2020: Issue 2 Archives - The Dulwich Centre

You can ask me: a guideline for parents and teachers to answer their questions on resilience and digital lives of young people — Mehmet Dinc

admin@dulwichcentre.com.au — Mon, 18 May 2020 02:16:19 +0000

Young people’s relationships with emerging digital technologies are often presented as a problem. I have been working with young people since 2003, and working with young people and their parents in relation to online activities since 2006. However, the funny thing is I had never listened to young people in relation to their experiences, understandings, values and difficulties in the online world. This article describes a group work project to explore young people’s understandings of their digital behaviours and relationships, their skills and capabilities in this area, and their experiences of negotiating their digital lives with parents and teachers. I avoided taking an expert position and instead set up a process of co-research with young people to elicit their insider knowledge.

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Integrating narrative practice into alcohol and other drugs counselling — Heidi Bosch

admin@dulwichcentre.com.au — Mon, 18 May 2020 02:12:40 +0000

This paper reflects on integrating narrative therapy practices into an alcohol and other drugs context. It includes examples of these techniques with clients, highlighting externalising conversations, re-authoring conversations and the migration of identity concept. It also describes how therapeutic letter writing has been used in this context to provide an opportunity for people recovering from addictions to tell and develop their own stories.

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The power to speak: Poetic re-presentation as an ethical aesthetic research practice for narrative therapists — Sarah Penwarden and Laurel Richardson

admin@dulwichcentre.com.au — Mon, 18 May 2020 02:09:24 +0000

Narrative therapists may hold a commitment to a person speaking for and making meaning of their own life stories – maintaining a person’s speaking rights as the primary meaning maker of their lives. When therapists wish to research counselling practice to gain new insights about the effects of the work, how they handle the speaking of those who participate in their research requires ethical sensitivity. This paper considers the value to narrative therapy practitioners of a qualitative research approach to representing participants’ words: poetic re-presentation. Created by American sociologist Laurel Richardson, poetic re-presentation is a research strategy that involves a researcher turning transcripts of participants’ words into found poetry. This strategy clearly delineates between the speaking of the participant in a research conversation and the later representation of this speaking on the page in a researcher’s writing. As such, this approach seeks to maintain the participant as speaking in excess of the meaning the researcher makes of it: speaking for themselves.

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Narrative therapy, poetics and poetry: Revisiting a workshop — Jill Freedman and Gene Combs

admin@dulwichcentre.com.au — Mon, 18 May 2020 02:04:37 +0000

In this short piece, Jill Freedman and Gene Combs describe how they began to write poetic responses as a form of outsider witness practice. Also included is an exercise that they first facilitated at the 2001 Narrative Therapy and Community Work conference in Adelaide.

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Developing a thera-poetic practice: Writing rescued speech poetry as a literary therapy — Sarah Penwarden

admin@dulwichcentre.com.au — Mon, 18 May 2020 01:59:30 +0000

In narrative therapy, documents written by counsellors as part of therapy can assist with the re-authoring of clients’ lives in tune with their preferred narratives. Rescued speech poems are an addition to documentation such as letters and certificates. In this thera-poetic practice, a therapist writes poems directly from the client’s talk, offering these poems back as a retelling. Drawing on my doctoral study, I explore the writing of rescued speech poems through five practices: listening for the poetic in the ordinary, listening multiply, capturing a client’s words, depicting their speaking on the page and offering the poems back. I also discuss elements of power in this approach, and how dialogue between client and therapist facilitates the client’s evaluation of the effects of the poetry. This kind of poetic writing can assist with the re-authoring of client’s identities through the therapist’s tuning of their ears to hear the tones of the poetic in ordinary talk.

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Lessons from Rwanda — Jill Freedman

admin@dulwichcentre.com.au — Mon, 18 May 2020 01:54:12 +0000

Jill Freedman offers a short reflection on two interviews by Rwandan narrative practitioners: Survivors supporting survivors: Recalling the history of the Ibuka counselling team – An interview with Adelite Mukamana & Broadcasting hope and local knowledge during the pandemic lockdown in Rwanda: An interview with Chaste Uwihoreye

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What to do at home during times of quarantine: A guidebook for adults by children — Dulwich Centre Foundation

admin@dulwichcentre.com.au — Mon, 18 May 2020 01:48:58 +0000

This guidebook for adults about what to do at home during times of quarantine has been created from the knowledge of children in Turkey and Australia. Initiated by Mehmet Dinc and drafted by David Denborough, it contains sparkling advice from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian children and Turkish kids from 6 to 15 years of age.

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Death-care practices in the shadow of the pandemic: Can history help us? — Cody J. Sanders

admin@dulwichcentre.com.au — Mon, 18 May 2020 01:45:09 +0000

In the West, there has been a significant shift towards the medicalisation and professionalisation of the end of life, with people more likely to die in hospital than at home, and bodies tended by the funeral industry rather than by loved ones. David Denborough interviewed Reverend Cody J. Sanders about his research on the history of attitudes, practices and understandings in relation to death and dying, particularly our own dead loved ones and community members. They discuss culturally and historically located notions of the ‘good death’, and how they have been challenged by the COVID-19 crisis in which many people have died alone and conventional funeral practices have been curtailed. This disruption provides an opportunity to imagine new ways of practicing death care, including funerals that take account of the more-than-human world. The interview is followed by responses from practitioners from various cultural and religious experiences.

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Broadcasting hope and local knowledge during the pandemic lockdown in Rwanda — Chaste Uwihoreye

admin@dulwichcentre.com.au — Mon, 18 May 2020 01:41:07 +0000

In this interview, Chaste Uwihoreye discusses his ongoing commitment to discovering local names for the difficulties people face. This is one step towards establishing solutions that fit their own lives and contexts. He also describes how the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown in Rwanda have led to further innovations. The lockdown that has affected much of the world coincided with the annual period of commemoration in Rwanda, providing a unique challenge. Normally, April is a time of coming together for Rwandan people and communities as they remember the genocide and support one another. It is also a challenging time for mental health workers. This year, Chaste has had to find a new means to respond to people despite physical separation. Combining a range of narrative practices with communication technology, social media, radio and television to reach people both individually and collectively, Chaste has managed to overcome physical barriers to establish contexts of mutual and community support and connectedness.

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Survivors supporting survivors: Recalling the history of the Ibuka counselling team — Adelite Mukamana

admin@dulwichcentre.com.au — Mon, 18 May 2020 01:30:06 +0000

Adelite Mukamana was in her early twenties when, as a newly qualified psychologist, she found herself in the position of coordinating a team of equally young and inexperienced colleagues to support survivors of the Rwandan genocide. In this interview, Adelite describes the process of finding solutions for complex challenges through necessity, and the steps she and her team developed in order to more effectively support those they worked for and with during these profoundly difficult times. This interview took place in Kigali in February 2020, just days after a reunion event with members of the original Ibuka counselling team. The interviewer was David Denborough.

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