DECOLONISING ‘INTEGRATION’ :

Reflections on why and where its important for energetic healing work to de.centralise the notion of ‘Integration’ & open to respecting Dis-Integration.

# decolonialist

Is ‘integration’ a goal of processual healing?
What is the ultimate state of health for us?
Is „Centralising“ of the psyche actually what we want?
Whose psyche, or who gets to decide what the central position is?

This blog post is not an attempt in itself to offer a solution, rather an undoing of preset forms of imagining.

Politics of (Dis)Integration:

The Coloniality of Migration and Integration:

From the perspective of migration, integration is contextualised under power structures.

“The urgency of calling to disrupt webs of coloniality embedded in knowledge production and practice of migration and integration is evident. Decolonising means to get rid of hierarchies and power structures, to embrace many perspectives especially those who are excluded. For Mignolo (2007) decolonising means ‘delinking’, or unlearning the ‘associated dispositions and values’ instilled by the dominant colonial regime. This is not an easy endeavour. “

“Decolonising means engaging in a deep reflexive attitude... The long tradition of feminist human geography offers a vast repertoire on reflexivity, from remaining alert to the (re)surfacing of normative language, ideologies and approaches; to reflecting on how the beliefs of the researcher/practitioner influence the research/work, and viceversa; how to maintain epistemic humility, while continuously scrutinising knowledge production and challenging racism. Institutions and individuals have knowledge, power and agendas to pursue. They are embedded in power relations and tend to reproduce those relations. Attempting a decolonial project, means constantly reflecting upon and challenging how knowledge, position and relations are produced to silence some groups and voice others, to create and constitute difference, to racialise certain bodies over others. “

CARE 

“Ethics of care, collective and radical care have been employed to rethink human and more than human relations. While care is referred to as ‘an affective connective tissue between an inner self and an outer world… and as a critical survival strategy’ (Hobart & Kneese, 2020, p. 2), it is also recognised that dominant paradigms of care are connected to its humanitarian function and shaped by neo-liberal practices that make care work invisible. Within ... integration rhetoric, humanitarian care produces differentiation and exclusions. Pertinent to this context is Miraftab et al (2019) description of care as having been used as an alibi for super-exclusion and a demonstration of the need for different functions of care, including as ‘transformative solidarity’—in lieu of a short-term humanitarian care which does not go above the individual and does not address historical and structural problems. Instead, radical care will have elements that critique this and move beyond categories of deserving: it is inter-scalar, not temporal and emergency driven. ‘Radical care can present an otherwise, even if it cannot completely disengage from structural inequalities and normative assumptions“


What is clear to me is that:

- ‘Colonial powers produce the problem, that they claim to address (integration)‘ - And this can easily become the same within the healing context of Integration, depending on the centrism of the gaze.

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Integration implies changing, merging and blending.
Weaving wounds together. 
Merging states of separation.

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Does this always lessen the potency of dynamics?
Is lessening the potency of dynamics always the goal?
NO.


Also within Cultural Integration theres always a Power Dynamic or heirachy, which we can’t deny.
Integration is an important word for centralizing and rooting the Self.
Yet…
Is „Centralizing“ of the psyche actually what we want?
Whose psyche, or who gets tto decide what the central position is?
Or are we looking to be Decentralized, fluid between states and locations within psychic space?
It’s important that we are able to navigate.
Some times integration is necessary but it’s not always the total aim.
Integration of migratory identity into a non migrant identity - whose doing all the empathic labour of adapting?

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About Race & National Identities:

Do national identities also integrate towards the migrant identity?
Are there integration courses for them which they need to do in order to be able to keep living in the area?
Who gets to belong here?

Decentralizing and Centralising.

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‘Responses to Schinkel largely converge on and acknowledge three central problematics with the concept of integration:
the ‘society’/’immigrant’ binary that creates a permanent continuous space/gap between the two; they agree that ‘the central role of the nation-state as the sole democratic space for decision-making and identity-building is problematic’ (Graef, 2019, p. 9) and, national integration, ‘an absurd anachronism’ (Favell, 2019); and the entanglement of the social sciences in the reproduction of asymmetrical power relations.

While in these critiques ‘integration’ presents as an obstacle to equality, inclusion and belonging, the question that continues to be debated, is whether or not ‘integration’ is inherently flawed in its tenets and if so what is the way forward or, if it is possible or, indeed, useful to salvage some analytical value from the concept.‘  


‘racism is depoliticised through integration itself. Instead, integration becomes responsible for a ‘civilising and disciplinary programme aimed at correcting the presumed deficiencies in ethnically marked populations’ ((Maeso, 2015, p. 53): a rationalisation that ‘depoliticises racism by constantly shifting the focus to the presumed characteristics of the ‘other’, re-enacting white-privileged notions of nationhood’ (ibid). ‘