Keynote Speakers
Prof Adrian Blow
Professor
Michigan State University
Biography
Adrian Blow works as a couple and family therapy intervention researcher and educator at Michigan State University (MSU). Adrian is a Professor in the Human Development and Family Studies department and a core faculty member of the MSU Couple and Family Therapy programme. He studies families and trauma, military families, resilience processes in couples, and change processes (common factors) in interventions pertaining to Systemic Family Therapy. He has published numerous peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, and three books. He has mentored many students and in 2017 was awarded the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Training Award, which recognises excellence in family therapy education. He currently serves as President of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (2025-2026).
Abstract
Presentation information coming soon...
Dr Dwight Turner
Integrative Counsellor and Psychotherapist
University of Brighton
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.
Umberta Telfener
EFTA President
European Family Therapy Association (EFTA)
Biography
Psychologist, epistemologist, systemic thinker, activist, teacher of the Milan School of Boscolo and Cecchin, President of EFTA, the European Family Therapy Association.
Abstract
Presentation information coming soon...