(Image of the Colombian Amazons by Miguel Winograd (Colombian Photographer, ethnographic research)
Suicide from A Magical Realist Perspective: Incarnated Stories from the Colombian Amazons
Online Workshop
with marcela polanco, PhD
Monday, October 27th, 4:00 to 7:00 pm ET
- How might we unlearn to listen monolingually (in one or more languages) to stories of life and death beyond eurocentric conceptualizations of suicide and prevention and toward a pluriversality?
- How can we understand and respond to ‘suicide’ otherwise when learning from communities for whom the word suicide and the physiological and anatomical body do not exist, like the indigenized communities from the Colombian Amazons including the Tikuna?
I intend to introduce the perspectives of the Critical Studies Network on the medicalized, criminalized, and moralized perspective to suicide in therapy from a magical realist lens. I will share experiences of decolonial healing from indigenized communities from the Colombian Amazons. This is an invitation to therapists to a conversation on therapy and suicide, in relation to life and death liberation that steers away from an anti-psychiatry stance or dismantling and deconstructive proposals, engaging instead epistemic humility and pluriversality. An option to think, sense, listen, and engage with life and death otherwise will be at the center of the discussion.
Learning Objectives
This program will enable participants to:
- Critically examine the limitations of monolingual and Eurocentric frameworks in understanding stories of life and death, particularly in the context of suicide and its prevention.
- Explore alternative epistemologies of life, death, and mental health from indigenized communities, such as the Tikuna of the Colombian Amazon, where concepts like “suicide” and the anatomical body may not exist in the same way.
- Engage with the concept of pluriversality as a guiding framework for listening, sensing, and responding to suffering, life, and death beyond universalist or biomedical paradigms.
Introducing Our Presenter
marcela polanco
My ancestry es Muisca, African and South European de Colombia. Como inmigrante en los United States (U.S.), I am a part of the faculty team in the family therapy and Spanglish decolonial healing programs at San Diego State University located in Kumeyay land. Mi trabajo de supervisión, teaching, research, and therapy in my immigrant English are informed by the Australasian narrative therapy and U.S. Black feminism. En my Español Colombiano y Spanglish, I am particularly interested in Andean decoloniality, decolonial feminismos and Chicanx borderland activismo as a response to Eurocentrism. I am a practicing licensed Marriage and Family Therapist en los Estados de California and Texas and Supervisor. My ancestry es Muisca, African and South European de Colombia. Como inmigrante en los United States (U.S.), I am a part of the faculty team in the family therapy and Spanglish decolonial healing programs at San Diego State University located in Kumeyay land. Mi trabajo de supervisión, teaching, research, and therapy in my immigrant English are informed by the Australasian narrative therapy and U.S. Black feminism. En my Español Colombiano y Spanglish, I am particularly interested in Andean decoloniality, decolonial feminismos and Chicanx borderland activismo as a response to Eurocentrism. I am a practicing licensed Marriage and Family Therapist en los Estados de California and Texas and Supervisor.