During a two-month residency at Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca, Mexico, I made a series of ink drawings on cochineal presses to experiment with (a) decolonising psychology, re-turning the psykhe – breath – of our studies by welcoming the more-than-human into our process. This task feels particularly urgent given Psychology’s ongoing role in colonialism and white supremacy – what Nelson Maldanado-Torres describes as a ‘state of breathlessness’. Committing to mystery, ritual, and pausing, each drawing attended to specific native plants, opening a space for me to be guided by their stories and shaping the spirit-cum-politics of my analyses. They are printed in the cracks of my 2019 book with Routledge, Psycurity: Colonialism, Paranoia, and the War on Imagination. Underneath the images below are the pages of the book in which I detail and theorise this experiment.

Psycurity, pp. 130-1

Psycurity, pp. 132-3

Psycurity, pp. 134-5

Psycurity, pp. 140-1