About this event
The Pluralistic Practice Network, and Onlinevents, invite practitioners, researchers, students and service users interested in the development of flexible, co-produced ways of working together in counselling, psychotherapy and mental health care, to take part in this engaging and welcoming annual event. A range of presentations and workshops will focus on the possibilities that are arise from open-ness to multiple perspectives when supporting individuals, families and communities to overcome issues arising from experience of trauma, adversity and oppression.
The conference begins on Friday evening with a dialogue between Divine Charura (University of York St John, England; https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/our-staff/staff-profiles/divine-charura.php) and John McLeod (Institute for Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy, Dublin; https://www.iicp.ie/faculty/johnmcleod/) on Sanctuary, Trauma and Psychotherapy: Decolonising and Pluralistic Perspectives.
The keynote presentation on Saturday is offered by Vikki Reynolds, an activist/ therapist and community organizer in Vancouver Canada (www.vikkireynolds.ca), author of many articles and papers including Justice-Doing at the Intersections of Power (Dulwich Centre, 2019), who will explore the topic of Trauma and Resistance: Innovative Responses to Oppression, Violence and Suffering.
The Saturday programme also includes a selection of interactive workshops and panel discussions around the conference theme.
As with previous Pluralistic conference, the aim is to create a space in which participants from different backgrounds can share their ideas and experience through respectful open dialogue, in ways that promote solidarity and mutual learning. All are welcome to attend: conference registration is on the basis of a self-select fee to ensure everyone who wishes to be involved is able to do so.
Friday 15th November 2024 (UK time 18:00 pm – 20:45, followed by social event)
Saturday 16th November 2024 (UK time: 9.15 – 18:00)
Online via Zoom, hosted by Onlinevents
Further information about pluralistic counselling and psychotherapy is available at: https://pluralisticpractice.com
We are delighted to invite submissions for the seventh international conference on pluralistic counselling and psychotherapy.
We are seeking submissions of abstracts for:
- Papers of 30 or 60 minutes (20 or 45-minutes presentation/10 or 15-minute questions)
- Panel dialogues (60 minutes)
- Workshops (60 or 90 minutes)
- Poster presentations to the full conference (2 minutes per presentation, again with a focus on one of the two strands)
Conference submissions can be submitted up to Wednesday 18th September: https://forms.gle/E7URMVaSbZkktF7N9
___________________________
KEYNOTES:
Sanctuary, Trauma and Psychotherapy: A Dialogue between Decolonising and Pluralistic Perspectives – Divine Charura and John McLeod
Keynote Details:
Working with a group of colleagues at the University of York St John in England, Divine Charura has developed a programme of research that uses a decolonising perspective to explore the experiences of people who are seeking sanctuary as a result of traumatic dislocation of kinship relationships, and the kinds of therapeutic support that may be helpful in such circumstances.
This keynote presentation will explore the implications of that work for pluralistic practice. Four key themes, woven through this research programme as a whole, will be discussed in turn: (i) appreciation of the ongoing, everyday relevance and influence of coloniality; (ii) groundedness: locating research and practice in concrete knowledge of specific situated events and socio-political realities, as opposed to reference to abstract contextual factors; (iii) de-centring the researcher or therapist voice: strategies for avoiding placing the researcher or therapist in an expert or privileged position of power; (iv) co-production and co-design as core principles for therapy practice: flexible and improvised forms of therapeutic support, informed by a relational ethics of solidarity and care.
These themes reflect a commitment to recognising and engaging with the facets and diversity of the other, with the goal of avoiding being entrapped into seeing ourselves as the/an expert who knows what wrong or happening with the other (colonization and misrecognition). The opening section of this dialogue will take the form of a conversation between the two presenters around how a decolonising perspective both challenges and extends current pluralistic practice.
This conversation will then open out to incorporate the voices of conference participants. A briefing paper outlining and summarising key studies published by the York St John group, will be made available to conference delegates in advance, to facilitate their active participation in this event.
‘Trauma’ and Resistance: Innovative Responses to Oppression, Violence and Suffering – Vikki Reynolds
Keynote Details:
Vikki will share stories of practice and acts of resistance that inspire believed-in-hope, describing activist-informed ways of responding to suffering in persons who have been oppressed and harmed. This approach requires a deconstruction of ‘trauma’ and the trauma industry, and instead centres on witnessing folks’ wise and creative and collective acts of resistance. Justice-doing and a decolonising stance for the work is required to resist psychology’s neutrality and objectivity that often blames people for their own suffering from oppression.
A witnessing approach requires that we situate personal suffering in its sociopolitical context of necropolitics & structural abandonment under austerity and neo-liberalism. Witnessing Resistance acknowledges that wherever there is oppression there is resistance, and resists the individualisation and medicalization of both suffering and acts of resistance into criteria of ‘trauma’ and other mental illnesses.
Vikki will address:
- A decolonizing & justice-doing ethical stance
- Resist individualization, objectivity & neutrality of trauma Industry
- Witnessing stance informed by direct action activism
- Understandings of Acts of Resistance
- Stories from practice
Vikki’s articles & speaks free at www.vikkireynolds.ca
ZOOM
This Conference will be hosted on the Zoom meeting platform where we will use our cameras and microphones to interact with each other as a group.
___________________________
All the colleagues at ONLINEVENTS and the presenters we collaborate with are committed to working in a manner consistent with the BACP Ethical Framework, which can be accessed on the link below. When registering for this event you are agreeing to be present and interact in a manner that is consistent with this Framework.
