Roots

This reference list is not neutral
It is a root system
alive with memory

It gathers the voices
who question empire
pathologisation
extraction
and the myth of endless progress

From feminist writers
to poststructural thought
to earth-based cosmologies

these works share a knowing

that power concentrates
that suffering is patterned
that truth is shaped by discourse
and that other ways of being human
have always existed beneath domination

Their work keeps alive
forms of knowing that are embodied
ecological
communal
and resistant to forgetting

Feminist Lineages

  • Elias, A., Gill, R., & Scharff, C. (2017). Aesthetic labour: Rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism. Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia.

  • Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review, 100, 99–117. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii100/articles/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care

  • Gill, R., & Scharff, C. (2011). New femininities: Postfeminism, neoliberalism and subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.

Narrative Therapy

Narrative Therapy emerged from movements that questioned psychiatry’s pathologising gaze and asked who gets to define what is normal, healthy, sane or worthy. It understands identity not as fixed, but shaped through story, relationship, culture, history, language and power. Deeply influenced by poststructuralist thought, systems thinking, community storytelling traditions and feminist and liberation movements, Narrative Therapy honours the voices and lived experiences of those pushed to the margins. Finding my own narrative therapist, who is now my supervisor, changed my life. I had loved the theory for years, but experiencing someone relate to suffering without immediately reducing it to pathology was transformative. Narrative practice helped me understand that many struggles are not signs of personal failure but meaningful responses to lived experience, trauma, family systems, culture and the worlds we are shaped within. It remains one of the deepest roots of my counselling philosophy.

  • Dulwich Centre origin of narrative practices and publications. Resource rich website.

  • McLeod, J. (1997). Narrative and psychotherapy. Sage.

  • White, M., & Morgan, A. (2006). Narrative therapy with children and their families. Dulwich Centre Publications.

  • White, M. (2007). Maps of narrative practice. W. W. Norton.

  • White, M. (2011). Narrative practice: Continuing the conversations. W. W. Norton.

  • White, M. (2016). Narrative therapy classics. Dulwich Centre Publications.

Beyond Pathology

  • Burstow, B. (2015). Psychiatry and the business of madness. Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Dalal, F. (2023). CBF: Cognitive behavioral fallacies. In L. L. Michaels, T. Wooldridge, N. Burke, & J. R. Muhr (Eds.), Advancing psychotherapy for the next generation: Humanizing mental health policy and practice. Routledge.

  • Dana, D. (2018). The polyvagal theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation. W. W. Norton.

  • Davies, J. (2021). Sedated: How modern capitalism created our mental health crisis. Atlantic Books.

  • Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.

  • Teo, T. (2018). Outline of theoretical psychology: Critical investigations. Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Wilberg, P. (2013). Being and listening: Counselling, psychoanalysis and the ontology of listening. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

  • Wolynn, M. (2016). It didn’t start with you: How inherited family trauma shapes who we are and how to end the cycle. Viking.

Storytelling

  • Carter, A. (1979). The bloody chamber. Gollancz.

  • Dovey, C. (2014). Only the animals. Hamish Hamilton.

  • Heiss, A. (2011). Purple threads. University of Queensland Press.

  • Saunders, M. (Ed.). (2022). This all come back now: An anthology of First Nations speculative fiction. University of Queensland Press

  • Tsiolkas, C. (2013). Barracuda. Allen & Unwin.

  • van Neerven, E. (2020). Throat. University of Queensland Press.

Tele-vision

  • Lambs of God (2019) miniseries, based on Marele Day’s novel, written by Sarah Lambert, directed by Jeffrey Walker

  • This Way Up (2019–2021) series, written by and starring Aisling Bea

  • Pachinko (2022– ) series, based on Min Jin Lee’s novel, created by Soo Hugh

  • Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) DreamWorks animated feature film, directed by Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook, music by Hans Zimmer and Bryan Adams

Brit Marling Reverence

  • A Murder at the End of the World (2023) miniseries, created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij

  • Another Earth (2011) feature film, written by Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, starring Brit Marling

  • The East (2013) feature film, directed by Zal Batmanglij, co-written with Brit Marling

  • I Origins (2014) feature film, written and directed by Mike Cahill, starring Brit Marling as Karen

  • The OA (2016–2019) series, created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij

What Even Is Truth?

Modernity claimed reason, science and progress as universal truths, yet this reason was never neutral. It carried the worldview of an industrialised West, positioning itself above Nature, myth, the body and other ways of knowing. Nature became something to measure, master and extract from, while ancestral, communal and earth-based cosmologies were increasingly dismissed as irrational. Postmodern and poststructuralist thought challenged these grand narratives, questioning who gets to define truth, normality, sanity, civilisation and progress. These thinkers remind us that meaning is never fixed, that language and institutions shape what societies accept as real, and that power often disguises itself as objectivity. Their work continues to influence my thinking around mental health, embodiment, storytelling, ecology and the inherited systems shaping human life.

  • Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1981)

  • Cixous, H. (1976). The laugh of the Medusa (K. Cohen & P. Cohen, Trans.). Signs, 1(4), 875–893.

  • Cixous, H. (1993). Three steps on the ladder of writing (S. Cornell & S. Sellers, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

  • Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)

  • Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Routledge.

  • Foucault, M. (1965). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason (R. Howard, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1961)

  • Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1975)

  • Fraser, N. (2014). Behind Marx’s hidden abode. New Left Review, 86, 55–72. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii86/articles/nancy-fraser-behind-marx-s-hidden-abode

  • Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

World-Systems Theory

World-systems theory gave me language for an intuition I already carried: that inequality is not accidental. What is called development or modernisation often depends upon extraction, dependency and concentrated power. Across five hundred years of global history, Immanuel Wallerstein traced how wealthy “core” nations profited through the labour, resources and destabilisation of the “periphery,” concentrating wealth, technology and influence upward while exploitation and dependency were pushed outward. His work continues to shape how I understand empire, famine, class, labour, ecological collapse and the emotional realities of modern life under global capitalism.

  • Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world-system I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. Academic Press.

    Volume I traces capitalist agriculture, slavery, and the first long commodity chains

  • Wallerstein, I. (1980). The modern world-system II: Mercantilism and the consolidation of the European world-economy, 1600–1750. Academic Press.
    Volume II shows how mercantilism and monopolies locked in core dominance

  • Wallerstein, I. (1989). The modern world-system III: The second era of great expansion of the capitalist world-economy, 1730–1840s. Academic Press.

    Volume III covers industrial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when factories in the core depended on resources and labor elsewhere

  • Wallerstein, I. (2011). The modern world-system IV: Centrist liberalism triumphant, 1789–1914. University of California Press.

    Volume IV reveals how liberal ideas like free trade and rights talk normalised the system, presenting hierarchy as progress

Unconditional Universal Basic Income

Unconditional Universal Basic Income, to me, is more than economic policy. It is an ethical reimagining of human life beyond exhaustion, scarcity and endless productivity. The idea itself is not new. In 1516, Thomas More imagined forms of guaranteed income in Utopia, and in the late 1700s Thomas Paine argued for payments funded through shared land wealth. Across centuries of industrialisation and global capitalism, richer nations accumulated power through the extraction of labour, land and resources, while care work, creativity, rest and community labour remained largely invisible and undervalued. Since the mid-20th century, economists, philosophers and social theorists have continued arguing that guaranteed material safety improves health, education, creativity and collective wellbeing. UUBI challenges the moralising of endless work and asks what becomes possible when people are no longer trapped in survival mode. It deshames rest. It recognises that burnout is collective. It imagines a world where people are not expected to spend the majority of their lives labouring to sustain systems of concentrated wealth, endless consumption and ecological destruction. This vision continues to shape how I think about labour, dignity, interdependence and the possibility of organising society around care rather than survival of the richest.

  • Haagh, L. (2019). The case for universal basic income. Polity Press.

  • Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.

  • Standing, G. (2017). Basic income: And how we can make it happen. Pelican.

  • Van Parijs, P. (1995). Real freedom for all: What (if anything) can justify capitalism? Oxford University Press.

꩜

Pain and trauma move through every body
they do not discriminate

Yet systems of power insist
suffering is private rather than political
personal failure rather than patterned condition
weakness rather than wound

Across history
generations have survived
state violence
famine
silencing
extraction
ecological loss

while being taught
to blame themselves
for the conditions imposed upon them

My own lineages survived
An Gorta Mór
The Great Hunger of Ireland

and the Holodomor
Death by Hunger in Ukraine

histories I explore further in
Empire Eats the Poor and Blames Them

These are not isolated tragedies
but part of empire’s long history
of concentrated power
extraction
and dispossession

The patterns continue

cost of living crises
housing insecurity
burnout mistaken for discipline
wealth concentrated upward

while ordinary people are taught
their suffering is personal failure
instead of the emotional weight
of living inside extractive systems

No wonder so many people
feel exhausted
overwhelmed
terrified of modern life
and our collective future

And still
humanity’s resilience remains miraculous

we keep reaching toward one another
through care
through story
through love

The deeper we root in memory
the more unshakable
our knowing becomes