In this paper, I will introduce a new psychosocial writing project drawing on my experience as a Labour candidate in the 2026 local elections in south east London. The aim of this project is to nourish the imaginative nature of Labour politics at a time of significant soul-searching within the party, and to highlight the psychic dimension of political life, by sharing the voices and stories of local residents and Labour members, alongside my own reflections as a candidate and early-career academic in psychosocial studies. A year after completing my PhD at Birkbeck (about psychoanalysis and Brexit), I was selected as one of the Labour Party candidates in Mottingham, Coldharbour and New Eltham, at the southern end of Greenwich borough. This historically Conservative area has been represented by two Tory and one Labour councillor since 2022, but is now facing a surge in support for Reform UK. As a candidate, I’ve been continuously thinking about what it means to practice local politics - including speaking to a wide range of residents in biweekly canvassing sessions - with a psychoanalytic ethos, and in this paper hope to relate my experiences on the doorstep to the conference theme: Trust, Mistrust and Community. I hope there will be opportunities for discussion with conference participants, and for sharing ideas about the future direction of this project as a locus of community activism and psychosocial research (see: https://fieldnoteslabour.substack.com/).

George Shaw’s paintings of the Tile Hill estate in Coventry depict ordinary suburban spaces — pubs, garages, woodland edges, council houses — rendered with devotional seriousness. Across his work, familiar social infrastructures slowly disappear: the pub closes, the social club empties, shared spaces fade from view. These are not nostalgic images, but studies in the fragile relationship between place, memory and trust.

This paper uses Shaw’s work as a psychosocial lens to examine contemporary transformations. Trust is understood here not as confidence in individuals or institutions alone, but as something historically and spatially produced — embedded in neighbourhoods, social infrastructures and collective memory. When these infrastructures disappear or are repeatedly reorganised in the name of renewal and innovation, trust becomes harder to sustain.

The paper develops the concept of reform fatigue to describe the convergence of two dynamics: the erosion of public trust through populist narratives that frame care as indulgence or weakness, and the cumulative effects of decades of organisational reform within health and social care. Like Shaw’s recurring images of loss and absence, these processes reveal the gap between narratives of progress and lived social experience.

Against this backdrop, the paper reflects on neighbourhood mental health centres as tentative infrastructures of containment. In psychosocial terms, they represent attempts to sustain practices of being alongside in environments shaped by fragmentation and institutional instability.

Shaw’s attention to the emotional geography of working-class landscapes — spaces where “great thoughts aren’t rumoured to happen” — provides a way of thinking about trust not as restoration or optimism, but as something sustained through presence, memory and shared space. The paper suggests that containment, in this sense, is both relational and political: a way of remaining with uncertainty without collapsing into distrust or defensive certainty.

Stephen Mitchell's visionary text “Relationality“ (2022) charts the emergence of the relational perspective in psychoanalysis. Lying outside its scope is the emergence of careful borrowings of psychoanalytically informed understandings of societal impulses critical of the sociotechnical systems and infrastructures of contemporary societies. Such careful borrowings are important to consider when seeking to understand the rise of net zero politics, which has so quickly become a topic entangled with other risk objects associated with stirrings of distrust in contemporary life. Drawing on interpretive, psychosocial risk research conducted over the last decade in de-industrialising communities in South Wales, this presentation will consider published analyses in the social science literature on the net zero energy transition. It has introduced to the study of energy infrastructure consideration of “psychic objects” (Smith et al, 2024). The framework of Kleinian object relations enriches and deepens understanding of how communities can experience themselves within a dynamic nexus enabling imaginations but also leading to social defences (as wounded or contained). So far, this work has fostered questions about how to foster a just transition (IDRIC Frontiers Report, 2025). This presentation will do more to reflect on the fraught conditions of trust, mistrust and the challenge of community building in contemporary times.

Smith, H., Henwood, K., and Pidgeon, N. (2024) The infrastructural ecologies of industrial decarbonisation: Visual methods and psychosocial logics in place based public engagement. Energy Research and Social Science. 120 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2024.103874

IDRIC Frontiers Report: Public Perceptions and Just Transitions

Industrial Decarbonisation Frontiers Report | 2 June 2025

SSRN [Open Research Platform]

Abstract

Radioactive Patriarchy: The Impact of Nuclear Militarism on the village of Garelochhead.

Garelochhead is a small sleepy village which sits at the head of the Gareloch in rural Argyll, on the west coast of Scotland. Its unique in that it sits directly between two nuclear submarine bases at Faslane and Coulport, the home to the biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons in western Europe.

The economy is built around fear: time, space and the working day are determined by it. It pays the rent.To the military the village is a ‘service community’, as opposed to a community which provides services.

Trust and mistrust lie at the heart of the relationship between the local community and the submarine bases through the promise of “protection” and “safety”. This reveals a cognitive dissonance and black humour as coping mechanisms.

My proposal seeks to chart how hegemony and sexual predation is built into a matrix of hegemonic structures and masculinities which reveals the ethics of patriarchy and the limits of trust. Enloe (2000) reminds us that,

‘National security is often achieved at the expense of individual security.’

I argue that within such a regionally constructed gender hegemony, an entitled ‘frontier masculinity’ has emerged, on both sides of the fence, in which a structural violence is cultivated. In her book ‘Surviving Sexual Violence’, Kelly (1988) introduces the concept of a ‘continuum of violence’, which makes up to the cultural scaffolding of rape. This begs the question: What do we do with the violence during the “so-called” peacetime?

These observations are central to the problem my proposal is seeking to explore – the causal link between violence as the problem and violence as the answer contained within nuclear militarism and its impact on “community”.

Powerpoint presentation with slides and ethnographic documentary footage from my Phd film.