Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 48
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Throughout the series, art has highlighted the strength of in-process, handmade,
and less recognizable ideas. Using aesthetic strategies, narrative therapy can
challenge known terrain as our starting points. Clients’ stories are filled with
vitality when we enlarge our ways of ordering experience and radicalize what we
see as possible. In this way, art far exceeds the role of artmaking by exemplifying
unseen choices in our lives, worldviews, and narrative practices.
Of course, there are decades of examples and hundreds of artists who could have
been included in this project. The definitions of “art” and “aesthetics” continue to
expand, and technology is increasingly part of artistic conversations, including
digital work. Our therapy offices become their own contingent geographies,
hovering on the margins of the commonplace as sites of witnessing and transport.
Our Zoom rooms are neither inside nor outside, blurring spatial boundaries.
Art inspires participatory actions and fosters immersive dialogues beyond the
human-centric. Our stories can fight back against complicity as we awaken to vital
aesthetic performances and animate new options in our daily lives.
References
Abram, D. (2010). Becoming animal: An earthly cosmology. Vintage Books.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. & Trans.).
University of Minnesota Press.
Blake, W. (1906). The marriage of heaven and hell. John W. Luce & Company.
Bogue, R. (2004). Deleuze’s wake: Tributes and tributaries. State University of
New York Press.
Borges, J. L. (1962). The garden of forking paths. In D. A. Yates & J. E. Irby (Eds.),
Labyrinths: Selected stories & other writings (pp. 19-29). New Directions.
Carrie, M., & Russell, S. (2003). Outsider-witness practices: Some answers to
commonly asked questions. International Journal of Narrative Therapy and
Community Work, 1, 3–16.
Breaking the Frame: Aesthetic Encounters with Narrative Practice – Part Three
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2026 Release, p. 25-51.
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