Beyond Despair with Hannah Proctor

Hannah Proctor joins this year’s Book Fringe with a book that couldn’t be more timely.

Burnout: the Emotional Experience of Political Defeat explores hope, exhaustion, and the emotional dimensions of radical politics. It turns its back on narratives of individualist suffering and therapy and, instead, points toward ways of holding defeat while continuing to work for what we need, together. On the way, it introduces us to extraordinary lives lived in service of collective struggle: former Communards exiled from Paris to a penal colony in the South Pacific; a young Bolshevik fleeing the city in despair; an ex-militant on the analyst’s couch relating dreams of ruined landscapes; a trade union organiser seeking advice from a spiritual healer; and a group of feminists padding a room with mattresses to scream about the patriarchy.

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed with the toll of activism and organising, and wondering what to do with the feeling of constant fire-fighting, this one is most definitely for you!

This event will be 30 mins followed by audience questions and signing. Please feel free to attend any or all of these depending on your capacity!

Our speaker:

Hannah Proctor holds a Wellcome Trust University Award at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She is the author of two books: Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria's 'Romantic Science and Soviet Social History (published in the Palgrave series Mental Health in Historical Perspective, 2020) and Burnout: the Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024). She is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy, is a contributing editor of Parapraxis and is web/reviews editor of History of the Human Sciences.