Several people told me how much they enjoyed your session, and your participation in the event more generally. It was a real pleasure for me to meet you. I’m glad that you found the summer school rewarding as well.   

organiser of event IN EMAIL TO ME

I delivered a workshop with Dr Mohammed Rashed entitled ‘From Conditions to Encounters: The Problem of Understanding in Philosophy of Psychiatry. An Encounter between Mohammed Rashed and Kai Syng Tan’ at Mind, Value and Mental Health: Philosophy and Psychiatry Summer School 2022, St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. Participants include clinicians, professors, early career researchers in philosophy/psychiatry from Sydney, Hannover,  UC Berkley, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Latvia, Florida State University, University of Zurich. More a provocation than a didactic session teaching neat/readymade solutions, we introduced the problem as laid out by psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers, and introduced examples of encounter from the arts and beyond, and had a hands-on exercise in the form of Hand-in-Hand. See photos below, read brochure and full programmme here (page 7) and overview here.

SUMMER SCHOOL: What a lively and lovely two-days of nourishment for the brain, mind and soul. These spaces can often be elitist, but I met several amazing scholars-clinicians whose made beautiful articulations about the entanglements between mental health, social justice, power, co-creation and ethics, including by Professor Kamaldeep Bhui CBE (who called out on racism, class and other factors that have shockingly been institutionally ignored, and called for kindness as well as personified kindness throughout), Dr Khaldoon Ahmed (who also makes powerfully haunting films) Dr Kamran Ahmed (check out his fabulous articles on Guardian). It was great that early career researchers were included, some of whom expressed sharp insights to bravely counter the arrogance and privilege that a few established actors (unconsciously? or wittingly?) revealed in their contributions.

MOHAMMED: This was the fifth or so collaboration with Mohammed. Previous encounters were at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, Birkbeck and more. Mohammed is a philosopher and acclaimed author (Madness and the Demand for Recognition: A Philosophical Inquiry into Identity and Mental Health Activism, Oxford University Press, 2019), the British-Egyptian is also a practising psychiatrist. His work was submitted to REF 2021 as an impact case study for Birkbeck, University of London when he was based at Department of Philosophy as a Wellcome-ISSF Fellow. What a tentacular embodiment of productive antagonisms.