Welcome to this profoundly diverse collection of papers from Greece, Hong Kong, Australia, USA and Denmark.
These range:
— from practice based explorations about stories of the body … to narrative practice in the new media age
— from work within an Aboriginal community context in Australia … to explorations of Colombian magical realism
— from work with people with an intellectual disability in Hong Kong … to creativity research in Denmark
— from considerations of contemplation and creative solitude … to narrative responses to dreams and spiritual experiences during times of grief.
Narrative practitioners continue to expand the boundaries of the field in vibrant and creative ways!
As always, we look forward to your feedback.
'Stories of the body: Incorporating the body into narrative practice' Eleni E. Karageorgiou. (Pages 1-7)
'Collective narrative practice with young people with Aspergers Syndrome who have experienced bullying' Kit Hung (Chris) Tse. (Pages 8-20)
'The restoration of contemplation and creative solitude' Josie McSkimming. (Pages 21-30)
'Two-way learning as respectful community practice: Honouring, co-creating and facilitating access to the knowledge stories of the Men of the Mimosa Creek Healing Centre' Troy Holland. (Pages 31-45)
'Expanding the landscape: Narrative practice in rehabilitation services for adults affected by intellectual disability in Hong Kong' Ocean Hung. (Pages 46-56)
'Narrating creativity: Developing an emic, first person approach to creativity research' Mandy Chilcott and Daved Barry. (Pages 57-67)
'Language Justice: Narrative therapy on the fringes of Colombian magical realism.' marcela polanco. (Pages 68-76)
'Weird and scary stuff': Diverse spiritual experiences about death in Australia' Steve Rose. (Pages 77-84)
'Narrative dream analysis? Towards a narrative therapy response to acknowledging people's responses in dreams' Ron Findlay. (Pages 85-90)
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Stories of the body: Incorporating the body into narrative practice— Eleni E. Karageorgiou
This paper is an attempt to incorporate the body into the practice of narrative therapy so as to offer richer possibilities for therapists to work with clients' stories. The paper presents various case studies working with various body 'issues', such as quadriplegia, multiple sclerosis, sexual intercourse, stress, and body image. Maps of narrative practice brought to these issues include externalising conversations, outsider-witness conversations, re-membering conversations, and addressing personal failure.
Collective narrative practice with young people with Aspergers Syndrome who have experienced bullying— Kit Hung (Chris) Tse
This paper presents an experience of collective narrative practice with young people with Asperger Syndrome (Aspergers) who have experienced bullying. In Hong Kong, it is common to hear about bullying of young people with Aspergers. This article first discusses some dominant discourses relating to Aspergers and bullying. It then documents the innovative methodologies of the 'Smartphone of Life', which connects young people and assists them to develop second stories with alternative identities.
The narrative practices of externalising conversations, re-authoring conversations, outsider-witness conversations, and definitional ceremonies are used to richly describe the stories of the young people. In this work, the local knowledge and skills of young people in resisting the challenges of bullying are documented through co-creating collective postcards. The article concludes with some reflections about the collective practice and ethical considerations.
The restoration of contemplation and creative solitude— Josie McSkimming
This article offers some reflections on a renewed emphasis on imagination and creative solitude within the psychotherapy process. Increasingly, people consult psychotherapists with concerns around the effects of their level of connectedness to social media. The continuous exposure, over-comparing, and self-surveillance demanded by social media may be considered as another set of political sensibilities or social discourses that shape people's sense of self. This article considers these discourses against a backdrop of the prevailing 'psy' discourse, including the potentially deterministic field of neuroscience, along with the compulsory inclusion of 'mindfulness' in current psychotherapies.
The stories of two women who desire more creative solitude illustrate their ways of seeing themselves and their struggles differently. Through incorporating the creative ideas of Bachelard and Foucault's construct of the panopticon (along with dissident counter-conduct), ideas emerge around recreating solitude, reigniting imagination, and incorporating literature into psychotherapy. Not only this, but thought is given to the self-seeing and parrhēsia within Foucault's later writings which may assist in orienting ourselves as psychotherapists somewhat differently to people's expressions of resistance to the discourses of compulsory connection to social media and the pathologising of solitude. Creative privacy and solitude may then become more possible in people's lives.
Two-way learning as respectful community practice: Honouring, co-creating and facilitating access to the knowledge stories of the Men of the Mimosa Creek Healing Centre— Troy Holland
This article comprises two related accounts: first, a short history of an attempt to develop respectful practice in a two-way learning partnership with a community; second, a description of a collective narrative practice knowledges project with Aboriginal Australian men who are participating in a residential rehabilitation program.
Developing respectful practice is explained in terms of acknowledging and responding to the effects and operations of invasion, colonisation, privileges, and power, and earning and responding to invitations to become a participant and to be influential in a community. The collective narrative practice knowledges project demonstrates ways of externalising and historicising problems; cataloguing existing and aspired-to knowledges; acknowledging and honouring existing personal, familial, and cultural knowledges; being influential but de-centred in the co-research of new knowledges; and the documentation and reciprocal exchanges of knowledges.
Expanding the landscape: Narrative practice in rehabilitation services for adults affected by intellectual disability in Hong Kong— Ocean Hung
This article proposes the adaptation of narrative practice to the field of psychological services for adult persons affected by intellectual disability. The author advocates such adaptation in order to help anchor the agenda of rehabilitation service to the service users' hopes and dreams instead of the traditional notion of 'behavioral problems'.
In particular, the author discusses the use of narrative-based practices to facilitate the service users' participation in the co-construction of identity conclusions about themselves and their relationship with others within the care system. The use of narrative ideas and enquires in case consultation is discussed. In addition, three extended practices, namely 'Group re-authoring', 'Identity revisiting documentation' and 'Action dialogue' are described and illustrated with stories of two service users.
Narrating creativity: Developing an emic, first person approach to creativity research— Mandy Chilcott and Daved Barry
Despite the complexity of workplace creativity, laboratory or survey-based quantitative research conducted in the positivist tradition supports a trend towards prescriptive 'recipied' lists for stimulating creativity. In contrast, by recognising creativity as a complex multi-level system, we were inspired by ideas from narrative therapy to develop a new narrative inquiry methodology that uses personal storytelling to collaboratively investigate, promote intelligent reflection on, and enhance the creativity process.
Our aim was to explore how taking a pragmatic constructivist approach might unfold a new way of eliciting richly descriptive realworld information that exploits local situated knowledge (what we call 'emic creativity') about the individual and group creative processes within a workplace. Using a developmental application of the methodology as a single-level case study on gaming designers in Denmark, we found that the new emic creativity methodology can contribute valuable information about creativity within a particular system.
Language Justice: Narrative therapy on the fringes of Colombian magical realism— marcela polanco
When problems can talk, dead people can speak, hope can taste, and heart, soul and mind can dance together, a new discursive space is brought to life in therapeutic conversations. In this paper I discuss the reimagination of narrative therapy into my Colombian culture, adopting magical realism as a literary means to engage the imagination in therapeutic conversations. I transgress mainstream rational epistemological traditions of evidence to situate narrative therapy practice on the fringes of convention. I bring to the forefront the ordinary weirdness of narrative therapy conversations via the magical realism's absurdity and creativity. I stage the discussion in Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo in his novels to speak the unspeakable, to locate the unlocatable, to touch the untouchable, to hear the inaudible, and to utter the ineffable in our lives.
'Weird and scary stuff': Diverse spiritual experiences about death in Australia— Steve Rose
Rich opportunities await the narrative therapist when space is opened in narrative re-membering practices to incorporate those experiences of death and dying that are often thought of as too 'weird and scary' ‒ or simply as just 'a bit too strange or mystical' to be treated as privileged experiences. This paper suggests that far from deserving to be avoided or totally ignored, these stories offer rich opportunities for exploration. Using a narrative lens, and drawing on the already known practices of narrative re-membering, the author unpacks some of his own stories privileging unusual and, at times, transcendent experiences. The article then outlines how such stories fit within a narrative framework. Finally, a number of suggestions are canvassed for how narrative questions related to these 'weird and scary stories' may be framed.
Narrative dream analysis? Towards a narrative therapy response to acknowledging people's responses in dreams— Ron Findlay
This article starts with a brief overview and critique of classic dream analysis, then follows with a review of a sample of published narrative therapy approaches to dream analysis and working with dreams. He then outlines another possible approach focussing on attending to unique outcomes, initiatives, and responses in dreams already occurred.
Thinking about stories in this way makes possible more possibilities, it encourages me to stop and reflect (as I am doing now) about story creation as an act by a person in time, located in place as a narrator (a character/s act), making a narration (making meaning/s), with a narrative (events and characters put together in a plot of a story). My intuition is that it is an act which we are immersed in constantly, and another is the act of reflecting on it at the time which allows us a better op