Book at Lunchtime: Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor

Background is colourful old book spines. On the left is a white circle containing the words Book at Lunchtime. On the right is the cover of Unseen Poor

Register here.

Join us for a TORCH Book at Lunchtime on Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor by Professor Ankhi Mukherjee (English).

Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all.

About the book:

In Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, Ankhi Mukherjee offers a magisterial work of literary and cultural criticism which examines the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis. Spanning three continents, this hugely ambitious book reads fictional representations of poverty with each city's psychoanalytic and psychiatric culture, particularly as that culture is fostered by state policies toward the welfare needs of impoverished populations. It explores the causal relationship between precarity and mental health through clinical case studies, the product of extensive collaborations and knowledge-sharing with community psychotherapeutic initiatives in six global cities. These are layered with twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of world literature that explore issues of identity, illness, and death at the intersections of class, race, globalisation, and migrancy. In Unseen City, Mukherjee argues that a humanistic and imaginative engagement with the psychic lives of the dispossessed is key to an adapted psychoanalysis for the poor, and that seeking equity of the unconscious is key to poverty alleviation.

Speakers:

Professor Ankhi Mukherjee (English)

Professor Sally Shuttleworth (English)

Professor Josh Cohen (Goldsmiths)