Shared Conditions

Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) and other care professionals face forms of distress that exceed individual explanations and clinical taxonomies. Many of the difficulties experienced by the people we serve, such as loss, economic precarity, exposure to violence, displacement, moral injury, and relational breakdown, cannot be adequately addressed through individualised clinical frameworks alone.

Yet dominant approaches frequently frame socially produced suffering as personal vulnerability, maladaptation, or failure to cope, obscuring its structural, economic, and historical roots.

These same conditions also shape professional experience. Burnout, moral distress, and a pervasive sense of professional impotence increasingly characterise MHPSS and other related practices, yet are commonly approached through the same individualised frameworks rather than recognised as effects of systemic pressures and constrained care mandates.

At the same time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly mediating how knowledge is accessed and mobilised within MHPSS and other related practices. While AI can offer speed and synthesis, its use also risks promoting forms of knowledge detached from situated meaning, while bypassing the essential relational and ethical dimensions of care.

Despite being immersed in varied forms of suffering and care, MHPSS and other professionals worldwide share a common reality: suffering and care are shaped by structural, social, and historical conditions whose logics we can examine, contest, and potentially reshape through collective reflection.

Disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, critical social theory, and community psychology offer robust frameworks for understanding social suffering, violence, power, recognition, and collective agency, yet remain marginal within MHPSS training and much of everyday MHPSS practice.

Shared Conditions engages selected texts from those above-mentioned traditions through a structured reading group, using collective reading as a methodological pretext for the creation of situated knowledge. Reading functions not as an individual academic exercise or a source of decontextualised techniques development, but as a shared analytical frame through which to examine our own practice.

The project is designed for MHPSS and other related professionals who seek to examine suffering, care, and responsibility beyond individualising frameworks, developing greater analytical depth and ethical clarity in order to cultivate a more situated, relational, and structurally informed approach to care.

The initiative is structured around seven conceptual blocks that move from the naming of suffering and its structural conditions, to moral harm and recognition and colonial and historical violence, through the affective and performative dimensions of professional life, towards a critique of care, and into situated praxis.

In Naming Suffering, we will challenge individualised and clinical languages of distress. Rather than asking what is wrong with individuals, we will consider how suffering is named, narrated, and made visible, or invisible, across contexts.

Conditions of Life situates suffering within social and structural determinants. We will explore how precarityand inequity shape everyday life, shifting attention from symptoms to the social arrangements that render certain lives more vulnerable than others.

Moving beyond suffering as experience, Moral Harm and Recognition introduces the idea of moral and social damage. It examines how misrecognition, emotional norms, and relational expectations produce harm that is often normalised, internalised, or rendered invisible within contemporary societies.

Coloniality and Historical Violence challenges universalist assumptions about subjectivity, trauma, and care by emphasising colonial histories and ongoing forms of violence. The readings invite participants to confront how power, race, and death structure both suffering and the frameworks used to respond to it.

Returning to professional experience, in Affects, Exhaustion, and Performance we will explore burnout, emotional labour, and exhaustion as structural effects rather than personal failure. We will situate fatigue and overperformance within broader regimes of productivity, affective management, and self-responsibilisation that shape contemporary care work.

In Governing Suffering and the Critique of Care, attention turns to care itself as a site of power. In this block we will examine how psychological, humanitarian, and policy practices can operate as technologies of governance, regulating life and distress in the name of care, while also identifying tensions, limits, and spaces of resistance within these regimes.

The final block, Situated Knowledge, Community, and Praxis, centres collective practice as a site of ethical responsibility and knowledge production. Rather than offering models or techniques, we will explore praxis as a situated, relational process rooted in Human Rights and sustained engagement with people and communities as historical subjects.

Some of the readings may feel challenging. This difficulty is necessary, as these texts aim to challenge familiar ways. The proposal is to read slowly and remain attentive to what does not immediately fit.

• 17 biweekly online sessions, each lasting 2hours, from 16:00 to 18:00 Central European Time.

•  Sessions are scheduled on Tuesdays, running from 7 April to 15 December 2026 with no sessions in August.

• Sessions are designed with one main reading per session (2–3 hours preparation). 

• Participants who meet the 80% participation threshold will receive a certificate of completion recognising their engagement.

• Interested applicants are invited to apply by emailing a brief CV explaining why they want to join to cristinavivares@sciencebrut.org. Brief interviews may be conducted with shortlisted applicants prior to final selection.

• Priority access open until 28 February 2026: If you are receiving this message directly, you have first priority to apply early and secure one of the limited spots. Application deadline: 31 March 2026.

• Places are limited to 12 participants.

• Participants are invited to contribute according to their means, if they can.

Block 1 – Naming Suffering

• Session 1: Tuesday 07 April 2026 – Kleinman (Social Suffering, Introduction)

• Session 2: Tuesday 21 April 2026 – Veena Das (Life and Words, chapter 1)

• Session 3: Tuesday 05 May 2026 – Didier Fassin (Introduction + selected excerpts from Chapter 1)

Block 2 – Conditions of Life

• Session 4: Tuesday 19 May 2026 – Bourdieu (The Weight of the World, selected interviews)

• Session 5: Tuesday 02 June 2026 – Lorey (State of Insecurity, Introduction)

Block 3 – Moral Harm and Recognition

• Session 6: Tuesday 16 June 2026 – Honneth (The Struggle for Recognition, Introduction)

• Session 7: Tuesday 30 June 2026 – Sara Ahmed (The Cultural Politics of Emotion, chaper 1)

Block 4 – Coloniality and Historical Violence

• Session 8: Tuesday 14 July 2026 – Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks, chaper 1)

• Session 9: Tuesday 28 July 2026 – Mbembe (Necropolitics, key sections)

Full August pause — no sessions in August 2026 (vacation/rest period)

Block 5 – Affects, Exhaustion, and Performance

• Session 10: Tuesday 08 September 2026 – Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society)

• Session 11: Tuesday 22 September 2026 – Hochschild (The Managed Heart, chaper 1)

Block 6 – Governing Suffering and Critique of Care

• Session 12: Tuesday 06 October 2026 – China Mills (selected text on decolonizing global mental health)

• Session 13: Tuesday 20 October 2026 – Nikolas Rose (Governing the Soul, selected chapters)

Block 7 – Situated Knowledge, Community, and Praxis

• Session 14: Tuesday 03 November 2026 – Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, cap. 1)

• Session 15: Tuesday 17 November 2026 – Ignacio Martín-Baró (Toward a Psychologyof Liberation)

• Session 16: Tuesday 01 December 2026 – Maritza Montero (selected texts on concientización, participation, power, and everyday ethics) + Carlos Martín Beristáin y Francesc Riera (Afirmación y resistencia: La comunidad como apoyo)

• Session 17: Tuesday 15 December 2026 – Final integration / collective wrap-up + evaluation

Quick summary

• First session: 7 April 2026

• Last session: 15 December 2026

• Total duration: From early April to 15 December 2026, with full August off.

• Pauses:  August