Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice

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

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

From Two-Eyed to Three-Eyed Seeing: A Third Space Beyond Binaries

2025-03-14T04:46:34+00:00

As a Métis therapist and academic, it is not unusual for me to write from the margins. I live on land that is referred to, by Indigenous people, as (northern) Turtle Island, aka Canada. Referring to this land by one of its Indigenous names means that we situate this space apart from the dominant, British and French colonized society. We project our Indigenous inner landscape (ways of knowing and being) onto the landscape and fortify our Indigenous inner world with reinforcing experiences of interacting with the social and natural world. As Métis people, I believe we try to also call forth a Métis space in which we can dwell, a virtual “road allowance”. In this space, we can laugh and cry together, scheme, strategize, and grieve (Richardson, 2006; Troupe and Gaudet, 2024). This article explores the “third space” and what it means for Métis people to live across multiple spaces and to resist notions of “pure race” and other forms of colonial claptrap.

Drip Feeds. Resisting Binaries

2025-03-13T07:51:41+00:00

This is not the world we were promised and demands our refusal to accept it

2025-02-17T10:42:55+00:00

Our multi-storied bodies: in practitioner-centred conversations

2025-02-12T13:38:09+00:00

We will share five fragments of a collaborative exchange where multi-storied bodies practices are brought to practitioner-centred conversations. Our written dialogue woven throughout will illustrate how these practices create opportunities to disrupt professional binaries such as personal/professional, thought/feeling, and individual/collective. We will show how each turn in our exchange was taken and how this has shaped the practice. The story of this collaboration is at its heart, and we will therefore begin there.

“Everything is Research” – a brief reflection on how wizards and Barbie dolls are developing my understanding of binaries in my different contexts

2025-02-09T16:36:07+00:00

This writing reflects on how binaries and labels can present themselves for exploration and irreverence in all contexts, from systemic practice in a multidisciplinary team to enjoying theatre, TV and music with family. When we see "everything is research" as practitioner-researchers, we can use any opportunity to consider our positions, both privately and in dialogue with others, and challenge ourselves to work towards ethical congruence in our many contexts.

We Are Part of the Ecosystem: Therapeutic work within communities of practice

2025-07-18T08:16:21+01:00

As practitioners, we often share community memberships with those who consult us. We practice from a place of familiarity with how Western psychotherapy has failed, oppressed, and blamed racialised, neurodiverse, 2SLGBTQIA+, disabled, and otherwise marginalized people. Some is lived experience, the rest we draw from community knowledges. We hope to contribute a response to the question, “What can it mean to intentionally build a therapeutic practice outside the expectations of clinical professionalism as a person, practitioner, and community member?” Or, from another angle: "What does it mean to be a part of the ecosystem we support?" Our experiences and observations are framed by privileges (whiteness, stable housing, access to academic spaces, healthcare, and transport) and marginalisations that inform and contextualize this work. In perpetuity, we acknowledge and honour the brilliance and labour of Kimberly Crenshaw, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and countless other BIPOC scholars, activists, writers and beyond who have defined and created intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989) systems of resistance and survival. Any errors in the interpretation of these bodies of work are our own.

I thought there was a river behind my house

2025-01-31T15:19:11+00:00

Reclaiming Legacy. Beyond a Binary Narrative

2025-01-30T19:54:03+00:00

Transcontextual learning, warm data and unforeseen connections

2025-05-02T16:15:59+01:00

This article explores practices of trans-contextual learning, warm data, making unforeseen connections as approaches to address the complexities of interconnected systems. Trans-contextual learning involves collaborative, adaptive, and feedback-informed learning across different contexts and disciplines. It emphasises breaking down silos to find innovative and sustainable ways to go on. Warm Data Labs, developed by Nora Bateson fosters relational in- and outsights and emergent understandings by engaging participants in non-hierarchical, reflective, and dialogic processes. It seeks to move beyond reductionist and mechanistic approaches to embrace the complexity of interconnected systems. Transformation happens in unforeseen connections within a field of many possibilities. Trans-contextual learning might be crucial in the face of what is described as a “poly-crisis” — multiple, overlapping crises with cascading effects. People concerned explore how they collaboratively, trans-contextually learn, step by step, stumbling, and feedback informed, in complex systems, within multiple contexts.

Bright Intersex Futures

2025-01-17T10:21:19+00:00

The Paradox of Inclusion: Non-Binary Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Work in a Dualistic World

2025-01-10T13:19:09+00:00

Despite decades of policy and programming, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives remain constrained by the binary logic embedded in traditional organisational thinking. This paper critiques the positivist and dualistic assumptions that shape the environments in which EDI practitioners operate. We argue that modernist frameworks oversimplify complex social realities, obscure systemic harm and trauma, and reinforce hierarchical structures rooted in coloniality and white supremacy.

Drawing on social constructionism – particularly Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony –we propose that a paradigmatic shift toward non-binary, relational, and polyvocal approaches to organising is essential if we are to disrupt entrenched ways of thinking and the socially constructed patterns of hierarchical othering they normalise.

Through reflexive discussion of our thoughts, experiences, complicities, and biases, we explore how polyphonic organising, grounded in a pedagogy of love, offers a pragmatic framework for cultivating inclusive, dynamic, and ethically responsive human systems. We contend that the efficacy of EDI programming will remain limited unless organisations move beyond their colonial, neoliberal, and binary legacy. In an era of rising anti-EDI sentiment, we offer this paper as a reflexive, visceral, and hopeful response to the so-called culture wars – and the urgent need for systemic transformation.

‘Fuck normal’: Praxis for learning from the profane

2025-01-08T21:32:37+00:00

There is much to be learned through sharing stories of resistance to binaries. In this paper I introduce myself (so that you know a bit about how my experiences with privilege and marginalisation shape my view of the world and the knowledge which I create). I share some stories from my own life (and gifted to me) that make visible how binaries reinforce oppression, particularly how binaries reinforce colonial ideas about ‘superiority’. I share news stories about two Indigenous change-makers, so we can dream about how to resist binary and how to support each other with the lonely work of being a bridge/veggie burger with bacon. I’m a teacher, so sometimes I invite you to check out my references to learn more about vital concepts that cannot be explored within this one paper. I include my entire self in this writing, through the inclusion of my humour, my heart and my voice. I have found the most belonging with communities who are comfortable existing in a world where sacred and profane have a lot of overlap. Usually this means communities who exist on the margins, which is a great place to engage in binary challenging praxis! It is a sacred act to keep my outraged profane voice, particularly in communities such as ‘professionals’ where this voice is often looked down upon, even as we claim to centre these voices. The part of me who says ‘fuck’ is the same part of me who expects justice for all, so shutting them up is impossible anyway!!

Editorial: Re-imagining Neuro-inclusive Therapeutic Services

2024-12-22T07:14:19+00:00

An exploration of the relational experiences of a parent being diagnosed as autistic after a child’s diagnosis with autism

2025-07-13T14:18:05+01:00

This article is a retelling of the stories emerging from my dissertation research exploring the lived experiences of two autistic parents diagnosed as autistic following their children’s diagnoses. In my research I used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA, Smith et al, 2022) to elicit themes which I have used within this piece to frame the stories told by David and Sarah about their experiences.

Societal discourses around autism often occur in the context of ideas from a medical model which views autism as a disorder and situates autistic people as having deficits; such discourses contribute both to the limited literature on autistic parenting lacking attention to the joys and strengths of autistic parents as well as autistic parents being unfairly judged in the absence of support or understanding of their experiences (Murphy, 2021). This article is a retelling of the stories shared by Sarah and David and their experiences navigating familial and social contexts as newly diagnosed autistic parents.