Seikkula, J. & Arnkil, T.E. (2014) Open Dialogues and Anticipations: Respecting Otherness in the Present Moment. Tampere: National Institute for Health and Welfare. Sheen, M. (2015) “By God, believe in something.” Transcript of a speech in celebration of the NHS, Guardian, 2 March. Smail, D. (2006) Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books. Wilson, J. (2017) Creativity in Times of Constraint: A Practitioner’s Companion in Mental Health and Social Care. London: Karnac/Routledge. Suggested Further Reading: **Davis, J. & Tallis, R. (2013) NHS SOS. London. One World Publications. Eagleton, T. (2011) Why Marx Was Right. New York: Yale University Press. Fromm, E. (1997) To Have or To Be. London: Bloomsbury. Mason, P. (2015) Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. New York: Penguin. Wilson, J. (2007) The Performance of Practice: Enhancing the Repertoire of Therapy with Children and Families. London: Karnac. Younge, G. (2018) The British state has given up on the children who need it most. https://www.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/16/ austerity-british-state-children-special-needs- mental-health (On the privatisation of children’s mental health services) [Accessed 10/06/2019]. Varoufakis, Y. (2016) And The Weak Suff er What They Must? Europe, Austerity And The Threat To Global Stability. London: Vintage Penguin.
*
psychologychange@gmail.com
**Contains specifi c reference material regarding political action.
Jim Wilson is a UKCP-registered systemic supervisor. He works as a consultant, trainer and supervisor to mental health and social care services nationally and internationally. His seminars, workshops, and conference presentations are dedicated to exploring creativity in practice and the development of participative approaches towards mental health services and the people who use them. His latest book is entitled Creativity in Times of Constraint: A Practitioner’s Companion in Mental Health and Social Care (Karnac/Routledge, 2017).
Towards systemic praxis
practice and practices of ho Jan Parker
In this article, I hope to off er refl ections
and questions to the systemic community’s growing conversations about how we might strive to ‘do justice’ in our work. I will ask us to consider what we need as a systemic community and what we might do in our relationships with our clients, each other and our modality understandings to more actively challenge social injustices and to invite hope. We will have diff erent relationships
with ‘politics’, the word, so perhaps substituting the phrases ‘relational ethics’ or ‘compassion in action’ will, for many, be a more acceptable invitation into these explorations. But here’s why, for me, explicit talk of
the politics of systemic practice mat ers. As services are marketised and eroded for those with the least power to protest; as ‘wealth’ creation for the few destroys lives and environments; when the far right is on the rise across Europe and beyond; in a UK torn by adversarial parliamentary process, street-level hate and policy-level disregard, a UK where Grenfell was possible, I just don’t see how we can be anything but political if we are striving to work in ways that humanise, respect, create and warm contexts where healing, change and communal resilience can fl ourish. Just as Bateson reminds us we are not
skin-bound (Bateson, 1972), I believe our work as systemic practitioners cannot stop at the practice door. If we resist reductive, dehumanising approaches and are buoyed by practice examples that promote humanising creativity and relational resourcefulness and at end to the impacts of injustice and the multiplicities of human identity and experience; if we are prepared to fl ing open the windows of our modality and learn from other communities working for social justice; then, for me, these are political responses. T ey are woven into the warp and weſt of our histories and identities as systemic practitioners. Without them, who and what are we? Cosy group moans or collective virtue signalling are not enough. As the US philosopher
6
and activist Cornel West wrote on Donald Trump’s inauguration: “For us in these times, to even have hope is too abstract, too detached, too spectatorial. Instead we must be a hope, a participant…”
Micro and macro acts of resistance
T at being a hope, being a participant,
may be performed in larger-scale communal actions and in small yet transformative moments of relational regard. Here is a true story I hold close. One day,
a nine-year-old black child was walking home in South Africa with his mother, a domestic worker, when a white man in a cassock doff ed his hat in greeting. 72 years later, the boy described this small gesture of respect as “T e most defi ning moment of my life...” It was so replete with meaning, he said, “It had blown my mind ... T e impossible was possible” [his emphases]. T e man in the hat was Trevor Huddleston, the young boy was Desmond Tutu (Tutu, 2013). T e interaction was a spur to refl ection in
and on action (Schön, 1983) and, crucially, to action in and on refl ection, performed in decades of campaigning against apartheid. While our modality theorising clearly
acknowledges the impacts of oppression on us humans, one implicit and explicit message in recent invitations to ethical praxis is that we are working within unjust systems we can do lit le to infl uence, so we just have to do the best we can. If that were ever suffi cient, it is no longer. At recent workshops (Wilson & Parker,
2018; McNamee, 2018), colleagues spoke of feeling unable to respond helpfully in their work. Some described clinical supervision overwhelmed by crisis management and administrative checklists, with extreme staff shortages and high caseloads scuppering multi- agency meetings for highly vulnerable clients. Others were seeing clients for assessment, knowing they could off er no further sessions for at least a year. T eir experiences refrained key themes in the
Context 164, August 2019
Towards systemic praxis for social change: The politics of practice and practices of hope
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