Description of the track
The storymaking track is the searching track, the track in which we level with Wittgenstein’s philosophy about the ‘not knowing before being in the performance’. Or to put it more Deleuzian, we are the experimentarium, in which we acknowledge we don’t know where we are going. We don’t seek to escape the frame of reality, but to unfold reality with the knowledge that there is always something that could be different. This track sets out to playfully explore the question “how might one live”?
- How one might perform StoryMaking in Supervision?
- How one might perform StoryMaking in Therapy?
- How might one perform StoryMaking in Social work?
- How one might practice StoryMaking with families?
- How one might collaborate in StoryMaking with marginalized people?
- How one might perform StoryMaking in pedagogic work?
- How one might perform StoryMaking within and without oneself?
- How one might objectify and subjectify oneself in StoryMaking?
With contributions from different genres of narration this track seeks to catch the surf in the pool of diversity of discourses and create music with words. In this track of StoryMaking we allow ourselves to expand through the different narrations of e.g. authors, philosophers, therapists, bloggers, Facebook updates and the production of stories of daily life that continuously shapes the differences to the already experienced.
Like in improvised jazz we will take the conference to the virtuality of resonance, in which we through the different contribution will be led towards something new, a slight difference to what we already knew.
This track is arranged and designed by Narrativ Kommunikation & Terapi, Narrative Perspektiver and DISPUK.
Plenaries
Keynote by Sarah Walther 17th August Morning (Keynote by Johnella Bird has been cancelled due to illness)
Narrative therapy is heresy. Discuss(ed).
Heretic: anyone who does not conform to an established attitude, doctrine, or principle
Origin: 1300–50; Middle English heretik < Middle French heretique < Late Latin haereticus < Greek hairetikós: able to choose
In this keynote, I propose that narrative therapy is a heretical practice which continues to challenge domain understandings about identity and relationships. Making distinctions between heresy and revolution, I will explore the history of heresy in narrative therapy and of heresy in ordinary everyday lives.
‘Every upstart notion that ever got ideas above its station, every snotty street-fighter of a radical philosophy, was fostered brawling in Manchester’s streets, mills, pubs, churches and debating halls’
This keynote will invite a reconsideration of narrative therapy as a politicised practice, with a particular focus on respectful practices that attend to local expressions and experiences of wider discourses. I will use examples from my own practice in Manchester to discuss the dilemmas of working with people who are struggling with the concrete effects of social marginalisation. Is it ok to talk with people about meaning and preferred lives, when they have nowhere to live? As therapists who adopt a decentred position but are attentive to the politics of experience, what else can we do? How can we avoid an indignity of speaking for others, without being complicit with social injustice?
Keynote by Art Fisher 17th August Afternoon
Unfolding Significance: A Retrospective of Visual Narrative Practice, Philosophy, Social Justice, and Art
In this keynote, I will visit briefly with my personal and work history in order to explore some of the concepts I currently find useful, such as “unfolding significance” (vs. thickening preferred ways). I will explore some of the critical questions I ask myself in the name of supporting my skills. And, I will share some of the resulting complexities of story making practices involved in my everyday non-profit relationships with marginalized youth, adults, families, and communities. Lately I’ve been noticing that my past is becoming much more extensive than my likely embodied future. When I sit with these increasing limits of my life and agency, some ways of being here on the planet with you and performing stories, particularly stories about “responding to violence”, are so important to me. But I’m not very interested in promoting normalizing stories about “moving away from abuse and toward respect.” Instead, I’m profoundly disturbed by the colonization, double standards, and crazy making normalized within modernist Narrative interpretations of feminism, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze... I wish to focus on these complexities, especially in story making with folks who know first-hand how marginalization operates.
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