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When the editorial board considered the 487 submissions we received for ROOM 10.26, themes of taking action and acknowledging responsibility rose to the top with a screaming pitch. And nowhere was this more apparent than in the overwhelming number of…
Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Killing Spree; To 2040, a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; [To] The Last [Be] Human, which collects four extraordinary poetry collections—including Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway; From the New World:…
A phrase kept entering my head: the banality of evil. Not because individual workers are evil or because the delivery driver is evil. But because systems can become normal with shocking speed. With enough people doing ordinary things, eventually almost…
As someone who has spent years in analysis as both patient and clinician, I understand that many people come to therapy carrying a mountain, or perhaps a landfill, inside themselves. They carry unspoken stories, histories, experiences they regard as trash,…
None of us can carry activist work alone. Nor are we the first to face these monumental challenges. People have stood exactly where we are standing, facing forces that looked exactly this immovable, and moved them anyway. Not because the…
The jokes are alive, but they are alive in Hindi, waiting at a border. I have spent years practising English, and I am now fully purchased even the right to be funny.
Perhaps this is what unsettles me most about the language of resilience: It can make endurance sound like a quality someone possesses rather than something circumstances have demanded from them.
In this special section of ROOM 10.26, we pay tribute to the more than ten thousand young activists who took to the streets in New Delhi, demanding the resignation of the education minister on July 20, 2026. Led by the…
Katherine Filice is a Northern California painter whose practice is rooted in direct collaboration with the natural world. Working in ink, oil, charcoal, earth pigments, paper, and found organic materials, she often buries raw canvas in forest environments for a…
…the group no longer seemed to me a supportive community, but rather part of a persecuting entity.
Despite all the decades of denials and silence, the memories remain in many Ukrainians like my grandmother. They have also remained alive in me, perhaps even before I had the words to understand them.
The watermelon gesture asked me to loosen my ideas about what unconscious communication should look like. A person living under the threat of displacement also has desires, fantasies, defenses, ambivalence, humor, aggression, and a rich inner world. Community psychoanalysis asks…
Our ownership of desire understandably colours the women green with envy, a colour they would prefer to associate with disgust, as the former threatens their identification with “vo” if they were to use us as models to own their pleasure.…
Katee Boyle, Chadds Ford, PA is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, painting, photography, and mixed media. A conceptually driven expressionist, her intuitive, process-based work explores memory, identity, belonging, and the complexities of the human experience through a…
What happens when language is the very ground that has broken down between a father and son? Through a shared rooftop garden of desert cacti and edible vegetables, a son traces the psychic rupture between himself and his father, the…
Elizabeth Kandall, PhD, is a psychologist/psychoanalyst and student of Zen Buddhism. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, where Ada Limón was her teacher and thesis advisor. She serves on the Board of Directors at Poets House and…
What happens when psychoanalysis confronts the suffering of forced migration? Beyond diagnostic categories and the medicalization of trauma lies a more complex human story of exile, migrant subjectivity, intergenerational trauma, and the sociopolitical production of suffering. This essay considers how…
We are the Light is a forum and gathering place offering free and open expression to women from around the world whose voices are seldom heard and whose futures are threatened. The education and health of women, attention paid to…
For ten years ROOM has been a weight-bearing bridge for hundreds of writers, mental health professionals, poets, artists, and community leaders from all over the world. Some are well known, but for many, it has been the first time they…
Danielle Speakman, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, MA. She is a graduate of Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Her enduring interest is in Jungian depth psychology, and she seeks to hold a therapeutic space where…
