Becoming‑With at the Margins of Inquiry

This workshop brings together two doctoral research projects that explore how systemic practitioners “come as they are” into therapeutic, community, and research spaces. Both presenters position their lived experience, cultural identity, and personal histories as active, shaping forces in their work. Participants will be invited into this conversation, reflecting on how attending more closely to the self can deepen practice, supervision, and research.

Jennifer introduces findings from her ethnographic study with marginalised young people aged 18–24 in Northern Ireland. Her research explores what becomes possible when young people are met not through services but through local, ordinary encounters—hanging out in familiar places, walking streets marked by post‑conflict histories, and co‑creating a flexible group space that resists pathologising models of intervention. Growing up working‑class during the Troubles, Jennifer brings her own local and indigenous‑to‑place knowledge into the research: an embodied understanding of community, conflict, humour, silence, and belonging that shaped how she met young people at the margins. This situated knowledge became a methodological resource, enabling her to link theory to practice through the work of Inga‑Britt Krause, Taiwo Afuape, and thinkers beyond systemic psychotherapy, while drawing inspiration from the poetry of Seamus Heaney to illuminate how young people navigate contemporary post‑conflict life.

Carol then introduces her doctoral research on ritual as a therapeutic vehicle in family therapy. Her work traces the historical and contemporary use of ritual across systemic psychotherapy—from strategic and Milan traditions to more relational, culturally grounded practices—and explores how therapists’ personal and cultural rituals shape therapeutic encounters. She highlights themes of resilience, growth, and the ways ritual can open space for meaning‑making within families and within the profession itself.

Together, these projects offer a textured exploration of how systemic practitioners’ selves—our histories, rituals, communities, and identities—shape the work we do. The workshop will include experiential activities, inviting participants to draw a ritual object and reflect on how their own situated knowledge, lived experience, and cultural worlds inform their practice, supervision, or research. Participants will leave with renewed curiosity about how “coming as we are” can become a generative methodological and therapeutic stance.