Biography
Christopher Hoskins is a doctoral student in Religion, Psychology, and Culture as well as a fellow in the Theology and Practice Program at Vanderbilt University. Christopher's ongoing research focuses on spiritual care practices that contend with dislocation, ambiguous loss, global ecological identities, and selfhood across borders. He draws on the integration of pastoral and practical theologies, qualitative research, and psychodynamic theory to offer critical engagement with current migration trends and border systems that stem from colonial structures and ideologies. He holds commitments to accessibility for religious education, care for caregivers, and addressing domestic and political violence through communal care.
Paper Abstract
Pastoral theology has often avoided major approaches to the ecological self. This presentation briefly traces such avoidance in the field's dependence on classical psychoanalysis with Freud's dismissal of "the Oceanic"—a feeling of deep interconnectivity—while also pointing toward the formation of the ecological connections to self, particularly probing the heightened and overtly exhibited disruptions of a person from their known environmental context within human migration. Attending to the ecological self draws from the psychoanalytic examination of environmental dislocation by Salman Akhtar and religious studies' concept of identity depletion with vignettes from care cases from displaced seminary students in Ecuador. Such attention strives to uphold relations between embodied experience and ecological personhood. Possibilities abound in caregiving for those dislocated through migration, linking how religious practice orients and activates emotions and bodies to resist ecological depletion and our own ecological displacement. This presentation stems from a larger project on migration and spiritual care.