This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Dr. Ipek S. Burnett, author, cultural critic, and co-chair of the Human Rights Watch's Executive Committee. Burnett compares Robert J. Lifton's work on psychic numbing in the face of acute atrocities to the everyday psychic numbing in our contemporary life. She argues for exercising critical consciousness and imagination to face our political and environmental realities. For Burnett, psychological activism, or the courage to keep our broken hearts open, is an ethical responsibility to the collective and our children.

Read Ipek's work in ROOM:

"I ask myself, What can one do hurricane after hurricane? Wildfire after wildfire? All the droughts, floods, displacements? How can one go beyond witnessing?"— Ipek S. Burnett, "Hurricane After Hurricane," ROOM 2.25