Workshops

Submit Your Workshop Proposal

Following AFSP’s 50th anniversary, the 2026 conference looks forward, asking how we continue to grow a field that is clinically grounded, socially responsive, and attentive to what people have lived through.

In 2026, we gather in Glasgow, creating space for relational, embodied, and participatory learning.

We invite proposals for in-person delivery that explore lived experience not only as something our clients bring, but as something we ourselves carry: shaping how we meet, respond, and work in relationship.

Come As You Are: Lived Experience as Our Resource

We are particularly interested in workshops that:

Treat lived experience, including the therapist’s own, as a resource that can be developed with skill and care, rather than simply shared

Explore how experience shapes training, practice, supervision, research, or service development

Engage with the social contexts pressing on systemic work, including inequality, migration, class, neurodiversity, polarisation, and forms of resistance, growth and resilience

Attend to recursiveness; how our own experience shapes practice, how encounters reshape us, and how systemic work informs what we notice, ask, and build as knowledge

Corporate, development and seminar with business people in conference room for learning or

Workshop Submission Form

What We Are Looking For (our criteria)

We welcome proposals that are:

1. Participatory

Designed for engagement rather than presentation. Workshops should include structured opportunities for dialogue,
reflection, practice, or creative engagement, making use of the in-person setting.

2. Clinically Grounded

Clearly connected to systemic psychotherapy theory and/or practice. Proposals should demonstrate how learning will travel back into therapy rooms, supervision spaces, training contexts, or research.

3. Ethically Reflective

Attentive to power, difference, context, and the conditions that shape both therapist and client participation.
We particularly welcome workshops that model relational responsibility rather than positioning the presenter as the sole expert.

4. Socially Responsive

Engaged with contemporary contexts affecting systemic work: including social inequality, marginalisation, migration, identity, and changing services.

5. Developmental

Workshops may showcase established practice or emerging ideas. We actively encourage submissions from both established and newer voices.

Formats

We welcome:

Practice-based workshops
Research-informed sessions
Supervision and training innovations
Creative or arts-based encounters
Co-presented or dialogical formats
We are especially interested in formats that invite participation, reflexivity, and shared inquiry.

Recording and Online Access

All workshops will be delivered in person in Glasgow. One workshop from each session, will be live-streamed to the virtual audience. Where available and feasible, workshops will be recorded, and edited versions of the workshops will be made available to both online and in-person ticket holders after the conference.

When submitting a proposal, please indicate whether you would be willing for your workshop (or a modified version of it) to be recorded.

We recognise that some participatory formats may not be suitable for full recording. Presenters whose workshops are selected for recording will be supported to think through how to preserve relational safety, confidentiality, and ethical integrity in the recorded material.

Further information about what will be available to online participants will be provided once the programme is confirmed.

Proposal Guidelines

Please submit:

A workshop title
A 300–500 word description outlining:
The focus of the workshop
How it engages the conference theme
The participatory elements included
The systemic ideas or practice base it draws on
What participants will take back into their work
A brief presenter biography (150 words per presenter)

Our Commitment

AFSP Conference 2026 is designed as a participatory space with room for established and emerging voices alike. We aim to create a programme that reflects the diversity of systemic practice across contexts and communities.

We warmly invite you to come as you are, and to help shape how lived experience becomes a resource for our collective learning.

Submission Date

Please submit your workshop proposal by 01 May.

Assistance

Should you require any additional advice or guidance about workshop submission, please email afspevents@mintevents.co.uk and a member of the conference planning group will get in touch with you.