Valeria Kvasnevska draws on Michael White’s ideas of “saying hullo again” to re-member her home in the Ukraine and the way of being it held.
This is an audio recording of a paper that was originally published in Dulwich Centre Newsletter, the precursor to this journal, in 1988.
This audio practice note and the collective document it describes are part of “narrative projects in support of trans lives”, a collection of work being undertaken by Tiffany Sostar, Elliot Trimble, and Nathan Viktor Fawaz.
This article critiques the ways mainstream psychotherapy participates in the “ally–industrial complex”, a term coined by scholars and activists to describe performative allyship that reinforces existing hierarchies. Drawing inspiration from G. Patterson’s (2018) critique of cisgender scholars in transgender studies, I explore how psychotherapy – particularly as practiced by cisgender therapists – often recentres professional authority and individual virtue while masking the field’s complicity in trans and queer marginalisation.
This article is written as a companion to “Discovering the good man: Double-story development with a survivor of repetitive ongoing trauma in immigration detention” (Pelly, 2019). While the earlier paper explored double-story development within continuous detention, this article examines what becomes of re-authored identity when detention recurs after a period of relative freedom.
When women are forcibly displaced, structurally violent migration processes can have dramatic and devastating effects on experiences of motherhood. This paper shares stories of two women who overcame narratives of shame and guilt, individually developed second stories of motherhood, and then came together through letter writing and narrative conversations to collectively create a renewed sense of belonging.
Many qualities that may be considered “genetic” are, in fact, inherited through stories and the ways they are narrated and re-narrated. This article describes therapeutic conversations with a heterosexual couple who had recently confronted a medical diagnosis of male infertility. Grounded in a relational understanding of identity and using the couple’s Tree of Life, I illustrate how fertile ground was generated for the identity of a child conceived through sperm donation.
This article describes a creative narrative practice using music and song. It draws on collective narrative practice, rescued speech, and poetic and collective documentation, and fuses these with musical performance to create a new practice: collective narrative song creation.
Narrative therapy offers powerful approaches for honouring neurodivergent insider knowledge to resist thin, pathologising conclusions. To explore and extend these approaches, I interviewed loved ones as neurodivergent co-researchers using narrative principles to re-dignify their living experience.
Western grief discourse remains shaped by modernist norms that individualise and internalise struggles with grief. This article proposes that grief-related symptoms often reflect resistance to cultural expectations that the bereaved should “let go” of the deceased and confine them to a static “museum of memories”. We argue that re-membering a deceased child – actively restoring their presence in the ongoing life of the parent – plays a vital role in supporting bereaved parents.
Adelite Mukamana (click for bio) Adelite Mukamana is a clinical psychologist and genocide studies scholar with more than 20 years’ experience in mental health, psychosocial support and peacebuilding. A survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, she brings…
Download the editorial here Editorial by Shelja Sen Dear ReaderI am writing from Delhi, India, where we have been witnessing young people lead collective action against injustices in this country. A recent social movement has been sparked in response…