Third Space Practice is my initiative and passion project. My field of practice is supporting journalists, activists – people under threat, surveillance and exile; and teaching, supervising and coaching a wide range of clientele in parallel with that.
Most conceptions of distress accept a stable self – a self that has a “home” or place somewhere, and can be recollected when it has been fractured. As a description of a life that has been made in many places or under peril, this is inadequate at best, and it is political – and dangerous. It tells us to locate the problem in the individual, not in the circumstances, and interprets as pathology what is sometimes a highly justified reaction to the varieties of violence being done to people.
I am grounded in liberation psychology, radical theology, continental philosophy & phenomenology, de/uncolonial thought and feminist epistemologies. I am interested in approaches that maintain personal and structural suffering as one and the same and contest the question of whose knowledge counts. My own background and education has orientated many of my questions, including decades of critique around this question of neutrality.
I have an MSc in Existential Psychotherapy (from Middlesex University) and an honours degree in Theology (from Brunel). I am not a psychotherapist – my training is something I employ critically rather than allegiance, and the work is psychosocial education and facilitation.
Born and brought up between northern Pakistan and Germany by a German medical humanitarians, I lived in England to do my degrees, and have also lived in France, Spain, the United States, Australia and Tanzania. When in my thirties I moved to Kabul, Afghanistan to work and teach professional English to civil society activists, NGO managers and government officials across UN, EU and DFID initiatives.
I grew up between worlds that don’t fit together, and I have stopped treating that as something to solve, instead it is where I think from now. You see different things from there, mostly the things belonging lets people take for granted, and how much of your life goes on translating yourself into systems that weren’t in fact built with you in mind.
My mother tongues are English and German. I also speak French, Urdu and Hindi.
I teach on postgraduate programmes in London on family systems; ethics; systems thinking; philosophical and religious worldview; conflict and reconciliation; sexuality and gender; and human development through the lifespan. I supervise postgraduate students in the use of autoethnography. Here, the researcher’s own life is part of the data, not something to be ignored or hidden.
I am based in London with my partner, our two magnificent young daughters and a German Spitz with rather strong opinions on London wildlife (urban foxes!). My space is neurodivergent in the way that impacts my politics in as much as it impacts my work, drawing on story, silence and rest in resistance to systems that insist on mistaking urgency for care.
Publishing and speaking
Challenging Western Models of Care: Lessons From Exile, Scarcity, and Creativity. Mental Health in Journalism Summit 2026, The Self-Investigation, online, 8 October 2026. Panel with Kumi Naidoo and Umama Arshad, moderated by Maritza L. Félix.
Subverting Identity: An Auto-ethnographic Critical Analysis of Contemporary Politics of Culture and Belonging as a Transracial Adoptee. Book chapter, pending 2027.
Autoethnographic Reflections on Racial Identity: Transracial Adoption, Cosmopolitanism, and Hybridity. Conference paper, Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024.
Identity and the Need to Belong: Understanding Identity Formation and Place in the Lives of Global Nomads. Illness, Crisis & Loss, 2008, 16(2), 137–151.
Short bio for programmes and partner sites
Bea Mariam Killguss is the founder of Third Space Practice, which provides psychosocial support, education and facilitation to journalists, human rights defenders and others working under pressure, surveillance and displacement. She holds an MSc in Existential Psychotherapy from Middlesex University and a degree in Theology from Brunel, and works from liberation-psychological, phenomenological and uncolonial traditions rather than clinical ones. Raised between northern Pakistan and Germany, she has lived and worked in nine countries, including Afghanistan, the UK, France, Australia, Spain, the US and Tanzania. She speaks four languages with English and German as her mother tongues. She teaches on postgraduate programmes in London and supervises autoethnographic research at Masters and Doctoral level.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
