Roots of Resistance

This reference list is not neutral
It is a root system, alive with memory
It gathers the voices who question the legacy of Empire logic
Who refuse the pathologising of sensitivity
Who map what it means to be human:

feeling body, kinship, interdependence, reciprocity
shared futures
survival of all, not the richest

From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Gnostics
from Marx to Foucault to the feminists
to Wallerstein’s world-systems theory
to the advocates of unconditional UBI
to every earth-based culture:

we agree, long has the problem been unjust power
reaping control, profit, blame, shame
over the people they oppress

Each of these communities
question official power
its narratives, its intentions, its impact on common humanity
and embody centuries
of memory, resistance and resilience

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 within a humanistic trend that resisted psychiatry’s pathologising gaze. It scaffolds a range of postmodern and poststructuralist movements of thought, drawing from thinkers like Foucault, who questioned who gets to define truth, whose stories are heard and how power shapes what we call normal.

Narrative Therapy was also deeply influenced by Gregory Bateson’s systems thinking, which viewed relationships and communication as ecological networks rather than isolated individuals; Jerome Bruner’s insights into narrative as the primary way humans make meaning; Barbara Myerhoff’s community-based storytelling practices that honoured marginalised voices; and Clifford Geertz’s cultural anthropology, with its notion of “thick description” for interpreting lived experience. Alongside these intellectual roots, Narrative Therapy drew strength from the political force of feminist, First Nations and liberation movements, which challenged the dominance of psychiatry, resisted the silencing of communities deemed diverse and insisted that stories of survival and resistance matter.

Finding my own narrative therapist, who is now my supervisor, changed my life. I had adored the theory for many years, as I’d become deeply frustrated with the dominant pathologising models. Yet nothing compared to the experience of speaking with someone so committed to these ideas in practice. She had studied under one of the founders, Michael White. Her studies and lifelong experience in women’s issues enriched her practice, bringing a depth and empathetic understanding to our conversations I had never encountered before.

  • 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.

Re-envisioning the Foundations of Psychology

  • 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.

  • Davies, W. (2015). The happiness industry: How the government and big business sold us well-being. Verso.

  • Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. Basic Books.

  • Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. Basic 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.

  • Teo, T. (2019). Re-envisioning theoretical psychology: Diverging ideas and practices. Springer.

  • 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.

Literature & Storytelling

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

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

  • Hegarty, R. (1999). Is That You, Ruthie? University of Queensland Press.

  • 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. (2014). Heat and light. University of Queensland Press.

  • 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

  • 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, from the 1600s into the early 1900s, claimed reason, science and progress as universal truths. Yet this reason was never neutral. It carried the ideals of a Western industrialised God, detached and above Nature, dismissive of diverse local myths and bound to systems of economic oppression. Nature was increasingly imagined as an object to be measured, mastered and exploited, a sharp break from earlier traditions that saw humans as part of a living whole. Still, other ways of knowing, ancestral and earth-based cosmologies endured beneath its dominance. In the late 20th century, postmodernism rose as an intellectual and artistic movement, a shift in collective consciousness that began to question these grand narratives. Postmodernism unsettles what we call truth. Class, gender roles, species, even definitions of sanity are not fixed. They are shaped by power, access to resources and through inherited knowledge. Poststructuralist writers like Derrida and Baudrillard carried this further, showing how language, discourse and institutions themselves produce what we call truth. They argued that meaning is never stable, always shifting, always contested. From here, posthumanist thinkers like Cary Wolfe and Donna Haraway expanded the critique, decentering the human as the sole measure of value. They invite us to rethink kinship and ethics across species, technology and ecological entanglements.

  • Barthes, R. (1977). Image, music, text (S. Heath, Trans.). Hill and Wang.

  • 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. (1977). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). Viking Press. (Original work published 1972)

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

  • Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and difference (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1967)

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

  • Derrida, J. (2008). The animal that therefore I am (D. Wills, Trans.). Fordham University Press. (Original work published 2006). https://fordhampress.com/the-animal-that-therefore-i-am-hb-9780823227907.html

  • 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)

  • Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Vol. 1: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1976)

  • 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.

  • Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1979)

  • Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans., 4th ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. (Original work published 1953)

  • Wolfe, C. (2003). Animal rites: American culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo3622788.html

World-Systems Theory

World-systems theory matters because it gives us language for inequality that is not accidental. The richest countries consistently reap from those they label as poor. What is called development or modernisation often means extraction and dependence by design. Tracing five hundred years of global history, Wallerstein shows how Europe built a world economy where core states profited by extracting from the periphery. Wealth, technology and power concentrated in the core while raw materials, coerced labour and dependency were pushed outward. The semi-periphery sat in between, sometimes rising but mostly stabilising the system so it did not collapse.

  • 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 is more than an economic policy. It is not charity, it is ethical redistribution. By funding it through a serious luxury tax, we could end coerced and dangerous labour overseas, relieve people from survival-level jobs and normalise a rhythm of two- to four-day work weeks. UUBI would celebrate the unseen value of unpaid care, creativity and community. It would deshame rest and help end the moralising of endless work, endless production and the destruction of the Earth. The majority of workers tied to slave-labour conditions are producing non-essential goods for wealthier populations overseas. UUBI would realign humanity to what truly matters: care and connection, choice and expression, life beyond the grind of economic cogs. UUBI is rooted in humanistic theories that show people make better decisions when they are no longer trapped in survival mode and have guaranteed access to basic material safety. We collectively understand that scarcity breeds cycles of fear, conflict and destructive behaviour. The burnout is collective.

The idea of a guaranteed income is not new. In 1516 Thomas More imagined it in Utopia, and in the 18th century Thomas Paine argued for payments funded by land taxes. Compounding studies and experiments since the 20th century have shown its benefits again and again in improved health, stronger education and more connected community life. Economists such as Philippe Van Parijs and Guy Standing argue that UUBI would also boost local economies, reduce strain on public health systems and create space for small businesses to flourish. It would especially recognise the labour history has ignored, valuing women’s unpaid care work as central to life, health and community.

Can an economy become circulatory? Abso-fucking-lutely. Economists show that lower-income households, the majority, spend money quickly, sending it back up the economy where it circulates again.

Long has money shifted away from material goods and concrete reality. From 1944, when forty-four nations at Bretton Woods made the US dollar the global gold standard, through 1971, when Nixon ended dollar–gold convertibility, and into 1974, when the petrodollar pact with Saudi Arabia cemented US dominance, the foundations of global finance changed. Since 1971, money has no longer been tied to gold but to power, to US control of oil markets, trade routes, and labour systems. Long before this, core states such as England, France and the US violently secured trade routes and carved up what they called the Middle East to control resources. The true wealth of richer nations has always been enabled by the periphery through extraction of labour, land, and raw materials, and through the enforcement of dependency. Today, financial giants such as Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street manage vast stakes in corporations that dominate oil, water, agriculture and land. A handful of firms hold disproportionate influence over the natural world, while ordinary people are cut off from access to land, clean air and safe water.

Therefore, UUBI is about refunnelling power, enabling eco- and community-minded people to flourish in ways that are innovative, creative and sustained interdependence. People who need little should not be expected to spend majority of their lives labouring for the rich who demand endless consumption, service and luxury. Overall, at its core, UUBI must be unconditional. No state mandates, no compulsory medicine or vaccines, no conditions attached. Only then does it become what it promises, a policy that expands choice and protects bodily autonomy for every person. It is about survival of all, not survival of the richest. It’s about less state control, more care and dignity for all.

  • 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 the ruling class claim otherwise
They pretend it is private not political
They pretend it is personal fault
not systemic pattern, oppression
They call it weakness
instead of wound

The history of humanity is proof of our collective, often impossible resilience
Generations born into cycles of oppression: state silencing, denial, distortion
compounding ecological loss
violent means of extraction and control

My lineages, my ancestors survived
An Gorta Mór The Great Hunger of Ireland
and the Holodomor Death by Hunger in Ukraine

These are not isolated tragedies
but part of empire’s long war on the people of the land

You don’t have to look far
our blood carries the memory of injustice
power’s patterns repeat
ruling class top-down violence
hunger wielded as weapon
endless wars normalised as inevitable
resources stripped and managed by the few
the so-called cost of living spirals beyond reason

No wonder we as a collective feel terrified, hopeless, helpless

And yet
We endure
We remember
We reimagine

Our collective voice of resilience
is gaining strength every dawn
The deeper we root in memory
the more unshakable our knowing becomes