Call for submissions
Deadline 17th January 2025
MayDay Rooms are looking for submissions for our next pamphlet series! For our third issue, we are focusing on Red Therapy and the Anti-Psychiatry movement!
Red Therapy was a self-organised, leaderless, radical therapy group that grew out of small informal meetings in London in 1974; its members were involved in various political organisations and movements, including the women’s liberation movement, and the libertarian communist group East London Big Flame. Their shared anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian thinking is reflected in the group’s experimental praxis, producing a number of educational pamphlets which describe their group processes, therapeutic techniques and advice about setting up your own group.
Some of the emergent experimental approaches undertaken by the group are documented in their self-published Red Therapy (1978) pamphlet. Here they attempt to give historical and political context to psychic suffering, offer alternative approaches to conventional psychiatry and psychotherapy which emphasised autonomy and considered healing a collective rather than individual endeavour, as well as thinking through the specific challenges of creating a leaderless, self-help group.
The aim of this issue of the pamphlet series is to experiment with new ways of addressing Red Therapy, and offering critical resources to our comrades engaged in social struggles. Using the pamphlet Red Therapy (read here) alongside other anti-psychiatry publications housed in the MDR archive, such as Red Rat and Humpty Dumpty as a starting point, we are looking for creative and urgent proposals that interrogate the position of this archive in contemporary radical politics. We would like contributors to select material from the archive for reproduction, and then to produce essayistic or artistic responses that can be published in a pamphlet format, both in hard copy and as an ePub. These responses could be anything from manifestos to collages, from articles to comics. We are interested in proposals from individuals, groups or collective projects engaged in radical practices in relation to health, medicine and care.
About the MDR Pamphlet Series:
MayDay Rooms Pamphlet Series, which brings together reproductions of documents from radical history while offering a space for extended engagement and critical reflections on their contemporary relevance. Each pamphlet will contain newly created content – including essays, poems, and illustrations – set alongside reproductions of materials to which they are responding.
See previous examples of our pamphlet series here: https://maydayrooms.org/publication/camera-forward/
What we’re looking for:
MayDay Rooms will commission pieces of work (2500- 4000 words, or equivalent page length) that uses the MDR archive as their starting point. The archival material selected can be a whole collection, or work across various collections, or just be a single item or even a fragment. The archival documents will be reproduced in the pamphlet alongside the new work. This new work can be explicitly about these documents, or can move tangentially away from them or towards them.
We are looking to commission new work that is specifically related to our archival collections so will not be considering already complete work or works-in-progress. As always, we seek to make struggles from the past resonate with struggles of today and commissioned work will be equally antagonistic to the present condition.
This new commission will need to be finished by end April 2025 and will be published in published in Summer 2025
The final piece should contain:
- The new work alongside something from the archive that can be republished (fragments of, or in its entirety)
- Suggested length between 2500- 4000 words (or equivalent page length)
How to apply:
- Please send the following to in-formation@maydayrooms.org:
- Publication proposal between 300-500 words
- Links to any previous work that you think is relevant to your proposal. This doesn’t have to be professional work and we encourage people who have not been published before. Deadline: xxxx
- We recommended that people visit the archive or look at our online collection.
- Open to all. Proposals must be in English.
What you get from the commission:
- £350 fee
- Access to the archive and space to write (if needed) at MDR, although not permanent desk space
- Pamphlet published by MDR and distributed widely in bookshops.
- Work with designers to input into the layout of the pamphlet
- Open-Access version online in epub and pdf format
- Copy-left pamphlets
- Pamphlet launch event