The "F" word: The challenge of feminism and the practice of counselling twenty years on

This article revisions feminist thinking from the point of view of seven practitioners/researchers currently working in New Zealand. It arises from embodied pain, passionate commitments, and a shared curiosity about purposeful feminism in our work. We explore the challenges for us as counsellors to express feminism in our practice in ways that will meet the needs of women and men. The article aims to challenge practice by performing a number of feminisms in response to particular contexts. It speaks our practices as women

Controversies in Counselling: Re-thinking Therapy’s Ethical Base

This is a theoretical thesis about ethical counselling/psychotherapy. Its aim is to re-think some of the many problems that beset the “psy” professions, by addressing some of therapy’s foundational assumptions. It takes the view that these are still expressed in five ethical principles: autonomy, fidelity, justice, non-maleficence and beneficence. It considers this re-thinking a prerequisite to the development of “just” practice in the twenty-first century. Counselling/psychotherapy is still an emerging profession and contains many contradictions and unanswered questions. The thesis begins by foregrounding the ambiguous relationship of therapy to social justice and to the global environment. It describes the range of internal disruptions and discrepancies which the profession contains. It then presents ethical commitment as the uniting factor, and as the topic of study for the rest of the thesis. The re-thinking draws on a variety of poststructural tools and reviews literature throughout. It takes a discursive approach, drawing in particular on a framework suggested by Foucault in 1968. Each of chapters three to seven focuses on one of the five ethical principles. Each principle is subjected to both a meta-analysis, which locates it within wider discursive contexts and a micro-analysis, which tracks its expression in various versions of the New Zealand Association of Counsellors’ ethical codes. This re-thinking seeks to foreground other “truths” that may have been excluded. The thesis finds that various controversies play a distracting role in a discourse that struggles to exclude immanent relationship with “other things”, including the planet. It finds that therapy continues to play out traditional and oppositional philosophical themes. It finds that morality, expressed rationally as ethics, suffers an erasure. It becomes mis-represented. The thesis ends by proposing a theory of materiality that bridges the gap between discourse analysis and identity politics. It concludes that ethical therapy would do better to free itself from reason’s stranglehold. It calls for an emphasis on dialogic community and the honouring of irrational relationship with the natural environment

Controversies in Counselling: Re-thinking Therapy’s Ethical Base

This is a theoretical thesis about ethical counselling/psychotherapy. Its aim is to re-think some of the many problems that beset the “psy” professions, by addressing some of therapy’s foundational assumptions. It takes the view that these are still expressed in five ethical principles: autonomy, fidelity, justice, non-maleficence and beneficence. It considers this re-thinking a prerequisite to the development of “just” practice in the twenty-first century. Counselling/psychotherapy is still an emerging profession and contains many contradictions and unanswered questions. The thesis begins by foregrounding the ambiguous relationship of therapy to social justice and to the global environment. It describes the range of internal disruptions and discrepancies which the profession contains. It then presents ethical commitment as the uniting factor, and as the topic of study for the rest of the thesis. The re-thinking draws on a variety of poststructural tools and reviews literature throughout. It takes a discursive approach, drawing in particular on a framework suggested by Foucault in 1968. Each of chapters three to seven focuses on one of the five ethical principles. Each principle is subjected to both a meta-analysis, which locates it within wider discursive contexts and a micro-analysis, which tracks its expression in various versions of the New Zealand Association of Counsellors’ ethical codes. This re-thinking seeks to foreground other “truths” that may have been excluded. The thesis finds that various controversies play a distracting role in a discourse that struggles to exclude immanent relationship with “other things”, including the planet. It finds that therapy continues to play out traditional and oppositional philosophical themes. It finds that morality, expressed rationally as ethics, suffers an erasure. It becomes mis-represented. The thesis ends by proposing a theory of materiality that bridges the gap between discourse analysis and identity politics. It concludes that ethical therapy would do better to free itself from reason’s stranglehold. It calls for an emphasis on dialogic community and the honouring of irrational relationship with the natural environment

Controversies in Counselling: Re-thinking Therapy’s Ethical Base

This is a theoretical thesis about ethical counselling/psychotherapy. Its aim is to re-think some of the many problems that beset the “psy” professions, by addressing some of therapy’s foundational assumptions. It takes the view that these are still expressed in five ethical principles: autonomy, fidelity, justice, non-maleficence and beneficence. It considers this re-thinking a prerequisite to the development of “just” practice in the twenty-first century. Counselling/psychotherapy is still an emerging profession and contains many contradictions and unanswered questions. The thesis begins by foregrounding the ambiguous relationship of therapy to social justice and to the global environment. It describes the range of internal disruptions and discrepancies which the profession contains. It then presents ethical commitment as the uniting factor, and as the topic of study for the rest of the thesis. The re-thinking draws on a variety of poststructural tools and reviews literature throughout. It takes a discursive approach, drawing in particular on a framework suggested by Foucault in 1968. Each of chapters three to seven focuses on one of the five ethical principles. Each principle is subjected to both a meta-analysis, which locates it within wider discursive contexts and a micro-analysis, which tracks its expression in various versions of the New Zealand Association of Counsellors’ ethical codes. This re-thinking seeks to foreground other “truths” that may have been excluded. The thesis finds that various controversies play a distracting role in a discourse that struggles to exclude immanent relationship with “other things”, including the planet. It finds that therapy continues to play out traditional and oppositional philosophical themes. It finds that morality, expressed rationally as ethics, suffers an erasure. It becomes mis-represented. The thesis ends by proposing a theory of materiality that bridges the gap between discourse analysis and identity politics. It concludes that ethical therapy would do better to free itself from reason’s stranglehold. It calls for an emphasis on dialogic community and the honouring of irrational relationship with the natural environment

Controversies in Counselling: Re-thinking Therapy’s Ethical Base

This is a theoretical thesis about ethical counselling/psychotherapy. Its aim is to re-think some of the many problems that beset the “psy” professions, by addressing some of therapy’s foundational assumptions. It takes the view that these are still expressed in five ethical principles: autonomy, fidelity, justice, non-maleficence and beneficence. It considers this re-thinking a prerequisite to the development of “just” practice in the twenty-first century. Counselling/psychotherapy is still an emerging profession and contains many contradictions and unanswered questions. The thesis begins by foregrounding the ambiguous relationship of therapy to social justice and to the global environment. It describes the range of internal disruptions and discrepancies which the profession contains. It then presents ethical commitment as the uniting factor, and as the topic of study for the rest of the thesis. The re-thinking draws on a variety of poststructural tools and reviews literature throughout. It takes a discursive approach, drawing in particular on a framework suggested by Foucault in 1968. Each of chapters three to seven focuses on one of the five ethical principles. Each principle is subjected to both a meta-analysis, which locates it within wider discursive contexts and a micro-analysis, which tracks its expression in various versions of the New Zealand Association of Counsellors’ ethical codes. This re-thinking seeks to foreground other “truths” that may have been excluded. The thesis finds that various controversies play a distracting role in a discourse that struggles to exclude immanent relationship with “other things”, including the planet. It finds that therapy continues to play out traditional and oppositional philosophical themes. It finds that morality, expressed rationally as ethics, suffers an erasure. It becomes mis-represented. The thesis ends by proposing a theory of materiality that bridges the gap between discourse analysis and identity politics. It concludes that ethical therapy would do better to free itself from reason’s stranglehold. It calls for an emphasis on dialogic community and the honouring of irrational relationship with the natural environment.</p

When educational supervision meets clinical supervision: what can we learn from the discrepancies?

The authors question the taken-for-granted notion of supervision. Their concerns arose out of an attempt to introduce 'clinical' supervision into academia as a way of addressing an increasing number of the ethical issues which confront lecturers. They recognise that knowledge can impact adversely on students and that lecturers at times find themselves compromised. They settled on supervision as an organisational space in the domain of power in which to address the distress they observed. However, through their different experiences of supervision, they soon found themselves talking past each other. When clinical supervision meets educational supervision, several anomalies are brought to the fore. The authors draw on Foucault's notion of discourse, and of knowledge as power, in order to foreground these and conclude by cautioning against an uncritical acceptance of supervision as an ethical practice. They believe there is a benefit in bringing together the two discourses of clinical and educational supervision for further discussion

Supervision in educational contexts: raising the stakes in a global world

This paper brings together discourses surrounding two areas of supervision, educational and clinical, in order to address the increasing complexity of academic life. Educational supervision of postgraduate student researchers resonates with more clinical supervision practices. All are widely perceived as beneficial and promoted on ethical grounds. However, a comparison foregrounds supervision's problematic and questionable association with a neo-liberal economic agenda. Following a desire to speak the unspeakable in academic spaces, we apply a discursively informed critical analysis to describe supervision as an affluent, professional response to an increasingly restrictive individualism, which compounds the isolating function of an unsustainable regime. We explore the possibilities that supervisory practices offer as an organisational space in the domain of power, locating untapped potential in their ambivalence. We invite a radical revisioning of supervision as a platform that might have potential for an increasingly subversive and inclusive voice in higher education

Professionals becoming researchers: Collective engagement and difficulties of transformation

This paper canvasses some of the dilemmas faced by a cross-disciplinary group of researchers influenced by post-structural, feminist, and queer studies questions. Our research centred on our professional practice in the areas of youth violence, educational psychology, counselling ethics, and geography teaching. Each of us was committed to exploring possibilities for 'transformative' research relevant for our practice, but questions about its purposes and possible transgressions contributed in different ways to a collective sense of unease. We reached some consensus about transformative research as being attuned to political sensitivities, often including a Foucauldian critique of disciplinary knowledges, and leading to a reflexive engagement with ethics as well as a commitment to collaborative process. The paper indicates aspects of this collegial work in our quest for new insights into the complexities of research that purports to be transformative while at the same time sensitive both to its specific location and to wider ethical implications

The personal is still political: Collective biographical memory work and feminist practice

abstract We are a group of women working across a variety of domains within a tertiary education context, in a time of transition in tertiary education, who are using a process of collective biographical memory work in our research. Working with our memory of co-constructed fictional characters from our childhood, we trace our development as a diversity of third wave feminists sensitive to the privileges and exclusions of our positions. What were the gendered influences at play in our early memory and how have these shaped who we have now become? In particular, how have these influences positioned us as women academics in the current regime of performance-based accountability and multiple redundancies? Our analysis uncovers layers of negotiation between expected behaviour and new possible selves