Reverie of Resistance

Lara Sheehi is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences and the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work is committed to decolonial and feminist methodologies and is especially interested in psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles and life-making in the Global South, the psychic dimensions of resistance and revolution, and critical Zionist studies. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39) and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Lara is a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture. She is currently working on a new book, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto Press, 2026).

Stephen Sheehi is Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies in the Asian and Middle East Studies Program and  the Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project at the College of William & Mary. Having published on psychoanalysis, Arab photography, Arab identity and colonial modernity,  and Islamophobia and racism, he is, most recently, co-author of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine with Lara Sheehi, which has won the Palestine Book Award for Best 2022 Academic Book on Palestine; and Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories, co-authored with Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar. He and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian most recently co-edited a special issue of State Crime Journal, “Settler-Colonialism As State-Crime: Abolitionist Perspectives.”