Re-imagining Systemic Training for a Decolonising Era - Call for Papers

REDESIGNING SYSTEMIC TRAINING FOR A DECOLONISING ERA

A special Issue of

 Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice

          A fully open access independent journal for the

                         systemic practice communities

 

Decolonising Systemic Training

This call is an invitation to share your experience systemic trainings more culturally relevant. We welcome submissions from course leaders, tutors, trainees, external examiners, and institute directors discussing changes to decolonise the training of systemic practice. Those involved in systemic training courses are keen to respond to the challenges of social inequalities, new technology and staff and student overload/overwhelm.

 

Creating a fresh context

Most systemic therapy trainings need not so much updating so much as an entire re-design. Do we tweak, amend, update, flush, rewrite, repair, extend? This is the moment for a paradigm shift, not a tweak in content or delivery, but for changes that make a difference that matters in a world split by colonising and decolonising intentions. The biggest challenge is how to think outside of the colonial mindset, outside of taken-for-granteds, and not feel obliged to what have been considered pillars of systemic theory and practice.

Suggestions of possible themes:

  1. What are we training people to do and where?
  2. Creating inclusive course cultures
  3. Course participants as contextually situated community members
  4. Embracing new technologies
  5. Re-thinking assessment
  6. Teaching the practice of systemic research
  7. Transmaterial systems thinking
  8. Reading, listening and viewing as cultural interventions
  9. Reflexivity for personal and socio-political change
  10. Improving systemic articulation and representation in transdisciplinary teams
  11. Owning our professional history and reparative action
  12. Breaking with cultural compliance
  13. Practitioner learning, the circulation of knowledge and assessment
  14. Language Matters
  15. Supporting change leaders

Submissions

  1. Papers which address systemic theory and practice in-depth in relation to this topic.
  2. Papers which are theoretical, philosophical, arts oriented from outside the systemic field but with relational implications and therefore potential usefulness.
  • Poems – in any form
  • Short stories of about 1000 words
  • Practice or research notes up to 2000 words 
  • Photo or video essays
  • Audio recordings or videos

 

Murmurations is a systemic practice journal. You need to show relationality, reveal who you are (in your many selves and how they are present and in play in the writing), ensure you have genuine permission to include the lives of others in your writing or media, and hold in mind the key ethic of “Nothing about us without us!”

Please read some of the papers in this journal to understand the uniqueness of this systemic journal.

Timeframe

Submission date 15th November 2026 (earlier submissions welcome). Publication in Spring 2026.

 

Guest Editors: Shila Rashid, shila.rashid@murmurations.cloud and Gail Simon gail.simon@murmurations.cloud 

 If you have an idea about something you’re considering submitting, we’d like to hear from you.

Website: murmurations.cloud and check the website for dates of sessions with the guest editors to discuss your ideas for a submission.