Keynote 3: The Long Walk to Freedom; Intersectional Pathways Towards Community & Wholeness

Biography

Dr Dwight Turner is Course Leader on the Humanistic Psychotherapy Course at the University of Brighton, and a psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice. Dr Turner is the author of Decolonising Counselling and Psychotherapy: Depoliticised pathways towards intersectional practice (2025), The Psychology of Supremacy (2023), and Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2021). All are published by Routledge.

An Intersectional Psychotherapist, Dr Turner is an experienced conference speaker. He can be contacted via his website www.dwightturnercounselling.co.uk or on social media on LinkedIn, Threads, or on BlueSky at @dturner300.

Abstract

The Long Walk to Freedom; Intersectional Pathways Towards Community & Wholeness

The current political landscape is one of polarisation and separation form those around us, be they families who have fallen out because of their different positions over Brexit, to communities which have been disrupted because of COVID, Lockdowns and vaccines, or because of political splits driven by the rise of the far right and the positioning of the far left in opposition. The reality is that we are perhaps more opposite to each other than we have ever been in at least a generation. The polarities will hold echoes in our work as psychotherapists and counsellors of all modalities.

This talk, which takes an intersectional approach to the splits that will happen within our society, recognises that these splits are also internal ones and that much of what we are wrestling with is as much around the internal re-alignments and reconnections that we have to go through, as it about the external representations of these projected aspects of ourselves that we have to interact with and reconnect with. This is the long walk to freedom, a freedom from these polarities, a freedom which will hopefully bring us back into reconnection and re-alignment, not just with ourselves, but with each other, our communities and beyond.