Autumn Term
Monday 5 November, 5:30-7:00 pm, room 4.07
Narrative Open Space: Using narrative to explore the impact of school placement on the lives of people who have a severe or profound vision loss
This session will be facilitated by Marion Donaldson. Marion writes:
I am interested in how different types of educational experience for visually impaired people impacts on employability, mental health, independence and social inclusion. Twenty years ago boarding school was the main option for many visually impaired young people at KS3. Inclusion in secondary mainstream school is a more recent historical development and now, very few young people who have a vision loss go away to specialist school. As a result there is an opportunity to look at and compare experiences and outcomes for the two groups focussing on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of an educationally inclusive experience.
In this session I aim to explore perceptions of the impact and outcomes of a range of experiences on people who have a disability. I plan to do this by sharing some stories that adults who have a visual impairment have told about their school experiences, and providing an opportunity to reflect on these, have a discussion about them and write or draw into that space.
Monday 3 December, 5:30-7:00 pm, room 4.07
Narrative open space: ‘Exploring life changing events’
This session will be facilitated by Jan Filer and will pick up from previous sessions which Margaret Page facilitated on the theme of ‘making meaning of life-changing events’. Jan will share a short piece of her writing which emerged in previous sessions, and invite participants to respond. The session will follow a similar process to previous sessions. This will be an opportunity to participate in collaborative writing for those who are new to the methodology, and to contribute to the rich seam of writing on ‘making meaning of life changing events’ from previous sessions. Participation in previous sessions is not a prerequisite for attending this session, everyone is welcome.
Spring Term:
Monday 28 January, 5:30-7:00 pm, room 4.10
Narrative open space: A marriage made in heaven, but consecrated on earth: Narrative and Humanism in Renaissance Florence
There was a moment in history when the emergence of narrative expression and the creation of humanism moved in lockstep – when narrative became the core methodology of the humanist movement. This was the time of the Italian Renaissance – and it took place mostly in Florence. Here, over a period of 200 years, we saw a history-churning shift from awe and appreciation to engagement and critique; from portrayal as intercession between human and deity, to portrayal as a bridge of inquiry from one person to the next. We live in different times – when our onward march of humanism seems to be faltering, just as we commit ourselves more deeply to the power of narrative enquiry. Let’s look back at Florentines painters and remind ourselves of that marriage, and of the essential bond between humanism and narrative expression.
Saville Kushner is a long-standing advocate of case study inquiry, and one of the early contributors to its methodological development. He has conducted narrative case inquiry in fields of action as diverse as criminal justice, international development, the performing arts, health services, schooling and higher education. Having recently returned from the University of Auckland he is currently professor of Education at Edge Hill University and Professor Emeritus at the University of the West of England. He has published widely on case techniques and the ethics of narrative research, including three books, numerous short works and an active blog on Politics, Culture and Education: http://www.multiplythenarrative.com.
Monday 4 March, 5:30-7:00 pm, room 4.07
Narrative open space: Narrative insights: learning from the stories of others through creative listening
This session will be facilitated by ANI-Net member Katrina Plumb
In this session we shall engage with poetry, including concrete poetry, which emerged from an earlier Community Engagement project exploring life stories of recovering addicts. Opening up a space for the narratives of people who have been let down by bureaucratic systems, we shall peel away layers of privilege, or perceived privilege, listen to personal narratives of disadvantaged people and focus on creativity in the face of adversity. We shall explore the use of metaphor, consider Uncontaminated Communication, then write into this space being open to the truth as it unfolds and reaching across barriers in communication. Whether we choose to write about times when the odds were against us, or revisit any other of our lived experiences, the invitation is to remember that privilege is not a prerequisite and write with the raw energy of the experience.
Monday 1 April, 5:30-7:00 pm, room 4.07
Narrative open space: The Research Kitchen: experiences of collaboration
This session will be facilitated by Sofie Sergeant and Henriëtte Sandvoort, from “Disability Studies in Netherlands”, Free University Amsterdam
In this session we will explore collaboration in principle and in practice, using the analogy of the Research Kitchen. Who is in the Research Kitchen and what are they doing? Who gets the ingredients and who does the cooking? Who leads and who follows in these processes? Who is here all the time and who flies in and out? Who serves the food and who stays behind to do the washing up? The session will begin with a series of reflections on the ongoing collaboration between Sofie Sergeant and Henriëtte Sandvoort, who have worked together since 2016 on their project called “Working together, learning together”. They are familiar with assumptions people often make when seeing a disabled and a non-disabled person working together, and use their own work to articulate and explore stereotypes and assumptions.
Summer Term
Monday 13 May, 5:30-7:00 pm, room 4.07
Narrative Open Space: Working with Anger
This session will be facilitated by Marian Liebmann.
In this session we will reflect on anger – the good and the bad aspects – and share this in writing from our personal experience. What makes us angry? Do we express it? Hold on to it? Deny it? Appreciate it?
Then Marian will lead a guided meditation on layers of anger, and we will write from our experiences of this exercise, and share as much as we wish from our writings.
Marian has led workshops in this field for many years, in a social services staff setting and in a community mental health team with service users, as well as weekend workshops at several centres. She often uses art as a way of accessing thoughts and emotions on this topic, so it will be interesting to see how writing can contribute to the process of reflection.
Monday 14 May, 5:30-7:00 pm, room 4.07
Narrative open space: Rioting as a method of inquiry: exemplifying activist practices through collaboration, friendship and worlding into the always not yet known
This session will be facilitated by Ken Gale and Jane Speedy. They write:
Is it in the eyes? How do we make our selves visible and invisible? In this session we will show and talk about collaborative experiences of finding and losing selves, of putting into flow and then questioning, processes of subjectivation alongside the constant denial of ascendancies of substance and the metaphysics of being. The writings presented are about productive desire, they simmer in the always becoming of friendship, in the here and now of always making the other visible in shaded, murky fields of play in the vivid flash of rockets exploding with the stars. These writings are not about differences that precede, they revel in the constant processualism of creative relationality and in the ever presence of the always emergence of difference. In the never ending, shifting reel of now you see me, now you don’t, in the always finding of new rhythms in the dance of swing and in the disharmonies of growth and the rhizomatic politics of the riff, the collaborative writings in this session offer glimpses into glimmering transmutational flows of becoming (of coming-together/drifting-apart/reaching-toward/sharing-gestures). We attempt to map the ebbing and flowing tides of friendship through the sharing of practices of kissing in the pak, doctoral supervision, passages of virtuality through long distance, engagements with near death experience, unrequited love, siblings, sharing red wine, watching blackbirds and worlding with possibilities of always something new…
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