Editorial Joanne Hipplewith and John Hills


Joanne: It must have been two years ago now when the idea of producing a special issue of Context came to my mind. I spent the next year just thinking about it. I first met John at a Context publishing group meeting; he arrived fashionably late, came across as charming and charismatic… John: Hmm, “fashionably late…charming and charismatic yet down to earth, eh?” I had a clinical supervisor who wrote an assessment years ago that I never quite understood the “therapeutic value of time”. I thought I had that fixed 46 years on or at least “under wraps”. Clearly not! Joanne: … He was down to earth, and I liked the energy he brought to the room. This was my first meeting. It was a hot summer’s evening. I remembered him, and I thought it would be great if he would co-edit a special issue with me. John: On the subject of ‘joining and conjoining’, of course, is our own evolving working relationship. We have never worked together previously; have not known much about the other beforehand and undertaken quite a major piece of thinking and writing from a wide diversity of contributors. This is an exact parallel, I think, to the collaborative challenges of systemic co-working. Joanne: Yes, I agree. I am not quite sure now how I approached you to undertake this journey with me. Do you recall, John? John: Mind’s a blank, mate. I probably felt flattered to think I wasn’t quite on the senior citizen’s “scrap heap of the useless”. Joanne: You’re just being modest John. I was glad you agreed, and our journey began. Our special issue focuses on joining and conjoining. To foreground thinking about the different types and ways we are invited to join and help families, individuals and organisations in the task of offering help and support. As I reflect back now, and not so much unconscious but definitely unvoiced (Burnham, 2012), was how I joined with John on our first meeting. His appearance – he was dressed smartly, and maybe he reminded me a bit of my dad who was also a smart dresser; he wore his age well, with his grey hair on full show and his humour.


Context 169, June 2020


Joanne Hipplewith


John: Whoa up there, Joanne. Freud wrote about all this ‘relationship echo’ stuff. Systemic thinking has moved beyond this ‘reminds-me-of stuff’ into real relationship. I do take it as a compliment though. Joanne: For me, as a black woman, this made you more human to me, someone I could relate to. Whether this was due to meeting on the top floor of a pub with wood-panelled walls, while eating modern British nibbles, I am not quite sure. That said, the environment was and is an essential factor, often overlooked in our work contexts and therapy rooms alongside the power some spaces hold for our patients. John: So, so true and so, so neglected in the culture of “hot desking” and “open plan” offices. How can you attend to private and personal conversations in such an environment? This is a clear case of “the medium is the message”. Joanne: John and I had a good rapport from the start and, although most of our communication was through email, we did meet on a few occasions to catch up. We spent much of our face-to-face meetings discussing what play John had just seen, his grandchildren and trying to get an Internet connection. It helped us stay connected, understand each other’s contexts, support each other with


John Hills


our strengths and weaknesses and join together on a more personal level. We had conversations about what we meant and thought about joining and conjoining. What types of articles would be suitable for this particular issue? We agreed it was essential to span the life cycle and to engage as many voices as possible from diff erent positions. We were ambitious, and this did not diminish as we began to commission both new and established authors to write for us. John: That just about covers it fully, Joanne, though I should just add for the curious, the play was Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, whose theme of a free- spirited, educated woman facing subtle (and not so subtle) prejudice in a social class driven by conventional and conformist morality has a lot to speak to us today about social attitudes, 130 years on. I know it struck us both without saying


anything that we are different from one another in terms of age, gender, race and cultural background. Joanne: I agree, but it was not a barrier between us. We talked about our similarities and our differences but these conversations were not planned, they organically happened working together. John and I are both social workers and family therapists. We did not know this about each other to begin with.


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Editorial


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