1. LOOSE CHANGE?
Finding structure midst wicked
issues in messy circumstances
Ian Healy 2012

2. Nostalgia
Quote from the Ethics File Sep 24th, 2012
http://www.globalethics.org/newsline/2012/09/24/nostalgia/
“You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are
thinking about yesterday all the time.”
Charles Kettering quotes (U.S. inventor, engineer, and
businessman, 1876-1958)

3. FRUSTRATION
• “The trials and tribulations of wanting are
born of frustration; to choose one thing may
involve frustrating ourselves of something
else.”
{Phillips, 2012}.
• Implications for learning and practice?
• Implications for not knowing or initially
understanding?

4. VERSIONS OF SELF OVER TIME
• Past exists as a series of images-we recall these
in order to negotiate present and future
{Walther and Carey, 2009}.
 Past and present can as if coexist.
 Notion of stories that we tell about ourselves
over time {White, 1990}.
 Some stories become more dominant than
others.

5. HOW WE ‘STORY’ OURSELVES
• Consider the versions of yourself that you
might relate to others. Contexts?
• What comes to be included versus what is
excluded? What is emphasised versus
downplayed?
• How do you relate a version{s} of yourself
now compared to a few years ago?
• “I haven‟t changed a bit!”

6. COMPLEXITY OF SELF
• Everyone in this room.
• As learners in and out of this room.
• Clients/service users/community members
ditto.
• Professionals, practitioners, experts etc
ditto!

7. DIFFERENCE IS THE KEY
• Not just between people but within each of
us.
• Swarms of difference {Deleuze, 1987}.
• Such differences offer so much dynamic
potential {White, 2008}.
• Are differences always recognised?
Convenient?

8. ABSENT BUT IMPLICIT
• Derrida {1978} knowing what something is
in relation to what it is not.
• Example might be happiness versus
sadness.
• Optimism about change or difference versus
pessimism/negativity.
• The pessimistic client/community.

9. SIMILARITY IN DIFFERENCE
• Differences in us/others.
• Yet things that might link these differences.
• As we tell stories of ourselves differences
are indicated but links may be found.
• Stories are often told chaotically- threads of
connection?

10. AUTHORSHIP
• Deleuze (1987} spoke of becoming as
opposed to who we are; labels need not
stick.
• What sort of person/learner do I want to
become?
• What sort of Module Group/task oriented
group?
• What does the Community want to become?

11. LIFE AS MAP
• „The cartography of becomings‟ {Deleuze,
1987}.
• Identity, differences and possibilities.
• Check out your map as learner –
practitioner.
• Extent to which you are opening to your
possibilities.

12. ON NOT BEING OPEN TO LEARNING
• Can it be perhaps more convenient not to
know?
• Ignorance as bliss?
• Lacan: „the passion for ignorance.‟
• Not just a passive avoidance but a
commitment to not being affected by
something different.

13. PASSIONATE AVOIDANCE
• In avoiding the new e.g. ways of
learning, knowledge, practice we de facto
pretend confidence {Phillips, 2012}.
• We will be ok without it; doesn‟t matter….
• As if we fake knowledge about that which
we avoid.
• Running away from difference and towards
the known?

14. ON THE MAP
• Garfield, S {2012}On the Map: Why the
World Looks the Way it Does. Profile Books.
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/28/simon-garfield-
life-in-books
• Maps via Google etc have us believe that we
are at the centre of the Universe.
• As if merely have to explore/engage the
world online……

15. WE MIGHT BE MISSING SOMETHING
• Frequent if not incessant engaging with
technology.
• Curiosity meets anti curiosity?
• What price us mapping life
ourselves, actively learning through
interacting {inc. this room}?

16. THE DIFFERENCE OF BECOMING
• Am I prepared to work within myself to
become……?
• To become somehow different?
• Alright as I am thank you very much!
• Cameron et al inviting us to become „The Big
Society‟.

17. MUTUAL INFLUENCE
• Self as inter relational.
• Influence of problem over person.
• Person over problem.
• How does an individual sometimes manage
not to be engaged?
• Ditto a community/sub section?

18. POWER AND BECOMING
• Simply reflecting on the social world does
not make us objective or „truth owners.‟
• Me [practitioner] as outsider looking in.
• Mind the power imbalance.
• Habermas {1987,1992}Reflection as
impure.

19. • „The desire to cross boundaries and enter
into relationships of dialogic recognition
with others is fraught with problems of
misrecognition. This is especially true of
relationships in which there is an imbalance
of power.‟
• Whose terms of reference are being used?
p.249 Searching for Community:
Representation, power, and action on an urban estate.
Bent, Jeremy {2009} Policy Press.

20. BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated
Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
• Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
• Habermas, G {1987} The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity. & {1992} Post metaphysical thinking:
Philosophical essays . Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Phillips, A. {2012}. Missing Out. Hamish Hamilton.

21. • Sarah Walther and Maggie Carey, 2009. Narrative
therapy, difference and possibility: inviting new
becomings. Context.
http://www.theinstituteofnarrativetherapy.com/Context105-
SarahWalt_424831[1].pdf}
• White, M. & Epston, D. (1990) Narrative Means to
Therapeutic Ends, New York: Norton.
• White, M. {2007}. Maps of Narrative Practice. W.W.
Norton &Co.
• White, M. (2008) Notes taken from teaching, Centre
for Narrative Practice. Manchester, UK. Cited in
Walther and Carey.