'The war, with all of its brutality and nonsense, came to my house'

How invasion transformed our clinical psychology course

Abstract

This article—a collaboration between us as student and educator—shares an example of Freirean praxis in a clinical psychology course. We discuss how our course was transformed when, one day after our first class of the semester, Russian military forces invaded Ukraine and students were suddenly and unexpectedly called on to host and/or provide support for forcibly displaced people from Ukraine. This article is our attempt to describe how the complex political context in which we found ourselves shaped and transformed our clinical psychology course and our experience of our learning environment. We reflect together on how we responded to the immediate consequences of this event, share what we learned through this experience, and discuss the implications for anti-oppressive practitioner educational contexts.