability by Estelle Ferrarese (2016a, 2016b), authors who share the tradition of Frankfurt critical theory. From this conceptual constellation, the political processing of suffering is viable to the extent that it is understood: i) autonomy as multidimensional (moral, ethical, political, legal, and social); ii) the reciprocal recognition of all participants involved in the process; iii) vulnerability as a result of participation in the processes of exposing and naming our precariousness that demands attention.

Consequently, in this presentation, we articulate the concepts of politicised vulnerability, autonomy, and recognition in a constellation whose critical force enables care measures to broaden their repertoire to address suffering, integrating into their design and implementation the political processing of the discomfort experienced by academic communities.

References:

Ecclestone, K., Ecclestone, K., & Hayes, D. (2019). The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203870563

Ferrarese, E. (2016a). Vulnerability: A Concept with Which to Undo The World As It Is? Critical Horizons, 17(2), 149–159.

Ferrarese, E. (2016b). The Vulnerable and the Political: On the Seeming Impossibility of Thinking Vulnerability and the Political Together and Its Consequences. Critical Horizons, 17(2), 224–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2016.1153892

Forst, R. (2018). Committed critical theory: Some thoughts on Stephen White: A Democratic Bearing. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 44(2), 126–130. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453717752776

Forst, R. (2005). Political liberty: Integrating five conceptions of autonomy. In J. Christman, J. Anderson (Eds.), Autonomy and the challenges to liberalism: New essays (pp. 127–149). Cambridge University Press.

Hjortskov, M. (2020). Interpreting expectations: Normative and predictive expectations from the citizens’ viewpoint. Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, 3(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.30636/jbpa.31.72

Honneth, A. (2009). Crítica del agravio moral: patologías de la sociedad contemporánea. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Jessop, B. (2017). Varieties of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities. Higher Education, 73(6), 853–870.

Mason, O., & Megoran, Nick. (2021). Precarity and dehumanisation in higher education. Learning and Teaching, 14(1), 35–59. https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2021.140103

Morley, C. (2024). The systemic neoliberal colonisation of higher education: A critical analysis of the obliteration of academic practice. The Australian Educational Researcher, 51, 571–586. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00613-z

Schulze-Cleven, T. y Olson, J. R. (2017). Worlds of higher education transformed: toward varieties of academic capitalism. Higher Education, 73(6), 813–831.

The resurgence of psychedelic research explicitly targets treating mental health conditions largely through psychedelics-assisted psychotherapy. Current theories about mechanisms of change in psychedelics-assisted psychotherapy focus on mystical experiences as the main driver of symptom improvement. During these mystical experiences, participants report an enhanced sense of salience, connectedness, and meaning. Simultaneously, a growing psychedelic culture is also cultivating the use of psychedelics as medicine for relieving symptoms of anxiety and depression and promoting cognitive functions. We argue that an integral part of the excitement around the resurgence in psychedelics is in response to a meaning and alienation crisis that correlates with rising rates of anxiety and depression. Framing the absence of meaning as neonihilism, a contemporary correlate to the 19th-century phenomenon with unique features present in a neoliberal cultural context, we explore whether psychedelics combined with group therapy can provide answers to modern experiences of meaninglessness. Based on this exploration, we suggest concrete next steps both in the theory and practice of psychedelic psychotherapy toward what we are calling neonihilistic psychedelic group psychotherapy.