Mary Watkins, PhD | Toward Psychologies of Liberation

mary-watkins-portrait-2011-mexico Welcome to my library of written work and talks. I am happy to share my published and unpublished work with you. Feel free to jump to an area that interests you, search through keywords relevant to your interests, or take your time and wander historically or thematically. I have created short introductions to each set of articles to highlight the paths of my work, adding some autobiographical remarks. I have aimed to give you a brief sense of my positionality and context at the time, so you can appreciate and evaluate the effects of these on my writings. I have also added some caveats about particular pieces, seeing their limitations more clearly than I did at the time of writing them. In several cases, when an essay has been key to several categories, I have listed it more than once. Those that are hyperlinked are available at this time, and I plan to add others. Here I imagine my work as having a number of branches, growing from a trunk of interrelated concerns and advocacies, rooted in the soil of my personal and ancestral experience, historical-social-economic-political contexts, and sense of the sacred. Critique and creative imagination interact in my work, the former opening a space and a deep desire and need for the latter. What may seem like discrete interests—i.e., active imagination in Jungian and Archetypal Psychologies and liberation psychology—share a common core of deep appreciation for creative imagination and dialogue and their generative embodiments that flower in our lives and communities.

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Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons (2019)

A landmark book that maps a radical model not only for the “helping” professions but for the work of solidarity. This timely and pathbreaking volume maps a radical model of accompaniment, exploring its profound implications for solidarity. Psychosocial and ecological accompaniment is a mode of responsive assistance that combines psychosocial understanding with political and cultural action. Accompaniment—grounded in horizontality, interdependence, and potential mutuality—moves away from hierarchical and unidirectional helping-profession approaches that decontextualize suffering. Watkins envisions a powerful paradigm of mutual solidarity with profound implications for creating commons in the face of societal division and indifference to suffering.

Up Against the Wall (2014) As increasing global economic disparities, violence, and climate change provoke a rising tide of forced migration, many countries and local communities are responding by building walls—literal and metaphorical—between citizens and newcomers. Up Against the Wall: Re-imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border examines the temptation to construct such walls through a penetrating analysis of the U.S. wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as investigating the walling out of Mexicans in local communities. Calling into question the building of a wall against a friendly neighboring nation, Up Against the Wall offers an analysis of the differences between borders and boundaries. This analysis opens the way to envisioning alternatives to the stark and policed divisions that are imposed by walls of all kinds.

Tracing the consequences of imperialism and colonization as citizens grapple with new migrant neighbors, the book paints compelling examples from key locales affected by the wall—Nogales, Arizona vs. Nogales, Sonora; Tijuana/San Diego; and the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. An extended case study of Santa Barbara describes the creation of an internal colony in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of Mexican land, a history that is relevant to many U.S. cities and towns.Ranging from human rights issues in the wake of massive global migration to the role of national restorative shame in the United States for the treatment of Mexicans since 1848, the authors delve into the broad repercussions of the unjust and often tragic consequences of excluding others through walled structures along with the withholding of citizenship and full societal inclusion. Through the lens of a detailed examination of forced migration from Mexico to the United States, this transdisciplinary text, drawing on philosophy, psychology, and political theory, opens up multiple insights into how nations and communities can coexist with more justice and more compassion.

– See more at: https://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/casupa#sthash.skrOH7Qg.dpuf

The program I co-founded at Pacifica Graduate Institute:

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The Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-Psychologies
M.A./Ph.D. Specialization Newsletter, Hearing Voices, 2020

My Areas of Interest