professional identity – Re-Authoring Teaching

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.

Peggy Sax2023-05-24T11:03:59-04:00October 11th, 2022|Comments Off

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 18, 2023 Collab Salon: Teaching Narrative therapy: Exploring The KRAI Experience

How can we teach Narrative therapy in a way which responds to its philosophy and ethics? How can Narrative therapy change and develop in our collaborations and engaging with new ideas? How can we work together in the team paying attention to power relationships? How can we be narrative practitioners in actual political situation in Russia and in the world? When we’ve started our project, KRAI, together with our colleagues, we were drawn to this questions and a lot more. We’ve developed a diverse yearlong program on Narrative therapy and community work as long as another laboratories and workshops. We are glad to share our experience at the Collab salon.

Peggy Sax2023-06-21T09:24:11-04:00August 6th, 2022|Comments Off

Migration of Identity Consultation Group

This consultation group is for people who are familiar with narrative therapy practice and migration of identity in an experiential way and have a particular interest in unpacking ideas and practices that can accompany people/families/communities in times of movement (chosen and imposed), transition and liminality. While this can attend to large movements, it is also inclusive of small moments in daily life and moment-by-moment exchanges in conversations and relationships. Together we will explore our experiences accompanying people in these movements through sharing stories of practice and engaging in experiential exercises.

Peggy Sax2023-12-26T04:17:27-05:00July 29th, 2022|0 Comments

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.

Peggy Sax2022-08-20T05:28:17-04:00March 30th, 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

June 19, 2016 Collab: Centering Ethics in Group Supervision

What are narrative approaches to supervision? How does a group co-create respectful ways of exploring complex concerns and challenges that reflect the ethics of a just and accountable community? Shona and Vikki invited us into a conversation about supervision practices that contribute to a reinvigoration of professional identity, keep faith with what is given value, and build on an ethic of justice-doing. This online gathering welcomed old members as well as a number of Collab Salon members experiencing Zoom for the first time.

Peggy Sax2019-12-29T07:30:15-05:00November 8th, 2019|0 Comments

January 19, 2020 Collab Salon: What Happens to Narrative Therapy When It Migrates?

What is the DNA of Narrative Practice beyond the variations across cultures and languages? Pierre Blanc-Sahnoun (Bordeaux, France) will share how Narrative Errances - The Narrative Factory- collectively as a professional community has created the first ethical professional code composed only with questions...

Peggy Sax2020-09-29T05:55:16-04:00September 14th, 2019|Comments Off

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

September, 2015 Collab Salon: Stories that honor cultural integrity – marcela polanco

marcela polanco from Our Lady of the Lake University was our featured guest for the September Collab Salon. After overcoming some initial techno difficulties, we engaged in a discussion about a question Michael White raised in his work “How is it that people pull the materials of culture together to form an identity and a life, and of the processes by which these cultural knowledges and practices are reworked in people’s expressions of living?” (White, 2001). We focused on the complex ways in which culture shapes the oral traditions that support the fabrication of stories and the assembling of our lives in turn. Marcela's work emphasizes the importance of honoring the cultural integrity of stories by recognizing cultural difference between the person of the therapist and the consultant. She situated the discussion in a narrative therapy framework informed by traditions of her own cultural upbringing in Colombia, including the literary genre of magical realism; and her experiences with bilingualism as an immigrant in the U.S.

Peggy Sax2019-12-29T08:37:18-05:00July 8th, 2016|Comments Off