NextGen Collaboratory Online Series Registration
You can register now for the entire series. Re-Authoring Teachng members get further discounts. You can also register separately for each event. CE credit pending for the series.
Our Multi-Storied Bodies Practices
What happens when we shift from viewing our bodies as a single entity to experiencing our bodies as a community of diverse members each with their own experience, position, and stories? This consultation group is for folx who are interested in centering post-structural, narrative practice, intersectional feminisms, and community ideas in our conversations with our bodies and in accompanying individuals, couples, families, and communities in conversations that are inclusive of their bodies.
May 21, 2023 Collab Salon: Stories of Resistance to Isolation
Rocio and Akansha extended the following invitation to participants in a Re-Authoring Teaching Consultation Group from January-April 2023.Are you feeling a sense of isolation and disenchantment in your work? Do you feel you are being recruited into stories of dominant ideas of what a “good therapist” is or stories that are pathologizing of the people who consult you? We invite you to resist these stories and ideas in this community consultation group and think together about what you would prefer your practice to embody. Rocio and Akansha will create space for conversations about preferred ethics, consultation with your insider knowledges and wisdom, and articulation of consonant practices and ways of being. They will draw on their lived experiences of working in sites of “modern power” and support you in inhabiting your narrative multilingual voice. In this Salon they will share stories and ideas that group members generated for further circulation and co-sparking.
Engaging an Audience: Bridging Narrative Practice and Applied Theatre
This 6 session consultation group will be beneficial for practitioners who are trying to support communities and individuals to enrich their narratives through performing arts. Contemporary theatre shows an increased interest in personal stories, while the narrative community might be interested in the means to embody and celebrate participants/clients preferred identities.
October 16, 2022: A Response to The Hegemony of Standard English: Storying lives bilingually across languages
We are advocates for justice in language rights. Through our explorations of bilingualism we address the hegemony of standard English. We speak from the perspectives of our languages: Black Talk/Ebonics/Slang, Farsi, Fenglish, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Chilean Spanish, Colombian Spanglish, Spanglish, Colloquial Spanish, and standard English. We discuss efforts to respond to various linguistic landscapes from the vantage point of our lived experiences and practices in the United States. We explore ways to integrate languages through improvisation and creativity, beyond the lexical and grammatical rules of a language. We hope to describe our response to standard English to co-exist in the creative use of inter-lingual lives that seek to ensure that the juxtaposition of English therapeutic and daily-life landscapes is integrated into various settings. We discuss the contextual, relational, therapeutic, and training potential offered by bilingualism across various languages as well as the necessary transmutations in theory and practice.
February 21, 2021 Collab Salon: Community-based Practices as Response to Earth’s Environmental Crisis and Opportunity
The environmental crisis is increasingly showing up in our neighbourhoods through severe weather events, struggling ecosystems, and the coronavirus pandemic. How can we, as narrative therapists, offer pathways for coming into relationship with these escalating risks in ways that are not overwhelming nor lead to despair? How might we contribute beyond individualised models that leave far too many people without care for their collective challenges? How do we show up in solidarity with those who recognise the potential for a great breakthrough towards environmental and social justice? Narrative therapy has a rich lore of collective practice that has evolved beyond the office, which can be valuable in this context. Merle and Jenny will share collective initiatives in diverse settings in response to Earth’s environmental crisis and opportunity, followed by a conversation to explore possibilities and potential for our narrative therapy community.
December, 2017 Collab Salon: Narrative community work in Burundi, Africa – Linda Moxley
The work of narrative practitioners in developing countries has challenges not usually encountered in the developed world where many of us work. The needs of developing countries, such as Burundi, are enormous, and the challenges in providing support are sometimes unexpected. In this presentation on our narrative project in Burundi we hope; first, to inspire others who might want to do this kind of work in developing countries with special needs; second, to inform narrative practitioners interested in doing this work; and third, to describe some of the challenges faced and the special knowledges gained of how to create awareness when doing this kind of work. Our experiences of trying to provide support for these children, and the teaching and training of caregivers who were learning narrative practices will also be described in this Collab Salon.
November 2016 Collab Salon: Justice-Doing in therapy & community work
Vikki & Michael offer an alternative approach to work with trauma, which focuses on the resistance of victims of violence and oppression. Drawing from a decolonizing and justice-doing stance, their activist analysis resists the neutral and medicalised language of ‘trauma’, and names the contexts of social injustice that create the conditions for suffering. Honouring the wisdom of the people we work alongside in their acts of resistance and responses to trauma brings forward their agency and wisdom - creating identities of knowledge, autonomy and strength, as opposed to victim/survivor identities, or other spoiled identities.We will address structuring safety as the foundation of the work, alternative understandings of the way trauma works, and the duty of the witness to work towards justice-doing, connection of private pain with public issues.