Chapter 2: Funny moments
For those of you who never got to meet Michael in real life, Penny White wanted to make sure that you know that he was funny. Here are a series of clips from his teaching that convey not only this, but also so much of the politics and ethics of narrative practice
Please watch each short video, consider the questions that are listed beneath them and then write your own reflections and stories in the comments box below.
Is it important to identify current trends in how we understand our identities? Can this assist us to make visible the effects of these trends on how we are understanding ourselves? How might current trends be reinscribing dominant power relations and particular cultural understandings of life?
- Where once we may have been interested in how the past influences our present, are we now more likely to be striving to ‘live in the present’ (as if the present is separate from the past and future)?
- Where once we were concerned with ‘expressing our true feelings’ are we now more concerned with ‘regulating our emotions’?
- Where once we may have been concerned with relationship dynamics, are we now more likely to be concerned our likes, shares, algorithms?
- When once we were interested in mining our internal resources, are we now more interested in re-wiring our brains?
This is a story about the politics of naming and politics of class and gender. In your context who gets to name problems and what sort of language is used? How do you try to find ways to ensure that ‘the person is not the problem’?
What professional discourses does this story challenge? What are some of the possibilities of engaging non-professional outsider witnesses in your work?
Please share your own stories of how you are sustained by the people with whom you work.