Ideas of power – Re-Authoring Teaching

March 19, 2023 Collab Salon: The Radical-ness of Love, Attunement, and Imagination

This Collab brings forward the research and approaches of SuEllen Hamkins, Lynne Rosen, and Navid Zamani as they consider the ethics and effects of love and imagination, and the helpful-ness of attunement. Presenters will outline some of their theoretical assumptions, its intersection with broader social justice ethics and values, and the life that these practices breathe in our relationships with those who consult us. Their conversation gives a sneak preview of the new series now in development: Narrative Therapy, Trauma & the Affective Turn.

Peggy Sax2023-03-21T17:23:41-04:00September 10th, 2022|Comments Off

Rekindling Your Narrative Spark: The Resisting Isolation in Your Practice Consultation Group

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. This group is for narratively informed practitioners, familiar with narrative ways of working.

Peggy Sax2023-12-26T06:23:01-05:00August 7th, 2022|0 Comments

June 19th, 2022: Centering Diversity and Identity in Narrative Practices: The BIPOC Community

In July 2020, the BIPOC narrative community was launched with the intention of providing narrative practitioners of color a supportive space to discuss “local” ideas, innovative practices, amplify one another’s work, and process their experiences. The community organizers also hoped to mentor and support newer narrative practitioners, and practitioners working in spaces that did not privilege narrative ideas or postmodern therapy practices. As the community enters its second year, planning committee members Ingrid, Candea, Shuo, and Akansha shared lessons learned and their hopes for how they envision the community will grow and be sustained in the future.

Peggy Sax2022-06-20T15:59:18-04:00October 22nd, 2021|Comments Off

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.

Peggy Sax2023-05-20T10:55:39-04:00October 9th, 2021|Comments Off

January 16, 2022 Collab Salon: Beyond Deconstruction: A Compositionist Narrative Therapy

What's getting in the way of curiosity these days? Justine D’Arrigo and Chris Hoff will explore the practice of Scenarios and how narrative practitioners can use Scenarios in the effort of reinvigorating curiosity and composition in their practices. Michael White (1997) wrote that when someone is considering entering some form of liminal space, like the co-creation of possible futures, that it is important to engage in some predictions of the experiences that one might expect in these efforts. We believe that White (1997) knew that the significant periods of confusion and disorientation, and at times despair and desperation that often accompany journeys into liminal space could shut down these efforts, and have these travelers turn back toward more familiar territories. We think one tool that can support a cultivated liminality and composition is the practice of Scenarios.

Peggy Sax2022-01-17T16:13:33-05:00September 7th, 2021|1 Comment

Anti-Machinalization (a.k.a. Burn-out) Global Summit Part II ~Three Years Later~

Have you seen anyone spending extraordinary hours working in isolation with the best of intentions, being fueled by expectations or a sense of obligation/responsibility even though the initial fuel was un-mistakably passion, curiosity, creativity and/or social justice? In our first Anti-Machinalization Global Summit 2019, we invited the very problem ‘Machinalization’ as our guest speaker who proudly presented its juicy techniques for machinalizing Sumie and so many other humans around the world. During the last two years, Machinalization seems to have grown even more powerful, developing cruelly-sophisticated tactics for orchestrating its global influences. Anti-Machinalization Global Summit 2021 will again invite Machinalization as our controversial and provocative guest speaker and have Sumie Ishikawa (with rich ‘insider’ experience) interviewed by her dear narrative sister, Amy Druker. Participants were invited to join in a group discussion, where taken-for-granted Machinalizing discourses and practices that are woven into the capitalistic structure of modern society can be called into question. Let’s imagine together small acts of co-resistance and more humanizing ways to survive and thrive in this ever-Machinalizing time we live in today!

Peggy Sax2021-09-23T08:11:32-04:00October 29th, 2020|0 Comments

April 18 2021 Collab Salon: Individuals in Competition or Communities in Connection? Narrative Therapy in the Era of Neoliberalism

Even though the term “neoliberalism” often elicits eye rolls or glazed expressions, we use it because it is the most comprehensive label we have found for the dominant discourse shaping political and economic reality in the ‘developed world’ during the last 40 years. The neoliberal worldview treats monetary return on investment as the most highly valued measure of success, and it conceptualizes each of us as an entrepreneur in the world in competition with every other person; each of us as a tiny corporation. The metaphors of neoliberalism pull us away from any focus on community, collaboration, or caring for each other’s welfare. They invite us to focus on individuals, and away from social and cultural pressures. Instead of ‘unreasonable workload’, neoliberalism wants us to see ‘poor stress management’. Instead of ‘fear and worry due to financial insecurity’, it suggests we see ‘depression’. If we are to help people escape the constraints of neoliberalism, we must understand enough of how it has been constructed that we can expose its workings. This salon will provide an opportunity for the critical reflection that is necessary if we are to help people who consult with us see through the webs of neoliberal discourse and perceive possibilities for community, connection, and mutual caretaking.

Peggy Sax2021-04-19T17:21:57-04:00October 6th, 2020|Comments Off

November 15, 2020 Collab Salon: Collectivising Narrative Therapy: Performance, collaboration and community in the anti-anorexia league

This Collab Salon will bring together people from around the world with contributions to the Archive of Resistance: Anti-anorexia/Anti-bulimia. We hope to explore the following questions: *What are the possibilities and limitations of collectivised narrative therapy within the league of anti anorexia? *What could collective collaboration between insiders and outsiders look like? How could it work?* What learnings can be found through the political movements that are happening around the world that serve as examples of the power of networks in seeking healing and justice? Kitty Thatcher & Dave Villfaña (Santiago, Chile)

Peggy Sax2020-11-18T06:26:18-05:00September 22nd, 2019|Comments Off

December 20, 2020 Collab Salon: Becoming our practices: Interweaving the storied, embodied, affective and relations of power

Ian Percy continues to explore in his therapeutic work, and also in his teaching program, the interweaving of four interdependent dimensions of practice. He will present scenarios to illustrate some aspects of his weavings and wonderings. Along the way he will very briefly speak to: Upholding the precious traditions of narrative ethics; Sensory impressions in the making of storied lives; Interpreting mindfulness: body, ethics and inspiration; Situated affect; and Embodied/enacted power relations.

Peggy Sax2020-12-22T13:08:07-05:00September 19th, 2019|0 Comments

AUGUST 16, 2020: Working Narratively in Research with Maggie Slaska, Akansha Vaswani, & Navid Zamani

"As people interested in working narratively in research, we will share some of our experiences, influences from outside the world of narrative therapy that supported our principles, and challenges involved in the process. Each of us has been involved in a research project for our doctoral dissertations which we will use to illustrate 1) how we negotiated ideas of power to construct research questions 2) methods we used to incorporate social constructionist understandings of relationally informed meaning making in our work 3) how we navigated (continue to navigate) demands/expectations of our respective institutions." Akansha, Maggie & Navid

Peggy Sax2020-08-17T15:43:46-04:00July 24th, 2019|0 Comments

August 18, 2019 Collab Salon: Finding Agency: The Politics of Knowledge and Power in Supervision

Sarah Kahn & Sol D’Urso reflected on their experiences co-facilitating a narrative consultation/supervision group in San Diego, CA that seeks to address social justice issues by tending to the politics of knowledge and power in supervisory experience. During this salon, they shared the guiding principles and practices that inform their work. These principles include: 1) positioning knowledge as discourse: using the skills of deconstruction and transparency; 2) co-constructed knowledges: valuing perspectives of supervisees and clients; 3) the use of questions verses directives, 4) valuing expansive conversations, and 5) promoting discursive agency. Guided through questions, Sarah and Sol explored what resonance these principles have in participants' own life and work experience and invited us to consider ways to cultivate a social justice ethic in supervisory experience.

Peggy Sax2020-01-01T08:55:55-05:00November 11th, 2018|Comments Off

NOVEMBER 17, 2019: Re-imagining Narrative Therapy in the Americas

As part and parcel of marcela polanco's PhD thesis in Family Therapy at Nova Southeastern, she and David Epston set about the translation of Michael White's 'Maps'(2007). Through many twists and turns this led them to preparing a manuscript for a book tentatively titled: "Re-Imagining Narrative Therapy in the Americas." They will share with us some of their discoveries as they read and consider learnings from 'translation studies', 'decolonising methodologies'(Tuawai Smith) and creative transformations at the borders of cultures/languages.

Peggy Sax2020-01-07T17:44:14-05:00October 30th, 2018|Comments Off