…what can we apprehend if we stay with the “negativity” of (self-preserving) unfeeling and suspend its rehabilitation?
Xine Yao
Kesha Fikes (she/her/hers) is an independent scholar, as well as a psycho-political educator and somatic therapist. Her work is shaped by 25 years of engaged theorization on neoliberalism, universalization, normativity, colonialism, race, gender, labor, migration, and diasporization. Fikes’ teaching and process group work are about disrupting the everyday violence of universal reason in everyday communications. Through attuned sensorial and verbal connection, she facilitates engagement with embodied, creative theorizing that gives voice to the harms and existential dilemmas imposed by racial-gendered capitalism. She has a forthcoming book on the ‘Practicing Extimacy’ process and she is the author of Managing African Portugal: The Citizen-Migrant Distinction (Duke U Press, 2009). Fikes holds a doctorate in anthropology (UCLA, with dual sociocultural & sociolinguistic emphases); she formerly taught as assistant professor in the departments of anthropology at the University of Chicago, the University of Florida, and as core faculty in the former doctoral program in somatic studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She’s also a certified practitioner of Somatic Experiencing® and Perceptual Psycho-Education/The Danis Bois Method, the latter being a form of osteopathy that she studied intensively for 13 years. She self-describes as a recovering anthropologist and academic. Today she facilitates somatic-political praxis groups that integrate innovative theory and social attunement in the service of re-scripting the meaning and practice of social care and relational existence.
…That to own things did not necessarily mean one belonged;
that possession was no guarantee of control…
Ninotchka Rosca