Intimate shaping: the embodied self and activist therapeutic practices during the Greek economic crisis

Abstract

The social transformations that have transpired in Greece during the period of the economic crisis have altered the social fabric of living through the imposition of austerity politics, economic hardship, and work insecurity. These social shifts have created complex utterances of loss and vulnerability, but also resistance. This thesis examines the ways in which the self is enveloped and shaped by the power dynamics of the economic crisis and the feelings and experiences that permeate it, in order to advance a deeper understanding of how the crisis becomes embedded into the self. Aiming to identify ways of moving beyond the impasse and hopelessness of precarious living within the crisis, this study also explores the capacities for action and movement that the crisis can generate, in the context of social clinics and the psychotherapeutic practices embedded in them. Social clinics are a grassroots solidarity movement created by volunteer health professionals where practices of care provision and economic activity are performed in ways that challenge the neoliberal and austere.

This thesis creates a theoretical space that can hold together the in-between space of entanglement where the personal meets the economic. Drawing upon Foucauldian and governmental perspectives, I examine subjectification processes within neoliberal realities. Thinking with Judith Butler, I focus upon vulnerability, loss, and dispossession, within the context of the crisis. Through cultural theory, I examine the affective textures of everyday lifeworlds during the crisis. Imagining other worlds and economies, I draw on Gibson-Graham to examine social clinics and the practices they incorporate as activist projects that can unsettle the present economic world.

This thesis employs a critical autoethnographic approach, as I delve into this space of in-betweenness through my own experiences of precarious living, while entangling my stories with those of volunteer psychotherapists who offer their services in social clinics of Athens. By using writing as inquiry and thinking with theory as my analytical approach, I foreground my body as an instrument of research and advance an understanding of theory as an embodied and dynamic process that connects thinking and doing.