Friday, April 9, 2027 at 4:00 pm
UB Humanities Institute and Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center present
Join us for the inaugural Scholars@Hallwalls talk of the 2026-27 season! Complimentary beverages and light fare are served for a brief, pre-talk mingling session.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestream via the Hallwalls website.
In recent years, disabled, queer of color works such as Pleasure Activism have argued embodying joy and satisfaction help marginalized peoples recover from oppression and prefigure liberatory politics. While necessary for self-preservation and survival, this talk historizes the political economy of contemporary mutual aid to ask how pleasure in community advocacy can mimic liberal settler logics and ameliorate crises through distracting leftists from structural violence. Drawing on interviews with critical mental health practitioners in Toronto’s migrant justice movement, as well as Canadian sociolegal analysis, Lou Tam explores how autotelic productivity underpins the work of progressive psychiatrists. They contend intrinsic satisfaction and professional rewards guide medicolegal advocacy at the expense of assessing the power of “PTSD reports” to intervene in refugee cases and secure migrants’ legal status, release from detention, and safety. Dr. Tam concludes by connecting these motivations to larger organizing patterns in North American mutual aid.