Our 2021 Monthly Schedule
The Collab Salon is a monthly webinar when online presenters and members from around the world meet informally in real time for 1.5 hours. We always meet at 4pm on the third Sunday of the month (New York time). In each of these Zoom “meetings on a cloud,” we focus on a different theme relating to narrative practice for further reflection/inquiry, cross-cultural exploration and learning. After the meeting is over, the recording is added to our Library of Past Salons – available 24/7 to all Collab Salon members. All levels are welcome. You just need to register, download Zoom ahead of time, check your local time zone, and then come to our meeting room at the designated time.
Look below to see what’s in store for 2021. This year, we selected presenters with topics particularly relevant to our 12 Hot Topics and 1 burning topic for the New Decade.
I can’t recommend the Collab Salon enough. This year’s lineup showcases some of the most fascinating and innovative up and coming practitioners and their practice. And you can both meet and hear about this in the most intimate of situations, almost as if your were sitting around a dinner table speaking to one another as old friends. We should all be thankful to Re-Authoring Teaching for creating such a ‘space’ for us to meet one another from all around the world.
I am happy to be able to share with colleagues from around the world the methods and practices we have developed in France for working with companies and organizations!
18 Alliant Continuing Education Credits Now Approved!
Do you want to earn Continuing Education Credit? Alliant International University has approved 18 CE credit for attending and/or viewing our entire 2021 series, and filling out a brief evaluation after each Collab. It costs an additional $40.
Looking for a Particular Presenter, Hot Topic or Theme?
Please try out our Search! We’ve added all six years of Post Salons as well as the coming year, Type in whom or what you are looking for, and see what you find.
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Around the world, Covid-19 profoundly impacts our everyday lives. As narrative practitioners we are trained to double-listen to problems, to pay close attention to the suffering as well as to initiatives and events that might not be predicted by the problematic stories. What are some of the sparkling moments where the dominance of the pandemic problem disappears? Please join us as we begin our new year with a range of contributors sharing experiences and the joy of collaborative projects across the world: making poetry and art, creating Covid inspired music, learning from Community gatherings and from our children.
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.
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The international development of the narrative approach has allowed narrative ideas to inspire interventions in a wide range of areas. In particular, over the last 15 years or so, these ideas have been transposed into the world of business and organizations. Narrative coaches offer to accompany managers, teams and all working communities in exploring the meaning of their work and how the dominant economic discourses create or reinforce situations of power and privilege in the companies. One of the most sensitive areas of this new field of action for narrative ideas is the accompaniment of suffering communities, either through psychosocial risks, burnout, bore-out, or even « return-out » (since the lockdown). There is a particular circumstance where they are very relevant: in those very frequent tragedies that are suicides in the workplace. Beyond this Collab salon, several projects are envisaged: setting up a Consulting Group to deepen all these subjects and bring concrete tools to all international colleagues interested in it, writing by Piper Clyborne of a first book in English on the subject? But the first step is to present an overview of corporate narrative practices, as well as a few stories that will show that the power and poetry of narrative ideas bring to the business world the political, therapeutic and ethical perspective it so often lacks.
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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.
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In this Salon, Barbara Herring (“B”) and Charley Lang will interview two new members of our narrative community, Tanya Barr and Eric Katende, both black clinicians and recent graduates of Antioch University. Tanya, Eric and B will speak to both the challenges and the hopes experienced as black students, community members and therapists in a very white world. Tanya and Eric will then select participants’ questions to respond to in an engaged collaborative conversation.
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Established in 2002, Le LAB is an endeavour of the CIPTO in Gatineau, Quebec, dedicated to making arts and creative expression accessible to all. We focus on people at-risk of living or already living with challenges related to substance use, homelessness and social exclusion. What do youth dealing with homelessness have to say about transitioning into adulthood? How can Digital Storytelling enable and unlock these knowledges? How can we, at a community level, create the space for these stories to be listened to and heard? The presentation will hopefully include a participant of one of these workshops to share their experience and their stories.
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How have the immigrant rights movement and immigrant rights voices resisted the negative dominant discourses about immigrants? What discourses and language has the immigrant rights movement and immigrant leaders created? How has this discourse and language evolved and influenced, how clients story themselves, and their lives. Nidya – a formerly undocumented immigrant therapist – will discuss the connections she has found and utilized between the immigrant rights movement and Narrative Therapy and how these have inspired her therapeutic work with clients.
“David Epston has invented many imaginative, and startlingly successful ways of disappearing problems for children & young people which he has documented in stories from his practice in many publications. I have found that using his ideas successfully within my own practice has required more of me than simply following the guidance in the stories, and I have had failures along the way. In this Collab Salon, I will illustrate David’s approach to Temper Tantrums with using recent examples from my own practice to children & young people which have been successful in just two sessions. I will also touch on what I am a learning so far about applying David’s remarkable inventions.” Kay Ingamells
Narrative Therapy inquiry offers novel and exciting opportunities to explore membership in online communities and spaces. Whether it is through involvement with Discord servers or Team Speak or through informal groups through Facebook or WhatsApp, complexity and sophistication can be co-discovered in online communities. Vast possibilities exist around speaking about these groups and communities in Narrative Therapy and, in particular, the importance of these communities can be privileged and elevated instead of obscured or diminished.
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How will narrative practice sustain and transform in the coming years and decades? While honoring our mentors, we take delight in the emergence of newer voices within a generation of narrative practitioners. Here we bring together voices from around the world to learn more from them about their narrative initiatives and collaborative spirit.
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This conversation will be an introduction to Narcissism and Narcissistic Abuse using a Narrative Lens. My hope is that this introduction will be able to help clinicians notice when they may have a client who has been victimized by a narcissistic person, while listening to the experiences and feelings that the client describes. This introduction also aims to offer clinicians some new language to more precisely describe and discuss the most notable signs of this type of abuse – isolation, gaslighting, triangulation, and coercive control. Moreover, we will be able to discuss and create language that bridges the gap between a narrative approach, which entails curiosity, deconstruction, and externalized language, and a Narcissistic Abuse Recovery perspective that tends to be more psychoeducational and directive in its approach. B. Herring