Gentleness as a Discipline: Anjali Nath Upadhyay on Liberation Psychology and the Politics of Care
Anjali Nath Upadhyay was a panelist on the fourth installment of IDHA’s Decarcerating Care series in March 2022, Community-Based Healing Alternatives and How to Build Them. This panel sought to explore the ways in which white supremacy plays out in the mental health system and movement spaces, and how we can draw upon traditional knowledge and lived experience to create more accountable, effective, and healing-centered alternatives.
Anjali offered the opportunity to delve deeper into her perspective and expertise in a follow-up interview with IDHA Program Coordinator Noah Gokul. The recorded conversation explores questions such as:
How do you think about ethics in relation to community, professionalism, and mental health?
What liberatory work can be done by those working inside the mental health system?
Tell us about a care alternative or care team that you were part of that you thought went well, and if/ how you were able to reutilize or repurpose the successful elements.
In your experience building care alternatives, what have you tried that didn’t work? What did you learn that can sustain us into the future?
During the panel, you talked about “dis-ease” as a concept. Could you tease out the relationship between ideas of ease and illness?
What did you yourself learn during the Decarcerating Care panel?
VIEW THE CLOSED CAPTION TRANSCRIPT FOR THIS INTERVIEW HERE
Resources and References
Anjali Nath Upadhyay M.A.² (she/her) is the founder of Liberation Spring, a grassroots adult education program that offers consciousness-raising in the service of collective liberation. She also hosts the decolonial feminist podcast Feral Visions. She’s academically trained as a political scientist, philosopher, and educator. She holds an M.A. degree in Political Science from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa with specializations in Indigenous Politics (the only program of its kind in the US) & Political Theory & a Graduate Certificate in International Cultural Studies (the only Cultural Studies graduate program in the US that explicitly teaches scholarship from the Global South & not mostly the Western canon). She also holds an M.A. degree from the oldest Women’s Studies Department in the US (at San Diego State University) with concentrations in feminist pedagogies, epistemologies, and gender and militarization. From 2010-2014, she was a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu. She double-majored in Women’s Studies and Political Science with a minor in Philosophy at California State University at Fullerton. Upon invitation, she has presented her original research at dozens of universities, in addition to professional associations, radio shows, and community events.
Anjali’s long-standing curiosities focus on learning and teaching as practices of liberation. Her community organizing has encompassed a wide range of areas, including but not limited to graduate student collective bargaining, prison abolition, Earth defense, guerrilla theater, anti-war organizing, LGBTTIQQ2SA advocacy, & popular education on transformative justice approaches to intimate partner violence. She’s currently working on a manuscript titled Pulling Weeds & Planting Seeds: a Guide to Decolonial Discernment and building the Weeds & Seeds app.
Noah Gokul (they/them) is a Queer multidisciplinary artist and educator here to create liberated worlds through art, storytelling, and sound. They grew up in Oakland, CA/unceded Ohlone land, and identify as a trauma survivor with sensitivities to the world around them. They use music and art for meaning-making and the healing of others, integrating these passions into their work as a peer for young adults in a first-episode psychosis program. They have facilitated in a wide variety of settings, at the intersections of anti-oppression, trauma, incarceration, Caribbean ancestry, music, and mental health. Through their incantations they create spaces of radical imagination and possibility.