Elmarie Kotzé

In the Wake of Violence: Enacting and Witnessing Hope Among People

In the territory of violence and despair, hope is rare. Recent work on hope has shifted attention from hope as a feeling to hope as a practice that people can do together. This case report of a family exposed to domestic violence highlights the role played by a South African police officer in the mothers actions to separate from the context of violence. As a witness to the violence, the police officer acted from an ethic of justice and an ethic of compassion. Outsider witnessing of a counseling session resulted in the recruiting of a community of acknowledgement for the mother, the police officer, and an Assistant Commissioner of Police. Listening carefully and doing hope together gave rise to alliances against practices of violence. As a step of accountability, the authors used reflexive practices to question their responses and to avoid colonizing practices.

Women ... Mourn and Men Carry on: African Women Storying Mourning Practices--A South African Example.

African mourning of loss of lives in South Africa has been shaped by discursive practices of both traditional African cultures and the sociopolitical developments under apartheid and in post-apartheid South Africa. This article reports on changes in mourning practices on the basis of a literature review and uses a collection of examples to highlight the navigation of some cultural and gendered issues relating to mourning, against the backdrop of the everyday experiences of loss of life in South Africa due to violence and HIV/AIDS. The article draws on African womanist and feminist scholarship and focuses on the intersections between cultural and gender practices of bereavement in the lives of professional urban African women. The authors argue for the use of positioning theory and witnessing practices to honor and story the ongoing struggle of African women as these women take different agentic positions by accepting, questioning, resisting, and/or changing cultural mourning practices while they compassionately witness the self and others in the narratives they live.

Mo(ve)ments in the academic supervision relationship: Ethics in practice

Context: The context of the article is a supervisory relationship between an academic supervisor and a student-researcher and an ethic of risk within the research and supervision. Focus: The challenges for supervisor and student, and thus the supervisory relationship, and the strategies to move beyond the ethical dilemmas encountered in the research project, within an ethic of risk, form the focus of the article. Discussion: This article highlights the moments when a student counsellor/ researcher came to an impasse in transcribing and analysing data generated in an auto-ethnography, and the author, the academic supervisors responses to these difficulties. The use of specific knowledge, skills and strategies in the supervisory relationship opened space for agency and movement within these moments of impasse. Text work and researcher identity work was facilitated through the use of particular listening skills and narrative therapy informed questions.

Re-imagining Family: Growing Family Therapy Practice from the Rhizome of Autoethnography

This chapter explores a therapist’s autoethnography and the subsequent shaping effects of his self-in-relation, for him and his therapy practice. The autoethnography employed narrative therapy’s re-membering practices to (re)write into existence an enriched relationship with the therapist’s deceased mother. This process produced movements through which he and his family were transformed. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, becoming different became possible in surprising and delightful ways that he did not foresee when he began his autoethnography. The final section of the chapter turns to how these new becomings played out rhizomatically in the therapist’s family therapy.

Counsellors becoming Counsellor Educators: A New Zealand Example.

ABSTRACT The international literature on adjunct faculty in higher education, including professional education, does not yet cover counsellor education in particular, although many programmes rely on the teaching services of experienced practitioners in adjunct faculty positions. This article reports on a small, exploratory study conducted with adjunct faculty members appointed to one-year, full time fellowships in the counsellor education programme in which the authors are full time academics. The study identifies the mutual benefits of this practice, to the practitioners who teach as adjunct faculty and to the counsellor education programme. It also identifies areas that are problematic. In view both of the identified benefits and the difficulties experienced, the authors discuss their responsibilities as permanent academic staff to the practitioners who teach as adjunct faculty. The authors suggest that programmes benefit from the ethic of hospitality that adjunct faculty can offer and invite academic staff to bring (un)conditional hospitality to the collegial relationship in counsellor education.