Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice

Editorial. Transmaterial Worlding in Practice

2026-05-23T20:33:10+01:00

Issue 1 of this tenth volume of Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice has two sections which share a focus.

The first is a collection of writings which answer the question of what transmaterial worlding can look like in practice. The call for papers was a response to the 2019 paper published in this journal, “Transmaterial Worlding. Beyond Human Systems” written by two of the editors of this issue, Leah Salter and Gail Simon. The response was such that it is likely to lead to a second themed issue and/or a book of selected papers.

The second section offers short papers on the impact on practice of reading papers in this journal, a new development which will continue into future issues.

The focus on the impact of new ideas on practice, in both sections, is important. What we write needs to be meaningful and relevant for practitioners. Most papers in this journal are written by systemic practitioners who want to study their own practice and share how their learning might make a useful contribution to the world.

When Objects Refuse Silence: Violence, Resistance and the Re-shaping of Knowledge

2026-04-22T10:19:31+01:00

This paper reflects on how Julia Jude’s (2017) African Indigenous Oral Traditional Endarkened Feminist Practice and David Newman’s (2021) Dictionary of Obscure Experiences influenced my work with women who have experienced partner violence and with institutional representatives in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through a series of workshops, I explored how objects can interrupt dominant ways of knowing and invite witnessing rather than interpretation. Objects were first presented to institutional representatives without accompanying stories, creating space for not knowing and relational engagement. This process led to the creation of Preplitanje nasilja (Cerkic, 2026), a practice-based document. The paper reflects on how this work reshaped my understanding of knowledge, language, listening, and decolonising systemic practice.

On Reading ‘Aspects of Reading’

2026-04-15T22:33:06+01:00

In this article I explore the impact of reading Desa Markovic’s 2021 paper, Aspects of Reading, whilst training as a student family and systemic psychotherapist. I argue initially that the paper’s content helped me move away from a linear valuing of logical validitiy, to a greater appreciation of a multi-perspective engagement with a text. By remarking on the similarities between Markovic’s schema, and the traditional Jewish exegetical method of PaRDeS, by way of an appeal to Bateson’s ideas about levels of learning, I seek to show that the coherent intellectual thread in systemic thought is not one of content, but of method.

Questioning Certainty: Theoretical Tensions in Practice. Tensions as an Ethical Companion

2026-03-18T21:40:00+00:00

In this writing, I engage with the articles, Stories of “self”: Ideology in action (Simon, 2024) and Towards a heart-centred philosophy: Embracing poetry as transformative practice (Abraham, 2024). Both pieces helped expand how I understand systemic therapy, along with broader considerations of professional responsibility. Inspired by these readings, I reflect on the tensions that arise when therapeutic theories meet lived human complexity and the pressures of neoliberal professional culture. Rather than viewing these tensions as problems to resolve, I approach them as ethical companions that invite ongoing reflexivity and relational accountability in therapeutic practice.

Pragmatic Pathfinding: reflective walk and talks with my colleagues in children’s services

2026-03-02T19:58:13+00:00

Pragmatic Pathfinding describes an application of Transmaterial Worlding as a reflective walk and talk practice with peers in children's services. Charlie Chapman talks with colleagues Mark Hendy, Shannon Keogh and Huw Taylor about their experiences of working with families and about their personal connections with other than human members of the environment that they work in.

The ethics within Transmaterial Worlding are connected to sense making and actions to make a difference as part of interwoven social and ecological justice agendas. Walking and talking together provides a space to engage with wider contextual issues, engage with others and find forward steps together.

Transmaterial worlding in the home

2026-03-08T17:06:11+00:00

The family home offers tremendous possibilities for expanding the scope of systemic therapy beyond the limits of spoken language. In this paper, I will describe how the home has often been rendered undesirable by those writing in the systemic field. I will explore how the home and its contents actively shape the therapeutic process as described in the literature. Finally, I will draw on the concept of transmaterial worlding to show how the richness of the home and its contents can be embraced as actively participating in the therapeutic encounter, helping to bring the process to life. Simon and Salter (2019) offer transmaterial worlding as a framework for considering the ways in which the human and other-than-human are mutually entangled, drawing on examples which highlight the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world. In my view, practitioners engaging with a posthuman perspective can sometimes develop a sense that the other-than-human is located ‘out there’ in places which can seem geographically distant from the spaces in which everyday systemic practice most commonly takes place. This paper seeks to address this issue by exploring how transmaterial worlding applies to systemic therapy when carried out in the domestic space, as a way of demonstrating the applicability of these ideas to local, everyday systemic practice.

Transmaterial Worlding. A brief illustration of the theory in practice

2026-04-20T12:00:57+01:00

Transmaterial Worlding is an intriguing concept which is valuable for philosophical discussions around systemic practice, but might be considered complex. This writing encourages practitioners to play with Transmaterial Worlding language, and to be creative in developing a Transmaterial Worlding practice which enriches families by expanding their network to beyond-human community.

Wandering with Mindful Wonderment

2026-03-20T15:11:48+00:00

This article extends and shares practices inspired by Simon and Salter’s (2019) “Transmaterial Worlding: Beyond Human Systems.” This article argues that there is a need for wandering, and finding or creating diverse transmaterial worlding and practices that transcend Western binaries and hierarchical thinking in order to foster dreams of ecological civilisations. The article shares ways to seek sacred spaces within a pluriverse of worldviews by embracing an eco-relational mindset informed by non-anthropocentric Western, Eastern, Indigenous, and other process wisdom traditions, as well as science. The narrative and storied intention is to engage mindful wonderment and wander within an enmeshed, entangled, “naturalcultural” eco-relational worlding story by playfully integrating transmaterial worlding into an alternative gyrovague lineage connected to Ionian, Chinese, and Indigenous wisdom pointing to possibilities for ecological civilizations. The diverse process wisdom streams are connected to contemporary eco-relational practices, like lifescaping action research, eco-participatory forest walking, and mutual aid efforts. The lifescaping action research section summarises how diverse international co-researchers developed relationships with specific trees in their countries. The eco-relational forest walking practice activities deepen human-to-human and human to the more-than-human connection. Specific eco-relational practices include reciting loving kindness mettas, practicing chi kung (standing like a tree), reciting poetry to trees, and community building that extends beyond the forest walking practices into support for protests, actions resisting the fascist drift in the USA, and hope for emerging ecological civilisations.

Aesthetics of Co-ordination: On Behalf of a Kinder Reply

2025-12-31T04:17:43+00:00

In this writing, we recount the story of our journey as a pet-assisted therapy team from a poetic and creative perspective. Attending to the notion of practice-in-action, the authors develop an aesthetics of co-ordination as an analytic and ethical orientation to embrace how relational life is made and unmade in real time. We discuss breed-specific legislation and these constraints framed as a reflexive loop in which typological accounts of danger circulate in the social production of stories, connecting them to the conditions that intensify animal surrender and euthanasia vulnerability. We explore co-authorship with a canine participant as a method: a commitment to co-composed signification and transmaterial worlding, where meaning is created in collaboration with-in and across environments, not extracted from them. As a result, we present a poetic practice narrative offered as a performance-based rendering of our relational knowing.

Attuning to Generational Relational Wisdom Through Elephants

2026-05-23T12:32:40+01:00

Painting elephants as a form of inquiry led me on a quest to find connection with not only non-human participants, and the planet itself, but also to grounding myself within Indian history and ancestral memory. On my journey of discovery of human and non-human entities, I experienced elephants as symbolising all living entities, including rocks, water, and minerals alongside humans, the prime predators on this planet and a major evolutionary force. Nested in my search is a consideration of human supremacy as a hegemonic structure which led me to consider other hegemonic structures, such as patriarchy and caste. From a Harappan seal dating back to the second millennium BCE to the exploration of the divine feminine in tantric philosophy (700-1200 CE), to the feminist artist, Carolee Schneemann in the twentieth century, I sought to connect with anti-casteist, anti-patriarchal ideas consonant with ecofeminism. I try to inquire into how elephants matter to me and how painting them helps me understand my own history and thereby equip myself to be humble as a family art therapist attuned to planetary health.

Comrade Mikhail Bakhtin's Defense of his Dissertation: "Rabelais in the History of Realism". Performing Bakhtin’s Defense

2025-12-08T14:02:33+00:00

Four of us from the first cohort of the Professional Doctorate in Systemic Practice at KCC and the University of Bedfordshire presented at the 2014 Bakhtin Conference in Stockholm. During the conference, the English translation of Bakhtin’s viva was freely circulated to attendees and was given a table reading by some members of the conference committee.

A key figure from the inception of the Professional Doctorate in Systemic Practice at KCC and the University of Bedfordshire, was Professor John Shotter. John Shotter was a Bakhtin immersive. Bakhtin was definitely in the category of what Professor Mary Gergen referred to as John’s many textual friends. I was fairly sure John was not aware of this document.

It turned out that John Shotter had not known of the existence of this transcription neither in the original Russian nor in its English translation. It was a real discovery for him and presumably many others. He was excited to see it and was further thrilled at the invitation to direct a performance of Bakhtin’s Viva at the inaugural Bedfordshire International Systemic Practice and Research School in February 2015 at Brathay Hall, Ambleside.

John set about editing it, re-engaging with his theatre directing history, saying one had to allow no more than 80 words a minute of speech. So he cut it down and the doctoral students were invited to perform one of the actual participants in the viva/defence. You can watch the recording of this unrehearsed, spontaneously read-performed event via the link at the end of this document. In the performance, John introduces the work of Rabelais and Bakhtin and plays the part of Bakhtin in his own viva.

Watch/listen on the Systemic Practice Channel on YouTube

Thanks to:
• The stenographer whose name is not known.
• Denis Zhernokleyev and Caryl Emerson who translated the stenographer’s transcript from Russian into English.
• John Shotter who adapted the script, directed and introduced the performance.
• The doctoral researchers at the 2015 Bedfordshire International Systemic Practice and Research School who acted the participants.

Gail Simon, DProf, Editor

Re-membering Land That Knows Our Footsteps: A Celtic Window into Decolonising Systemic Training

2026-04-20T10:05:18+01:00

This paper explores systemic constellation practice through a Celtic perspective, tracing how land, water, story, and ancestral memory shape the field of belonging in a post-colonial era. Drawing on lineage, practice-based research, collective field inquiry, and collaborative research projects including Mapping the Empire and Tending Hope, the paper argues that ungrieved collective grief and historical silences shape what systemic practitioners are able to perceive within relational fields, influencing both constellation dynamics and the frameworks through which systemic training is taught. Through migration triangulation, the unacknowledged dead within lands and waters, and feminine wounding, the paper proposes a decolonising reorientation of systemic training that restores relationality with place, the more-than-human world, and the unacknowledged dead. This perspective expands systemic practice beyond the parental dyad into a wider ecology of kinship, memory, and care.

The Entangled Human: Fourfold Vision, Sacred Unity and the Ethics of Transmaterial Living

2026-01-10T02:53:56+00:00

This chapter introduces the Entangled Human as a way of perceiving and practising that recognises our inseparability from the living systems around us. Drawing on Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind, William Blake’s Fourfold Vision, and Karen Barad’s idea of onto-epistemology, it proposes an ethical stance grounded in awareness of entanglement rather than connection alone.

Through a blend of lived reflection, ecological observation and theoretical dialogue, the chapter situates systemic practice within what Simon and Salter (2019) describe as transmaterial worlding. Presence is reframed as practice, and Sacred Unity as an embodied discipline of attention that honours the patterns linking all forms of life.

Blake’s Fourfold Vision is interpreted as an ecology of perception. Single Vision represents the mechanistic logic of separation. Twofold Vision opens relational awareness. Threefold Vision brings imagination and emotion into knowing. Fourfold Vision points toward a lived experience of unity within diversity. Rather than stages of progress, these ways of seeing coexist, offering a fluid and ethical sensibility for practice.

For systemic practitioners, this orientation involves inhabiting relationship rather than observing from outside it. To live systemically is to live immanently, recognising that every act of meaning-making has material and ecological consequence. Ethical practice then becomes participation in an ongoing field of mutual becoming.

The Entangled Human invites a stance of humility, imagination and care. It calls for therapists and others to cultivate a Fourfold sensibility that holds paradox, acknowledges kinship across species, and acts with reverence for life. In doing so, it gestures toward a transmaterial ethics for living that may help us respond with integrity to the crises of our time.

Summer Travelling with Posthumanism

2025-10-24T13:36:20+01:00

Summer travels with posthumanism is an experimental piece of prose and praxis. It aims to map out the influence and effect of post humanism on systemic practice, by following and presenting the authors use of the ideas over a period of (summer) time. Examples of lived experience, intertwine with playful representations of sea and critters, and case work is considered through posthuman theory and concepts.

What emerges is a ‘composting’ of ideas and the proposal of a slow ontology, alongside an approach that embraces the “tentacular”; a trying feeling and relational being (not singular), with others, in trying feeling and relational worlds (Haraway 2016).

The author is writing from her position as a white woman and a systemic psychotherapist, situated predominantly in London, UK. Her ambition is to bring the often separate parts of the therapist (the ‘re-source’ of personally felt, relational experience, the overlooked detail of living, and the intertwining ecology) onto the academic stage and to suggest expansive and response-able ways of developing systemic thinking and practice.

Neurodivergent inclusivity within the supervisory relationship: Co-creating shared meaning using CMM

2026-02-03T12:00:11+00:00

We describe the beginnings of an ongoing collaboration between two curious clinicians seeking to deconstruct in order to co-construct meaning brought to the supervisory relationship in the context of difference, specifically neurodivergence. With different spoken relationships to neurodivergence between us, among many other intersections of our identities, we were asked to create and deliver a supervisor training workshop for clinicians supervising clinical psychologist trainees. We write this paper to share some of our journey together, expressed through reflections on our workshop and the co-constructed meaning that arose from bringing our conversations to a wider audience. Our hope is to tell a story of how Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) theory and practices can support speaking about, around, of, or with difference in supervisory relationships. We conclude with a co-constructed model for use by supervisors in curiously considering the multiple intersecting influences upon a neurodivergent supervisee within an ongoing supervisory relationship. We hope to inspire greater curiosity and reflection on the application of CMM theory and skills to supporting difference, including neurodivergence, within supervisory relationships across clinical disciplines.

How about some critical soup?

2025-09-25T07:55:43+01:00

This poem emerged from the raw data material of the author’s most recent teaching evaluations in higher education, recasting the very phrases and opinions that often remain, decontextualized and invisible in the educator’s official records. Rather than accepting the felt judgments that often do harm, the poem reworks reviewers’ bolded sentences into a counter-narrative that centres the context of classroom dynamics and relational learning - transforming deficits into narrative coherence.

Additionally, this poem illustrates how reviewers’ feedback, when clipped from its classroom context, can be situated into surveillance practices of women’s tone as well as feminist critique that often flattens relational learning. By repurposing those words as another act of rebellion, the poem reframes criticism as a site of meaning-making. It moves from accusation to invitation, from rating to reflection, and from surveillance to shared responsibility.

The inspiration for this writing is situated in the lived realities of the author - a woman of colour - who has written about embracing poetry as a transformative practice in educational environments (Abraham, 2024). The author invites readers through the journey of reconsideration - from receiving student feedback in the form of teaching evaluation that is centred in anonymity to building dialogic, context-rich response to the felt damages of a consumer-style feedback system.

Can you see me beyond the binary? Three poems and three invitations

2025-06-20T00:20:00+01:00

These three poems sought to navigate and share my experiences as a non-binary person within two institutions at different time points. The first two were written to the same educational institution several months apart, with the second coming in the wake of the April 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling. The third was written during a hospital admission one month on from the same ruling, a changing and cold landscape of care that felt increasingly unsafe for a gender diverse person in this moment in time. I am a human being; I am fully living in existing beyond the binary. I’m asking you to see me, and look at the world with me in these words to understand an othered experience (Shotter, 2009). So many conversations are happening about gender diverse people without us, for to converse with me, I’m asking you to look beyond the binary. In this way, I’m seeking to engage you in “being” with me on the path to ”becoming", or growing together mutually, as I ask you to engage with our collective humanity. I hope by unusually asking you to move from the witnessing position in reading my words, to the active position of contending with different forms of questioning, that you might sense that mutual growing together and coming into action (Andersen, 2012). These questions invite you to take multiple perspectives, and I’m interested in what happens within you as this sharing happens to us both. What new ways of thinking, values, endings, or beginnings enter your mind if any? In my experience working with allies, our best work is done in equal parts, while I am and I exist, and I’m sharing this with you, I ask that you actively engage with me too.

The Tower is Falling: Collapse, Connection, and the Possibility of Reorientation

2025-06-13T12:16:56+01:00

This paper uses the Tarot arc of the Devil, the Tower, the Star, and the Fool to explore systemic collapse and the logics of masculinised power. Drawing on archetypal imagery, ecological systems theory, posthumanist feminism, and lived experience, it argues that the panmorphic crisis (Simon, 2021) of climate change, technological acceleration, and political instability are not merely failures of implementation. They reflect a deeper failure of imagination. The Tower is falling because it was built on the ideology of the Devil, to deny relationship, vulnerability, and feedback. In its place, the Star offers a different kind of intelligence: attentive, embodied, and quietly relational. Figures such as Trump and Musk are read not as aberrations but as expressions of a system that rewards shamelessness and disconnection. The paper invites readers into an ethic of reorientation, recognising even those we most oppose as part of our systemic kin. The Fool, traditionally male, is reclaimed as a post-binary, post-certainty figure who gestures toward a different way of going on, a journey that is uncertain, attentive, and deeply relational.

Listening to Parents, Listening to Myself: A Systemic Encounter with Autism, Emotion, and Family Legacy

2025-07-07T08:52:58+01:00

This paper explores the complex emotional and cultural terrain navigated by 28 parents of children diagnosed with autism or ADHD, weaving their narratives with the author’s lived experience as both a systemic practitioner and mother. Through reflective group sessions and therapeutic tools such as board games and genograms, parents found space to externalise blame, rediscover agency, and build supportive community. The research challenges conventional clinical models by centring parental emotion, trauma, and intergenerational legacy, offering a re-humanised lens for practitioners, educators, and policy makers. It calls for a shift from diagnosing dysfunction to understanding systemic patterns, advocating for empathy-led practice that listens not only to the child, but to the stories that surround them.

Editorial: Beyond binaries, beyond despair

2025-03-25T16:21:14+00:00