Join us for this stirring conversation with Dr. Carter Carter and Alec Karakatsanis. Our guests peel back the curtain and inspire with a paradigm-shifting conversation on how they wrest life from institutions and build communities for themselves and others. By exposing the limits to our imagination when we adhere to the counterintuitive logics of institutionalization, our guests challenge us to think beyond the status quo.
Episode References
- Civil Rights Corps
- Copaganda – Alec Karakatsanis
- Copaganda Merch – Support Civil Rights Corps
- Psycho Analyst – Dr. Carter Carter’s Substack
About Our Guests
Dr. Carter is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and member of the leadership team of the union of Massachusetts state university professors and librarians. They maintain a private practice in psychoanalysis, individual and couple psychotherapy, and clinical supervision. Their writing can be found in assorted psychoanalytic journals and on their Substack, Psycho Analyst.
After beginning his career representing people accused of crimes who could not afford an attorney, Alec Karakatsanis founded the Civil Rights Corps, an organization that challenges systemic injustices in the U.S. legal system. In the last decade, the organization’s work has freed hundreds of thousands of people from illegal confinement in jail cells, reunited hundreds of thousands of families, returned tens of millions of dollars to marginalized communities, and advanced inspiring alternatives to punishment as a means of preventing and addressing social harm. He was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice for designing and litigating landmark constitutional challenges to cash bail and modern debtors’ prison practices across the United States. The author of Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System and Copaganda (both from The New Press), he lives in Washington, DC, with a community of wonderful friends, family, weird paintings, a garden, and his rock collection. Please check out the Copaganda merch and help support Civil Rights Corps!
Mary Kim Brewster is an executive editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and the guest editor of the special edition of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 24(40): “On Being Asian in America”. She is a clinical psychologist, faculty member of The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis, and the Director of the Serious Mental Illness and the Family Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family. She supervises in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at City University of New York and has a private practice in New York.
Shinhee Han, PhD is a senior psychotherapist at the New School University
David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Professor in the Programs of Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. Eng is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. In 2016, Eng was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City. In 2021, he was awarded the Kessler Prize from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS), which is given to a scholar and/or activist who has produced a body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies. His most recent publications are Reparations and the Human (Duke, 2025), and Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (co-authored with Shinhee Han, Duke, 2019). 
Griffin Hansbury, LCSW-R, is the author of several books, including Feral City (as Jeremiah Moss) and the Stonewall Award-winning novel Some Strange Music Draws Me In. His writing on the city has appeared in many publications, including n+1, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review. His clinical writing has received the Ralph Roughton Paper Award and appeared in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality, among other journals. He practices as a psychoanalyst in New York City.
Kris Grey is a New York City based transgender artist who uses their body as raw material, often presenting themselves in states of extreme vulnerability as an invitation to experience transcendence or discover hidden queer histories. Grey’s cultural work includes curatorial projects, performance, writing, and studio production. Grey has been a resident artist at the Bronx Museum, Fire Island Artist Residency, ANTI Festival for Contemporary Art, International Centre for Training in the Performing Arts, Wave Hill, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson. Grey’s writing, Trans*feminism: fragmenting and re-reading the history of art through a trans* perspective, was published by Manchester University Press in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories. Grey earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of and a Masters Degree in Fine Art from Ohio University. They perform, teach, and exhibit work internationally.
Foluke Taylor
Jyoti M. Rao is a psychoanalyst and holds faculty appointments at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis, and The New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Her publications, which explore the intersection between unconscious process and social phenomena, have appeared in the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Parapraxis Magazine, Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and elsewhere. She is in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.
George Makari
Francisco J. González is a psychoanalyst who helped found and co-directs the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) in San Francisco which is spearheading a movement to bring community work to psychoanalytic training. He also conducts, teaches, and supervises traditional dyadic psychoanalysis at PINC, and is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. His writing focuses on the articulation of individual and collective psychic life, including in the domains of gender, sexuality, racialized difference, and immigration. He has been the recipient of the Symonds Award, the Ralph E. Roughton Paper Award, and co-recipient of the JAPA Award for the Best Published Paper 2019. He serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, JAPA, and Parapraxis and on the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis. He practices privately in San Francisco and Oakland and in the public domain at Instituto Familiar de la Raza in San Francisco.
Katie Gentile, Ph.D. is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) and the author of Creating bodies: Eating disorders as self-destructive survival and the 2017 Gradiva Award winning The Business of being made: The temporalities of reproductive technologies, in psychoanalysis and cultures. She is the main editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, on the faculty of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Critical Social Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her current work focuses on psychoanalysis as a multispecies/object/environment proposal and the fetus as a fetish object. She is also an active violinist who has recorded, toured, and plays with a number of bands and an avid open-water swimmer. She is in private practice in New York City.
Yin Q (b.1974, they/she) is a parent, writer, media producer, curator and core organizer with Red Canary Song and founding member of Kink Out. They were honored by Spike Lee as an impact activist in 2019 in his tribute to Jackie Robinson. Yin’s writing has been published in BUST, Apogee Journal (Columbia University), We Too, Stories of Sex Work and Survival (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2021), and Afro Asia (Duke University Press, 2008). Their media work includes “Mercy, Mistress,” an autobiographical pilot based on their experience as a dominatrix (starring Daniel K. Issac, Poppy Liu; EP Margaret Cho), and Fly In Power, a documentary for Red Canary Song and the short video, Yang Song, Fly in Power.
Chanda D. Griffin, LCSW, is a teaching, training, and supervising analyst at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP) and co-chair of the Committee on Race and Ethnicity at MIP. Additionally, she is a faculty member of the National Institute For the Psychotherapies. (NIP),The Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP)and an Adjunct Professor at the Silberman Graduate School of Social Work at Hunter College. Chanda is the co-author of The Secret Society: Perspectives from a Multiratial Cohort (with Rossanna Eceygoyén and Julie Hyman) and author of Who’s on my couch: BIPOC subjectivity and the climate crisis,the MIP blog essay: Red Pill Psychoanalysis and the Matrix of Racial Roles, and the Psychoanalytic Activist,: Centered. Chanda is a member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak and is in private practice in New York City.
Led by twin choreographers Hilary Brown-Istrefi + Briana Brown-Tipley, 
Robert Jay Lifton
Dr. Sally Weintrobe
Ricardo Ainslie
Angela Garcia
Judith Butler
Ken Corbett