Conference Agenda

I reflect on my struggles to become inbetween, to really do diffractive methodology as intra-action (Barad, 2007) in my inquiry into the bodily sensations felt by me, as a family therapist in sessions. I studied the post session discussions of professionals working with me as reflecting teams (Andersen, 1987), who reflect with each other, which is witnessed and commented on by the family and lead therapist. This is an under researched aspect of family therapy because of the complexity of the dynamics, how to not lose the wonder of this experience in the writing, which invites simplification with calls for clarity, which can get fetishised (Colebrook, 2014), and lose sight of the magic in the periphery.

Initially I was focused on resisting separations especially between mind and body and reifications of categories, which would have sent me into misguided certainties and missing the flows around in relational connections beyond what is already known about verbal and non-verbal communication in therapy. I needed to avoid being distracted by reviewer’s fascination and concern about the context in which my inquiry has taken place, that is in developing a family therapy service in an English National Health Service adult forensic mental health setting.

In the writing up stage and working out my discussion, rather than justifying why I did not go down certain paths, I want to embrace how post qualitative research has been opening up my inquiry at every stage. I am enveloped in the messiness, trying not to avoid the trouble (Haraway, 2016) with a deadline looming, sending me oscillating between restating knowns to reassure my readers, and lines of flight to find less explored territories (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Where my bodily responses, expressed in poetry holds my rigour and accountability.

Drawing on my doctoral research, which is now in its final year, I consider how altered bodies marked by cancer treatments, resilience, and persistence, are sites where the visible and invisible meet. I explore how experiences of illness and health care are shaped by global flows of knowledge, power, and relational practice. These experiences are not only medical but social and affective. As Ahmed (2006) reminds us, orientations matter. Drawing on participants' conversations, I consider how the position of bodies and how systems orient toward them, shapes what can be seen and heard.

Health systems often privilege biomedical authority, reproducing what Peters (2018) identifies as the “unquestionable” discourse of Western medicine, and reducing people to cases rather than storytellers (Frank, 1995). Yet, as Braidotti (2011) writes, “we are rooted but we flow” with identities are situated but fluid, relational, and in movement.

Through poetry, narrative, and reflexive insight, I invite dialogue on how systemic inquiry might re-orient health systems toward more humane, relational practices.

Initially enquiring into the inclusion of climate dilemmas within coaching conversations, the research has meandered, bolted and rebounded through the process of discovering its place. Conversations with participants on land that was meaningful to them led to two-fold ‘listening’; human dialogue enriched by the presence of landscape.

Writing about these encounters, inspired by novellas that ask, “Something happened but what?” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980), led to a polyphonic experience involving human and more-than-human ‘voice’ while sensing underlying Mystery (Bateson 2004). Time was unquantifiable, as past experiences of colonisation propelled the research into present day and current climate issues were grounded in the experiences of humans wrenched from the land beneath their feet centuries before.

To ask questions with Land, to notice the boundaries of nations and the boundless relations with land of Indigenous peoples who do not live with notions of boundaries, continues to be a puzzling experience. Yet as this research enters its final year it must find a place to stop to ask, “What might happen next?” (Manning 2023). Could the cultivation of a sense of belonging (hooks 2018) build relations with the land beneath our feet and “allow the quality of tipping that keeps life on its toes,” (Manning 2023, 109).

In the context of modern Western society, elders are often seen as a burden. Western culture is dominated by values of productivity and achievement, and ‘retirement’ implies you no longer contribute to society but become a cost to it. The focus is on a ‘decrease’ in abilities, inherited from prior generations. Elders are not considered a resource for our world in crisis.

Drawing on my doctoral explorations, with self and others – now in the final year – I found other ‘Elders’ interested in following a calling to reshape our lives. We are not focused on personal contentment but on a re-source-full ‘growth’, individually and collectively, in service to improving society. My research recognizes and contributes to a growing movement among elders to develop informal communities based on an understanding of why we are here, seeing evolution as the path for transformative refinement (Sae, 2015).

This research addresses the question of how can we find our appropriate (not just convenient) life as elders (Hesse, 1928 in Largo, 2022) and step up to commune in our elder strengths beyond growth as productivity? For this, I draw on systemic exploratory constellation (Müller-Christ and Pijetlovic, 2018) and abduction pragmatic analysis (Peirce, 1934; Merk, 2023) as my methodology to find the path of individual and collective growth in consciousness and to reconceptualize retirement as re-‘source’-ment.

To understand this journey in practice, I will consider the difficulties involved in using data collection methods and dealing with ‘measurability’. The application of constellations to this topic of re-‘source’-ment provided this data. They were guided by principles enabling a multidimensional way to experience the ‘all is one’ space (Gehlert, 2025) in an embodied way (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2013).