Research Interests

Psycho-political education; the study of perception & body-centered philosophies; socio-political praxes of somatics & engaged immediacy; the embodied socio-relational field & the embodied therapeutic encounter; somatic applications of Fanonian psychoanalysis.

Biography

I'm a social praxis scholar-educator, group facilitator, somatic therapist (certified in Somatic Experiencing®), and a bodyworker (certified in a contemplative, non-physician osteopathic practice called Somatic-Psycho Education, renamed Perceptual Psycho-Education). My work integrates somatics within a focus on the everydayness of racial-gendered existence and colonial-capitalisms. I developed this approach through a praxis I created called Political Extimacy. My consistent focus is creative disruption of the normative violence of western universal reason, whether in the world or within the therapeutic encounter. I hold a doctorate in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, and I authored Managing African Portugal: The Citizen-Migrant Distinction (Duke U Press). I previously taught as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and as Associate Professor in the former doctoral program in Somatics at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Most recently, I’ve lectured in Black Studies at Portland State University and in the Education Department at UC Santa Cruz; in both places my courses centered the psycho-politics of racial-gender. I’ve left academia multiple times to center my work as a social praxis educator. But I keep coming back because, ultimately, I’m a teacher at heart.

For the last 15 years I’ve maintained an ongoing private practice. I somatically support perceiving and integrating the threads that bind unresolved personal, familial, communal, and historical-political traumas.

Education

Ph.D. in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology, UCLA (2000)

Courses

Theories and Techniques of Somatic Psychotherapy I

Somatics and Society

Multicultural Counseling

Group facilitation and Group Therapy

Therapeutic Communication

Neuroscience