Dark brown womyn, dreadlocks….

…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, group facilitator, and somatic therapist. Her work is shaped by 25 years of engaged theorization on neoliberalism, existentialism, Marxism, capitalism, universalization, normativity, colonialism, racialization, racial-gender, labor, citizenship, migration,border politics, and diasporization. Fikes’ teaching and process group work are about disrupting the everyday violence of universal reason in everyday communications, or in relational contexts. 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 existence. She has forthcoming writing projects on the ‘Practicing Political 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 contemplative osteopathy that she studied intensively for 13 years. She self-describes as a recovering anthropologist – zero pun intended – and she now leads psycho-political practice groups that integrate innovative political theory and sensorial attunement in the service of re-scripting the meaning and praxis of social care, engaged politics, and relational existence.

…That to own things did not necessarily mean one belonged;

that possession was no guarantee of control…

Ninotchka Rosca