Why do some men sexually assault women? Can their behaviour be explained exclusively through reference to inadequate understandings of consent? Or are more complexly gendered power dynamics in play? In this article I reflect on the narrative accounts provided to me over the last 27 years by men who have disclosed sexual assaults they have perpetrated on women and girls: assaults often perpetrated with impunity, the tellers evading detection, arrest, conviction and, in some cases, without any acknowledgement that what they had done was wrong or illegal. The article calls for a more dynamically psychosocial analysis of how insecurities and trauma inform misogyny and masculinities, alongside an intersectional analysis of which men get criminalised for sexual assaults. It advocates for public engagement strategies that ask men to reflect upon the benefits of being brave and curious enough to ask prospective partners not just what they will consent to, but also what they really want.

This article forms part of a special issue on a psychosocial method of group data analysis characterised as Many Minds. In this article, we aim to democratise and render transparent the Many Minds process and outline its affordances as a method for analysing evocative and provocative data. The article begins with an acknowledgement of our own positionalities. We move on to explore the specific context in which our experiences were located, how the Many Minds approach operated in this space and the methods we devised for writing this article. Through sharing our understanding and experiences in three discrete Many Minds roles – the facilitator, the sharer and the participant – we reflect on the characteristics, responsibilities and practices associated with each of them. We consider how attending to these roles is pivotal to the creation of a containing and generative environment that maximises the opportunity for the unbearable to be borne, the unthinkable to be thought and for unconscious knowledge to be surfaced and voiced. Attending to these roles, we argue, is essential for a space to be created in which participants’ research experiences can be honoured, respected and better understood. Many Minds offers a generative approach that has rich potential for researchers, including practitioner researchers, who seek deeply reflexive psychosocial methods for data analysis.

What happens to data when it is read and re-read, interpreted and re-interpreted beyond its original geographic, cultural and linguistic context? How might the transfer of data across countries and through the minds of a multicultural group of scholars generate new meanings or unsettle familiar ones? How might locally situated narratives act as a starting point for broader reflections on motherhood, young adulthood and researcher subjectivity? This article reflects on these questions by engaging with the emotional and bodily responses elicited through my participation in a ‘Many Minds’ group data analysis series, during which I shared data translated excerpts from my own research with an international group of scholars. In the article I explain how and why I chose the data – two interview excerpts and a reflective fieldnote, originally produced in Hebrew as part of a PhD project on mother–daughter relations in marginalised communities in Israel. Assisted by Lorenzer’s (1986) concept of the ‘scenic’ I explore my choices and the reception of the material by others, tracing movement between languages, locations and positionalities enabled by the affordances of a Many Minds data analysis group.

How do we – scholars in the academy – hold ourselves, each other and the practices of intellectual work in times of entangled multispecies, geopolitical and educational crises? This article presents and reflects on a two-year writing experiment that involved a regular, virtual, group-writing practice among four academics situated in the global North. The writing and resulting discussions evolved into a shared archive and a recursive archiving practice where material was re-encountered and revisited. The whole enterprise, including the writing and editing of this article, became an approach of collective thinking and analysis informed by traditions of psychosocial group analysis of data, memory work and auto-ethnography. In this article we present an account of our work together, characterising it as a knowledge practice, constituted through a combination of writing, reading aloud, listening, responding, archiving, revisiting and writing again. The article is illustrated with examples of our process and our multi-vocal writing. The article invites the reader into live archiving practices, academic companionship and intellectual work. At the centre of the article is the claim that our work can be understood as a sanctuary/ing practice , that enabled us to bear and continue to bear the deep worries for higher education and the frictions and demands of research and teaching in unsettling times. Writing for and with each other, building an archive from these common goods and working iteratively with that archive is offered as a tender knowledge practice for such toxic times.

This annotated bibliography is aimed at those new to the Many Minds approach to collective data analysis, wishing to understand its history and influence. We present a conceptual map, distinguishing three key bodies of work/fields, including: psychoanalytically informed group seminars; narrative approaches to sharing and reusing data; and collaborative group-based data analysis associated with feminist methodologies. Starting at the centre of a Venn diagram of overlapping circles we focus attention on key readings that connect all three approaches before moving out to each of the circles to provide examples of significant publications. Annotations are both descriptive and evaluative and sometimes also personal. The list is neither exhaustive nor definitive but is offered as a shared resource for those interested in learning more about the approach and the traditions on which it builds.

The call to re-enchant research is both a theoretical and methodological provocation that transcends disciplines. Drawing on concepts of re-enchantment from different traditions, this article examines how psychosocial methods – in particular, the ‘Many Minds’ method of group analysis – can foster a research praxis that foregrounds interconnectedness and care. As an interdisciplinary researcher new to psychosocial inquiry, I reflect on my use of Many Minds – in conjunction with supervision and reflective journalling – within a qualitative interview-based study about women’s farming journeys. Considering both the affordances and challenges of this approach, I explore how learning to use feelings as an entry point in analysis can enable ways of knowing and open up lines of enquiry that are new to activist research on alternative farming. Through worked examples, I demonstrate how links between the micro-level of the vignette and the macro-level of theory can be established, while maintaining the sense of connection that can be lost through generalisation. In the spirit of ecofeminist scholarship, I argue for re-enchanting research as a strategy of resistance – one that creates space for solidarity, care and collective meaning-making in the production of formal academic knowledge. Through this praxis, I argue that a specific kind of knowledge emerges which makes sense of the affective turn within problem-focused fields.

This article offers a brief psychosocial reflection on the relationship between authoritarianism and the family today. Taking as its starting point populist authoritarianism’s attachment to the family, the piece explores the relationship between the family form, gender polarity and authoritarian tendencies, drawing on the work of Robyn Marasco and Jessica Benjamin. Arguing that there is an intimate relationship between these phenomena, it then briefly hypothesises a connection between the rise of authoritarian tendencies and the return of gender traditionalism under neoliberalism. Ultimately, it suggests that authoritarian tendencies are, at least in part, ‘oedipal monsters’, which can only be challenged through a rearticulation of symbolic and social relations beyond the terms of paternal law.

This article adopts a psycho-social framework to explore the complexities of cross-race doctoral supervision through the reflective accounts of a Black female academic and a White female academic. It scrutinises the tensions, defences and incongruities that surface in cross-race encounters, highlighting often-overlooked anxieties rooted in colonial legacies. Emphasising the need to confront racial dynamics, the article advocates for the integration of diverse epistemologies into doctoral programmes to address epistemic injustices. Employing co-constructed autoethnography, the authors examine ‘raced moments’ in cross-race doctoral supervision and tentatively introduce the concept of a ‘racially reflexive third space’. This incorporated supervisory praxis in cross-race supervision aims to deepen understanding of race-related dynamics in academia – fostering contextualised hyper-reflexivity. By challenging traditional supervision models and engaging with existing power structures, it contributes to the decolonisation of educational spaces.

We use a psychosocial approach to explore the important role nationalism plays in underpinning the resurgence of far-Right populist parties. We first define nationalism as an everyday phenomenon, with a banal form that structures our lives, that makes the hot form possible (Billig, 1995). We then look at social and psychological reasons why people would be drawn to the far-Right. Socially, the far-Right take advantage of people’s alienation and the deteriorating economic circumstances, to argue that others are responsible for undermining the national spirit, sending the nation into decline. Psychologically, authoritarian leaders provide an opportunity for people to resolve their frustrations at their status: they see themselves reflected in the leader’s glory, by subsuming themselves to the nation. National identity, combined with these forces, thus explains the attraction of the far-Right as providing a seeming resolution to their social and psychological struggles, through the immortality of the nation.