Join us for this poetic and incisive conversation between Foluke Taylor and Dr. Jyoti Rao. Our guests explore the toxicity of institutional stasis and the subversive urgency of grief and grievance. Through their conversation they model inclusivity, interdisciplinarity, and intimacy offering us an alternative path through.
About Our Guests
Foluke Taylor
Foluke is a therapist*writer, author, and speaker. Her published work includes two monographs; a biomythography How the Hiding Seek (2018) and her most recent book, Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room (2023, W.W. Norton, London and New York). She has contributed to a range of academic journals and edited collections including chapters in What is Normal: Psychotherapists Explore the Question (2020, Karnac Books), White Therapies + Black Identities (2021, PCCS Books) and Black women, trauma and therapy: Revolutionising therapeutic thought and practice (PCCS Books, forthcoming 2025).
Foluke has taught across a range of higher education institutions and is currently a CHASE funded doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research focuses on Black feminisms—engaging creative writing and Black feminist poetics to explore possibilities for therapeutic practice.
Foluke is inspired and energised by collaborative and collective projects and values opportunities to experiment across disciplines and co-create with others. She has worked with a range of artists (including practitioners of therapeutic arts), researchers and activists transnationally. This includes performance installations across Britain and Europe as part of an ongoing collaboration on Dr Barby Asante’s Declaration of Independence and within the film ‘daughter(s) of diaspora’ by Black-feminist artist-researcher Dr Nydia Swaby. Convinced of the importance of spaces that nurture emergent formations, Foluke is a big fan of dancefloors, living rooms, and kitchen tables
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.