Race Reflections AT WORK

In today's episode Guilaine responds to, and reflects on, a dilemma from a listener who is a Black woman dealing with the way that workplaces tend to view her as overqualified, is having difficulty navigating these dynamics, has ended up moving from job to job, and increasingly feels the need to hide her knowledge and experience. Guilaine thinks through the issues around this problem, keeping it general because she doesn’t have the full information and also wants to keep the listener anonymised. She goes over the questions she would ask in group analysis or in one on one coaching or therapy. And considers some of the issues previously covered in podcast episodes such as these: Envy: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/8728416 Location of Disturbance and Scapegoating: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/8127268 Black Authority in the Workplace: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/8252930 Racial Trauma at Work: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/8033907 Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

In today's episode Guilaine reflects on extraction, the process of which touches on ancestral vulnerability, blackness, colonial dialectics and coloniality in the workplace and generally racialised dynamics, and echoes her recent trip to the Congo. She offers an aside on how plagiarism as an accusation can be weaponised and racialised against people of colour, particularly women of colour and Black women in particular; and how they can be on one hand mined quite heavily by institutions and by society at large, and on the other hand they tend to be the most vulnerable when it comes to those kinds of accusations. But she then focuses on examples of extraction she has experienced recently, looking at some of the reasons she has altered her use of social media and the phenomena of high earners approaching Race Reflections to be considered for the low income courses we have offered for our recent certificate. And she considers the response of some people to her sharing an article "Racial trauma as bodily archive: The Griot & The Nzonzi” freely to wider community for 48 hours, but after that making it membership only. She was asked not just to make it permanently freely accessible but was also asked to send people files of the article for their use for free. She then thinks about extraction in the workplace and considers some ways to navigate and mitigate these issues. This podcast brings together many strands from other podcasts for example: Introduction to the certificate in working with racial trauma and race based injuries using the foundation of group analysis: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/15148619-introduction-to-the-certificate-in-working-with-racial-trauma-and-race-based-injuries-using-the-foundation-of-group-analysis.mp3 Social Media Policy Change: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/15059341-social-media-policy-change.mp3 Reflections on a trip to the Congo: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/14947769-reflections-on-a-trip-to-the-congo.mp3 Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

In this re-released episode first published on 3rd May 2021, Guilaine considers the influence of the past on the present by exploring the concept of transference, what it means and how it might manifest in the workplace. This episode is all about making present-past links to better make sense of conflicts, tensions and race-based difficulties at work. Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine reflects on the upcoming new course: the certificate in working with racial trauma and race based injuries using the foundation of group analysis. And in particular she focuses some attention on the large group that is going to be focused on Whiteness at Work. She starts by describing the focus of the course. It is the first in-depth course on racial trauma in the UK, unlike the other courses it is a year long rather than a few days. It’s an online, group based course that looks at racial trauma critically, holistically, in the main using the foundation of group analysis, psychoanalysis, psychology and neuroscience, but also seeking to attempt to interrogate the thinking and colonial logics that lie within these disciplines. It’s a course for everyone but particularly people who are placed in positions to help, support and manage people who are racialised as black and brown and who are experiencing race based issues, and who may be dealing with race based distress and/or racial trauma. Then she gives some background in why she is running the course. It’s the outcome of professional and traditional doctoral studies, years of research around racial trauma as well as thinking about where we are in the world socio-politically in terms of global insecurity and racial retraumatisation, all of which resulted in Guilaine going being called from an African ontological and cosmological perspective to to create this course. She then discusses the content of the course in general and focuses on the large group that looks at whiteness at work. The group on whiteness is a core component of the certificate, by whiteness we mean the operationalisation of the structure of White Supremacy, the stratification of life based on racialisation. The aim of the group is to create a space to come together as a community to think about whiteness and share and speak about what they experience. It will meet monthly online and will focus on the dynamics at play and how to resist them. She concludes by considering that the bulk of harm she has seen in her clinical work has been acquired within the workplace and how this means it is essential for people within the workplace to understand these patterns. She is offering the experience of being in a large group to people wanting to pursue group analysis as a therapeutic discipline but more than that a large group is likely to repeat and recreate some of the dynamics at play out within institutions and society. So it’s very useful and insightful for exploring these issues in a more contained and better held environment. Interested in the course? More information can be found here: https://racereflections.co.uk/certificate-in-working-with-racial-trauma-and-race-based-injuries-using-the-foundation-of-group-analysis-fee-page/ and an opportunity to reserve a place can be found here: https://racereflections.co.uk/events/open-day-certificate-in-working-with-racial-trauma-and-race-based-injuries-using-the-foundation-of-group-analysis/ Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine reflects on her relationship with social media. The way she has used social media in the past and transition she is making in how she uses it going forward, and the reasons she is changing how she uses Twitter (or X). She gives some context about what social media has meant for both her and for Race Reflections. She thinks about how Race Reflections began as a blogging venture that was heavily influenced and developed by her writing being shared on social media. It allowed for a direct way to engage with communities and with the wider public and to improve her craft. This led to opportunities that resulted in peer reviewed publications, book contracts, conference invites and more consultancy work. There is no way that Race Reflections would be what it is today without social media. It gives or at least gave a space where radical thinking and marginalised groups could connect and find community, audiences and collaborators. Then she considers how over the years her experience of social media has changed, and challenges around others using her intellectual property without consent or plagiarising her content have become more common, she wonders if people see content shared on social media is to be less respected, particularly when shared by a Black woman. And by this point the balance between the advantages and disadvantages of using social media in this way have changed. This is related in part to peoples attitude to online content, partly due to the social and political climate we are currently within and also due to the change of leadership within this particular platform. She thinks about the different strands of herself and her thinking that she used to share on her personal account, her Race Reflections focused work, her commentary on news, politics and social events, and her personal experiences moving through the world as a Black woman. She argues for the value of showing your whole self and being open about your process of trying to learn about and make sense of the world. For people to connect to your ideas, particularly when those ideas are challenging you need to allow your readers to connect to you. If you want people to be open and vulnerable and transparent and compassionate you need to embody this in your work and practice. This is the liberatory case for this approach. But this needs to be balanced against avoiding self-sacrifice, to guard against necropolitics, the politics of the masters and of colonialism, that expect you to be extracted from and for your life to not be valued. And she thinks about this in this present context of multiple genocides and patriarchal whitelash. So this change of approach is not just related to protecting her work but also to prioritising safety. She ends by talking about the vulnerabilities that people carry and that she carries and that thinking about this during her recent trip to the Congo helped to clarify all of this and to see that to embody her politics she needs to also protect herself and respect her vulnerabilities and find new ways to be safe and sustainable. Previous episode: Social Media https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/11029464 Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine reflects on her recent trip to the Congo. This topic was asked for when she polled people on twitter/x to find out what they wanted her to speak on for this episode. She begins with some context, first for her and then for the country and region in general. Covering how she was born in Bastille and grew up in inner city Paris and is of Congolese descent, specifically descending from Congo-Brazzaville. She then gives a brief overview of the history of colonialism, slavery, war and genocide experienced by Congo-Brazzaville and The Democratic Republic of the Congo. Then she talks about her experience there, being confronted by this paradox of death and life, beauty and horror, poverty and people thriving, learning more about the colonial atrocities that were committed but also at the same time being exposed to the pure beauty of the landscapes. She explores the complexity of these powerful dualities and contradictions, the paradox of life and death almost intertwined and dancing, the invitation to ask how do we hold these dualities at the same time, remembering the pain of the past but imagining alternative futures, the abundance and wealth of nature contrasted with the poverty of neocolonialism. It invites you to be deeply reflective about the possibility of life. She finishes by thinking about her writing and research around trauma and transference and how when talking to people on her travels and looking into cosmologies and autologies of the region she realised that a lot of what she had been writing corresponded with the thinking and cosmologies of this land. And so brings her back to her question of “what we know without knowing?” And to issues of ancestral communication and memory and how echoes form between generations, particularly within the African diaspora, particularly when it comes to issues of thinking about African consciousness in the context of Black suffering, and thinking about all of this within the Kikongo frame, Kikongo being the language, people and culture of the Congo. Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In this re-released episode first published on 15th March 2021, Guilaine reflects on why institutions often turn on those who allege racism. She considers some of the group processes at play using as illustration the treatment of Meghan Markle and responses from that interview. Location of disturbance and scapegoating are presented as frames to formulate victimisation and retaliation within institutions. Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk Transcript: https://racereflections.co.uk/at-work-the-podcast/

In today's episode Guilaine reflects on consent, in relation to her research on whiteness, her lived experience, and the implications of this issue within the workplace She begins with a basic definition of consent, then she details some experiences related to going out dancing that she recently experienced, and links them to the wider issues that her research explores. Part of the theme that has come up again and again in her data is patients talking about experience of whiteness in the clinic where therapists appear to be breaching boundaries, oversharing, dismissing experiences of racism, using gaslighting tactics, and engaging in the politics of denialism. She links all this to her concept of epistemic homeless and names these behaviours as acts of occupying the epistemic space of the other. She considers how trauma is generally centered on some kind breach of boundary and how whiteness can be seen as colonial violence performed through spacial embodiment, that breaches of consent are the colonial enactment of whiteness, and that white supremacy is founded on breaching the boundaries, borders, and sovereignty of the other - bodily, territorial, psychic - and so in the everyday quotidian enactment of white violence we are going to see some repetition and reproduction of those wider politics She then concludes by thinking about the workplace and how the coloniality of interpersonal relationships, especially cross racial interpersonal relationships, is enacted in relation to the consent of employees of colour. Some links: Epistemic homelessness: https://mediadiversified.org/2017/11/24/epistemic-homelessness-feeling-like-a-stranger-in-a-familiar-land/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoKBLPbkB5I Envy: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/8728416 Location of disturbance: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/8127268 White Minds: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/white-minds Living While Black: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442992/living-while-black-by-kinouani-guilaine/9781529109436 Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine reflects around a listeners query asking "how do we get mangers to understand how biased they are when it comes to the feedback that they give to employees of colour." After briefly questioning the terminology of bias and unconscious bias, she looks at the evidence from organisational psychology, considering how empirical evidence shows that marginalised employees tend to receive poorer quality feedback. Even though the research isn’t always intersectional what exists demonstrates the intersectional effect that takes place when axis of oppression and identity collide. This feedback tends to be lower quality: less precise, more global, less frequent, and there tends to be a lot of anxiety around the exercise of providing feedback She consider aversive racism where employers withhold negative feedback to avoid accusations of racism, but in act of withholding feedback deprive the employee of the opportunity to correct and to improve, and so sometimes to not be able to pass their probation periods or acquire skills and experience that would offer the opportunity for progression within their work. Basically in this dynamic employees of colour and other marginalised groups are set to fail. She reflects on how a high percentage of disputes that end up in employment tribunals are related to evaluation or discipline, and that the provision of effective feedback is central and essential to fair and just treatment in the workplace. She spends some time talking about what employers racialised as white need to work on in regards to their anxiety and phobia around Blackness, considering what Fanon has said on these issues and the wider context of racist violence and exclusion, reflecting on how these conflicts are a liability for institutions when they are found lacking, and more frequently for black and brown individuals when they are not. She then gives some thought to what can be done to correct these issues. That whilst it’s worth making sure to avoiding it becoming self-fulfilling situation, most of the time people's instincts based on their lived experience are astute and accurate/ We need to correct the misconception that people are misinterpreting the situations, marginalised people in general interpret things on balance correctly. So instead we need to take seriously these feelings and instincts and come up with strategies to mitigate and navigate these situations. Ultimately though it is really for employers and people racialised as white to address their issues around giving feedback because it isn’t something employees of colour can change alone. Further listening: Aversive Racism: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/8346383 Thinking about feeling, feeling about thinking: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/14041582 Further reading: White Minds: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/white-minds Living While Black: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442992/living-while-black-by-kinouani-guilaine/9781529109436 Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine reflects on the phenomenon and social dynamic of what has been called whitelash, a combination of white/whiteness and backlash. The term was coined by African-American journalist Van Jones to describe the backlash of White America coming together to reject what had been seen as a liberalisation of the USA under Obama. And in a more general sense it describes the sense of grievance, the sense of anger, the sense of frustration that originates from people racialised as White that comes from an often misconstrued and misconceived sense of displacement and social change which is a reaction to a perception that social advancements are being made in terms of equality. This is a concept and area that is expanded on in Guilaine’s second book White Minds. After defining and exploring the concept she then considers it within the terms of group analytic thinking, theory and practice, and looks the relationship between the socio-political and the ways that institutions, organisations and individuals relate and interact, focusing on the workplace. She considers the whitelash that we are currently experiencing almost 4 years after the murder of George Floyd galvanised institutions to make commitments and how those words and sometimes actions are now being pushed back against very strongly. And how this whitelash is also being felt across many intersections and identities. She then shares some observations from her experience of delivering work related DEI training and looks at the affect of whitelash on Race Reflections as both an organisation and as a business. White Minds is available to buy here: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/white-minds Van Jones on whitelash: https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/11/9/13572182/van-jones-cnn-trump-election-2016 Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine continues to look forwards towards Race Reflections path in 2024 and beyond. She announces a future book that will be coming from Race Reflections, our first book as an organisation. That book is Surviving Whiteness at Work: reflections on defiance, resistance and transformation It will aim to describe the working of Whiteness in the workplace through the lived experience of our team and community members, and what ways they have found helpful to grow, to survive, to thrive despite working in an environment that might have been hostile, toxic, marginalising and discriminatory. It will look at theory and autoethnographic experience and will be solution focused. In this episode she discusses and reflects on that book and gives a flavour of the thinking and topics it may cover. For more on this exciting new project see here: https://racereflections.co.uk/title-surviving-whiteness-at-work-reflections-on-defiance-resistance-and-transformation/ If you are a member of the Race Reflections community we are looking for contributions: https://racereflections.co.uk/call-for-contributions-whiteness-at-work/ Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine looks forwards towards Race Reflections path in 2024. She starts by wishing everyone a Happy New Year, followed by a brief reflection on global violence, specifically in Gaza and Congo, a topic she will return to in more detail in a future podcast later this year. Then she outlines what is planned and being developed for Race Reflections over the next 12 months: Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In this re-released episode first published on 4th April 2022, we explore the relationship between podcasting and power, both how podcasting has replicated and interacted with existing power systems, and how it offers a radical space for marginalised voices to create freely without gatekeepers. We think about how The Podcast Industry has developed into just another industry/workplace incorporating the issues inherent in those industries and workplaces. We look at the history and present of podcasting and ask you to consider adding your voice to its future. This episode is hosted by Race Reflection's Audio Wizard/Witch, Dave Pickering: http://davepickeringstoryteller.co.uk/ LINKS: India.Arie on Joe Rogan/Spotify: https://www.nme.com/news/music/india-arie-says-she-left-spotify-because-of-its-treatment-of-artists-not-joe-rogan-3162696 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/india-arie-spotify-joe-rogan-interview-1299169/ Why I’ve Decided to Take My Podcast Off Spotify by Roxane Gay: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/opinion/culture/joe-rogan-spotify-roxane-gay.html The Test Kitchen: https://www.vulture.com/article/gimlet-reply-all-controversy-spotify-test-kitchen.html Hidden in plain sight by CC Paschal: http://www.thechiquitachannel.com/criticism/2021/3/7/hidden-in-plain-sight Glass Walls by James T Green: https://www.jamestgreen.com/thoughts/115 Another Round and The Nod: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/30/21308074/the-nod-spotify-rss-feed-another-round-buzzfeed-podcast-ownership https://hotpodnews.com/the-case-of-another-rounds-archives/ Palace Shaw - Why I’m saying goodbye to PRX by Palace Shaw: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13j3H7BidesRD4zgz2aoZuwDcdocV7NpzNs3YqA5Rcg8/mobilebasic?urp=gmail_link “In response to Kerri Hoffman’s Letter”: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uu1nOsqLsnZDXNJe04lJt3TQpt6-tvFhZnF4aQ_dwHc/edit https://www.vice.com/en/article/akdbbj/podcasters-are-reclaiming-storytelling-in-africa-and-becoming-celebrities-v28n1 Rise and Shine: https://www.riseandshineaudio.com Multitrack Fellowship: https://www.multitrack.uk/ Equality in Audio Pact: https://www.equalityinaudiopact.co.uk/ How the Equality in Audio Pact came together by Renay Richardson: https://hotpodnews.com/how-the-equality-in-audio-pact-came-together-by-renay-richardson/ To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.

In this re-released episode first published on 21st February 2022, Guilaine reflects on the particular dynamic where a person with power reacts to accusations of structural harm by saying that they feel unsafe. She considers how affect and feelings are conditioned and shaped by social context, histories and structures, and how feelings can play a role in protecting and enforcing social (dis)order and the status quo. She encourages us to consider how words and discourses can harm people, and to think critically about our feelings. Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Race Reflections' Associate Disruptor Simone reflects on workplace issues surrounding people's appearance, how appearance is policed, and how that relates to respectability politics and white supremacy. They first discuss how appearing Palestinian or showing solidarity with Palestine during the current genocide intersects with how people's appearances are policed in general, specifically looking at this issue from a US perspective. Then they consider how dress-codes in school set up dress-codes in the workplace, reflecting on how multiply marginalised people are the most affected by these dress codes, and the ways that dress-codes serve dominant cultures, patriarchy and white supremacy. They then discuss an essay by Aysa Gray called The Bias of ‘Professionalism’ Standards (https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_bias_of_professionalism_standards) which argues that the standards of professionalism are really just the standards of western white supremacy. They then challenge us to ask ourselves how we might be reinforcing white supremacy, xenophobia and other forms of systemic inequality and consider the role of hiring metrics in all this. Simone ends with a series of questions from that essay by Gray that aim to help de-centre the standards of whiteness within the workplace. Simone's website: https://www.simonekolysh.com/ Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine takes us on a freeform reflection and roundup of her thinking and feeling in 2023. From the publication of her second book White Minds to the writing and collating of her third book Creative Disruption she shares her position as someone who doesn’t identify as an academic due to the violence she has experienced as a Black woman in academia and psychology (something she explores in both these books.) She then gives us an introduction to Creative Disruption beginning with its genesis at a conference that looked at creative disruption. The chapter she has written for that book also began at that conference in a talk she gave on Congolese music. Here she also makes links with Afrobeats (which she describes as the hybrid child of the African diaspora). She then expands on the reasons for highlighting and emphasising creativity and on the importance of thinking about feelings, and feeling about thinking. Thinking with the body or feeling with the mind. How these ‘things’ are split by Western society but are not split within us. For this she refers to Audre Lorde’s text Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Then she asks some questions to you, the listeners: Do we do enough to engage with the creative in the work we do at Race Reflections? Are we playing into the splitting of the rational self and the erotic self, this splitting of the feeling self and the thinking self? She then talks about her latest piece (‘The world does not need more intelligent men’) which looks at the concept of intelligence and asks what intelligence is or might be. She explored these questions in relationship to the personal and the political overlapping and often being the same thing. She ends with another invitation or provocation to the audience: How do we find ways to reconnect body and mind, rationality and corporality, heart and head, as an organisation so that our dismantling, disruptive, anti-racist and anti-oppressive work continues to allow us to grow and be connected with the world and each other? Audre Lorde: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power https://www.centraleurasia.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/audre_lorde_cool-beans.pdf ‘The world does not need more intelligent men’ https://racereflections.co.uk/the-world-does-not-need-more-intelligent-men/ Guilaine’s first book Living While Black is available to buy here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442992/living-while-black-by-kinouani-guilaine/9781529109436 Her new book White Minds is available to buy here: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/white-minds Her third book co-edited with Hannah Reeves and Claudia Di Gianfrancesco is called Creative Disruption: https://creativedisruptioncouk.wordpress.com/about/ Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In this re-released episode first published on 5th July 2021 Guilaine takes the Tiktok trend of "white women fake crying" as a jumping-off point to consider a slightly different take on intersectionality in relation to white womanhood. She reflects on the reasons why black people and people of colour find these videos disturbing or triggering, and explore "toxic femininity" which she define's as when white fragility meets the constructions of white femininity. More on the TikTok trend: https://www.nylon.com/life/white-women-crying-on-cue-tiktok-trend Living While Black: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Racial Trauma is out: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/144/1442992/living-while-black/9781529109436.html Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine expands on her thinking around money which she has previously covered a little on the podcast and on the Race Reflections website. She specifically reflects on the relationship between money and attachment, considering internalised scarcity, social class and social deprivation, framing her thoughts around her own background and lived experience. This episode was inspired by the work she was doing for the Freud Museum Conference about the relationship between psychotherapy and money. She begins by going over attachment theory as it exists from initial work done by Bowlby which relates to maternal or parental attachment. She offers some critique and complications around these theories but generally doesn't dispute the ideas and evidence around this topic. She does however suggest that whilst a lot of time is given to maternal attachment theory not enough has been done around how material circumstances influence attachment, and that maternal and material are seldom considered together. She has done some work in this area when writing Living While Black, specifically considering attachment to and with place. We attach to spaces as well as to bodies, and anyway bodies and spaces are related to each other. And looking at places means looking at the influence of geopolitical factors such as borders and money. She then covers her own relationship with money and with scarcity thinking, looking at how growing up poor can create adaptive behaviours/internalised issues around things like experiencing injustice, a lack of familiarity with wealth, and difficulties navigating spaces without cultural capital. She asks us to imagine a graph that cross references material and maternal/parental attachments and how that kind of thinking can help us understand our own relationship to attachment and to how we relate to money. She ends by linking all this back to the workplace. The article she mentions is on the Race Reflections website for members (and if you are not a member you are welcome to join): Poverty, deprivation and internalised scarcity Her book Living While Black where she explores some of what she talks about today is available to buy here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442992/living-while-black-by-kinouani-guilaine/9781529109436 Her new book White Minds has just been published and is available to buy here: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/white-minds Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

This episode of Race Reflections at Work is about managing anxiety with the help of holistic/ alternative approaches while at work/ in employment, as well as some suggestions TW: Admin, Comms and Engagement Lead Dionne talks about the triggers of anxiety while navigating spaces around her - often being the only minority. Resources to read: https://www.rtor.org/2019/02/21/mental-health-and-chiropractic-care/ https://thehouseclinics.co.uk/learning-hub/stress-and-anxiety-how-chiropractic-can-help-you https://www.onechiropractic.co.uk/blogs/simple-tips-to-manage-stress-in-the-moment Where to find alternative support in the UK: https://www.lsbu.ac.uk/stories/lsbu-chiropractic-clinic https://www.gcc-uk.org/ https://blamuk.org/zuri-therapy-racial-wellness/ Dionne Anderson: http://dionneandersoncreative.com/ Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine explore and defines the concept of proximal ambivalence and proximal dynamics. She begins with the recent incident covered in the news that highlighted issues of anti-blackness within communities of colour, specifically in this context south asian communities in the UK. She reflects that whilst it's important to avoid overgeneralising it's also important to draw parallels and see patterns when they occur. She goes on to talk about some of her experiences of these dynamics and examines the specific racialised and economic context and tensions around afro haircare shops in the UK and the long historical legacies of inter-"racial" conflicts and tensions that date back to colonial administration and the role south asian groups played in African colonies and the Caribbean. She then defines proximal ambivalence as a term that derives the ways that groups with proximity to power/Whiteness can have mixed feelings when it comes to justice, liberation and dismantling White Supremacy. This is because White Supremacy is a caste system or pyramid and everyone within its structures and strata can reproduce and enact racialised violence towards groups lower down the complex hierarchies. All groups including people racialised as white exist within these racialised hierarchies which is what creates these proximal dynamics. She then considers how these dynamics look within the workplace. Guilaine fully explores this subject in her upcoming book White Minds that you can pre-order here: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/white-minds Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk