Telling, retelling and retelling the story: Survivors telling their stories with purpose and authorship by Erin Costello
In this week’s Friday Afternoon Video, Erin Costello brings together collective stories of sexual assault survivors working with a sexual assault team. Through the use of narrative therapy principles, these stories make visible the ways in which ‘expertness’ can take authorship away from survivors, and explores the ways in which outsider witness practices, and the telling, retelling and retelling of preferred stories support double-story development.
Biography
Erin Costello is a women’s health and sexual assault counsellor based on the Gurambilbarra lands of the Wulgurukaba people, known as Townsville, Queensland. She works within a sexual assault response team and is interested in how narrative therapy can be used as a counter practice in the context of taken-for-granted ideas and processes that replicate gendered issues of power and oppression, and the ways in which this can make visible political problems from collective.
