Biography

Guilaine Kinouani, Founder Race Reflections.

I am an Award-winning critical psychologist, group analyst and organisational consultant.

But, I am first and foremost a writer and on a good day, a (strategic) thinker on all things equality and equity.

In 2025, I received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Essex via the Tavistock for both my academic and clinical contributions to making psychodynamic and analytic approaches more accessible to marginalised groups and people of colour.

A few human facts

Given the very serious and paradoxically impersonal nature of biographies, I am sharing a few facts about me to give a more human context to this professional and academic story.

I am a French born and bred woman of Congolese descent, who has been largely educated in the U.K.

I still consider France home as it is where most of my family and long term friends live.

I am someone who spends hours of her day thinking, it has been the case for as long as I can remember.

In my private life, can be selective with the company I keep and tend to prefer solitude over superficial and or inauthentic engagements. Integrity, political clarity and value alignment matter enormously to me. When committed, I am incredibly loyal.

I love chocolate and African music, particularly Congolese. I have a thing for coats.

Fashion was my first love and I think it shows.

It continues to inspire my creativity and appreciation for aesthetics. Exploring, curating, and sharing this passion alongside my intellectual labour has become central to resisting and counterbalancing the weight of injustice and inequality with moments of joy and beauty.

I usually take life way too seriously. I am at peace with this though, some of us are just made this way.

I am most at peace lost in the music on the dance floor or in the warmth of my bed, lost in my thoughts. Another paradox, it may appear.

Professional and academic background or, how did we get here?

I come from a mixed background, part clinical, part research and academic and part organisational. All parts have centred on equality and justice with a heavy focus on intersectional thinking.

In the past I have held a number of management and senior management posts focused on embedding equality and justice in various settings including organisational consultancy, community development and engagement and research. I have freelanced as a trainer and as an equality and organisational consultant for years before starting Race Reflections.

I have also taught critical psychology and Black Studies at Syracuse University in London.

My long-standing involvement in anti-racism has deeply influenced my scholarship and thinking.

Before my PhD research, I completed a degree in Cultural Studies and studied Counselling and Clinical Psychology after obtaining a Masters in Transcultural Mental Health. I have since completed further studies in Psychoanalysis and in Group Analysis.

My PhD research is in the department of Social Sciences at Birkbeck where I am developing a new model called Afroanalytics to work with racial trauma, racialised violence and the afterlives of colonialism and enslavement. I put analytic thinking in conversation with African, mainly Bantu, philosophies in considering inheritance, memory and embodiment in relation to the past.

Organisational specialism: Making the workplace work for everyone

I design, implement and evaluate equality strategies grounded in empirical evidence, including diagnostics, audits and assessments.

My work draws heavily on psychology and analytic and psychodynamic principles to support both individuals and organisations through racialisation related challenges.

This includes capacity-building initiatives, delivering anti-racism and oppression leadership support and providing racial trauma coaching or mediation.

I have supported a large number of organisations to embed equity and justice into governance, HR processes and culture, with the aim of strengthening not only equity but also well-being and engagement.

As a clinician, staff welfare and wellbeing are central to my thinking on equality and justice.

This year, I created the RACE Matrix ™, an evidence-based organisational formulation model grounded in group analytic and in psychology to address apparently intractable race inequality and the harm they produce. You can read about it here.

Clinical Specialism: Bringing politics into healing work

I have worked with some of the most marginalised groups within inner city London and Paris. I am naturally drawn to community, critical and liberatory approaches to clinical practice as I find them more socially and politically engaged and more epistemologically consistent with my worldview.

Nevertheless, I do find relational and psychoanalytic and group analytic concepts useful. I am equally interested in compassion-based models and in philosophy.

Clinically, most of my experience has been with adults with more severe, complex and or enduring psychological difficulties and with very high levels of distress, many of whom were compulsorily detained under the Mental Health Act (1983) or otherwise deprived of their liberty. As such, a large proportion of my experience has been with traumatised people of colour.

Over the past 10 years I have led and developed much thinking on racial, historical and intergenerational trauma, particularly in descendants of displaced Africans and those living in the aftermath of colonial violence.

I have designed from scratch the first depth course on racial trauma in the U.K. which also equips students with an approved by the Institute of Group Analysis foundation level qualification in Group Analysis. This remains the only course addressing this widely unmet clinical and organisational need in global majority communities. You can read about it here.

My work is deeply influenced by Fanon. Patients who are keenly aware of the sociopolitical realities shaping their experiences, distress or malaise tend to seek me out. I am sure it works in both directions. I am trained though to also work more traditionally and with multiple therapeutic orientations.

Research and clinical interests: What I want to continue to learn about?

My academic, clinical and research interests are centred on issues of migration, displacement, racism and social and structural inequality and violence and injustice and in particular:

* Workplace injuries, organisational functioning, group and institutional dynamics

* Covert discrimination within institutions

* The development of more socio politically informed tools and models of therapeutic and clinical intervention and liberatory clinical practice

* The influence and impact of white supremacy, racism and whiteness on the mental health and psychological functioning of people of colour and particularly on people of the African diaspora

* Psychological distress and healing in people of colour and in other marginalised groups

* The intersection of racial trauma and discrimination with other traumatic experiences, a model I refer to as the intersection of trauma (see book 1)

* The theoretical bridges between the socio-economic, the political, the historical, the structural, the relational and the psychological

* The psychological, relational and structural sequelae of colonialism, imperialism and related intergenerational trauma

Did I mention that I like to think and write? I also clearly do not mind speaking.

Manuscripts written and in formation

My first book Living While Black (Ebury: Penguin Random House) exposed the impact of lived experiences of racism on Black minds and bodies. It aims to offer clinical support to people experiencing racial trauma and those who work with them. It was published in June 2021, became a Guardian Book of the Year in the same year and has since been translated into French.

My second book White Minds (Policy Press: Bristol University) is a psychosocial exploration of how psychic and social structures intersect to reproduce whiteness and consequent everyday race dynamics, inequality and violence. In this book I use much of my group analytic training to think about racialisation and associated group dynamics. It was published in October 2023.

My third book Creative Disruption: Psychosocial Scholarship as Praxis (Palgrave Macmillan) is a co-edited volume which explores the potential of creative disruption as psychosocial praxis. It draws on queer theory, disability studies, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, Black feminism, whiteness studies and theories of racialisation amongst others to consider psychosocial studies as a site of onto-epistemic transformation and resistance. It was published in 2025.

I am currently working on three book manuscripts in my spare time. A book on love. A book on home which is a long-standing project and a collection of essays on whiteness. All are at different stages of development, hence I cannot say much more.

Other selected publications and conference presentations

Kinouani, G. (2026). Whose trauma is it anyway? An Afroanalytic exploration of memory and inheritance. Black Mental Health, Power and Pride event. South London and the Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. February 26, 2026.

Kinouani, G. (2026). Two invited entries: “Internalised scarcity” and “Space illegitimacy.” In R. Soreanu & L. van Munsteren (Eds.), A Dictionary of Money and Psychoanalysis. Free Psy Publication.

Kinouani, G. (2025). Remembering without remembering: The Kongo, absence, presence, resistance. Dorothy Kuya Memorial Lecture. Liverpool International Slavery Museum. August 22, 2025.

Kinouani, G. (2025). Racial trauma, witnessing and memory: An Afro-analytic exploration of relational metaphysics in the clinic. June 15, 2025. Rassismuskritische Psychotherapie, Berlin.

Kinouani, G. (2025). The Black researcher as living and bodily archive: Racial trauma, resistance and community transformation. April 6, 2025. University of Liverpool.

Kinouani, G. (2025). When the discarded meets the discarded: The embodiment of Blackness and whiteness in the clinic as discarded Jewishness. February 24, 2025. William Alanson White Institute, New York.

Kinouani, G. (2025). On love, non-attachment and liberation. February 13, 2025. King’s College London.

Kinouani, G. (2024). Whiteness and white messes: Location of disturbance, race, space. May 5, 2024. Institute of Group Analysis National Learning Experience.

Kinouani, G. (2023). Maternal or material deprivation: The case for an internalised scarcity model. October 13, 2023. The Freud Museum, London.

Kinouani, G. (2022). The heart of rhythm: Congolese music as creative disruption and psychosocial resistance. June 20, 2022. Birkbeck College, London.

Kinouani, G. (2021). Whiteness as pathology: Shifting the location of disturbance to dismantle social inequality. September 8, 2021. Transformation Seminar. The Anna Freud Centre, London.

Kinouani, G. (2021). Black scholarship as Black resistance. October 13, 2021. Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Kinouani, G. (2021). Fanon the group analyst. Psychoanalysis After Fanon Symposium. September 17, 2021. American Psychoanalytic Association 110th Annual Meeting.

Asani, F., and Kinouani, G. (2021). Migration, homelessness and internalised displacement. Social and Health Sciences, 19(2).

Kinouani, G. (2020). Silencing, power and racial trauma in groups. Group Analysis, 53(2), 145 to 161.

Kinouani, G. (2019). Whiteness and the group analytic matrix: An integrated formulation. Group Analysis, 53(1), 60 to 74.

Kinouani, G. (2019). The workplace discrimination survey: Findings and implications. January 10, 2019. The British Psychological Society Division of Occupational Psychology Annual Conference, Chester.

Kinouani, G. (2018). Injustice: The root cause of psychological distress? November 19, 2018. University of Melbourne.

Kinouani, G. (2018). Racial trauma in children. Family, race, resources: Understanding assets and challenges for BME parents. May 22, 2018. Birmingham. Runnymede Trust.

Kinouani, G. (2018). Trauma, moral injury and moral courage: Marginalised experiences in clinical psychology, can we truly be allies? July 9, 2018. London. British Psychological Society.

Kinouani, G. (2018). The cycle of oppression: A framework for more socially and culturally informed formulations. Working with the marginalised: Formulating beyond the mainstream. July 9, 2018. London. British Psychological Society.

Kinouani, G. (2017). What can neurodiversity teach us about power and difference? Neurodiversity Longtable. June 22, 2017. London. DIY Culture.

Last but not least, I have written over 100 essays and articles for Race Reflections, totalling about 200 000 words on inequality, injustice and oppression, spanning 15 years or so.

Why Race Reflections exists

This site started as a platform to share my reflections and work to challenge people to think and rethink equality and justice. It was born out of my sheer spirit of perseverance and resistance in light of structural violence. The act of me speaking anyway as I write in White Minds.

The baby grew. In her sixth anniversary, Race Reflections took her first steps as a social enterprise. This was almost seven years ago. I thank all of you for the support you have shown me during that uncertain transition.

In addition to the consultancy services we have offered since inception, a range of membership options are now available but can only be accessed during open enrolment and subscription periods. To join the subscription waiting list or newsletter, please use the contact form below.

Thanks for your stamina and for getting here!

If you’re working seriously on an equality project, I’d be glad to help you think it through. Use the form below to get in touch.