Abstract: Katherine’s opening talk will be a personal reflexive exploration and owning of the seven generations of one branch of her families’ involvement in the Sugar plantations of Barbados and being Plantation slave owners. This is set in the context of a disavowed chapter of Britain’s history of Slavery and being a Slave Empire. Katherine sees this as a kind of facing: a facing of what she thinks of as their “blood in our sugar”; What Robert Frie calls the ethical responsibility to remember. At the same time it raises questions about her/our ability to both understand and critique events of the past through the values and ethics of the present and the need perhaps to place whatever needed understanding in its historical context. Katherine draws on Micheal Rothberg’s ideas on the implicated subject to help me/us move beyond impotent guilt and/or rage into recognizing, accounting for and taking responsibility for how the long shadows of past events shape events in the present. “I”, and we, are implicated like it or not. This is also about walking; walking as the creative crucible in which this piece spoke itself into my consciousness; walking, as Rebecca Solnit describes it, as an “improvisational act”.
Bio: Katherine Murphy is an Integrative psychotherapist working in independent private practice in West London. UK, as a practitioner, supervisor and educator. She is also a qualified teacher and social worker. Born into a farming family in the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand, she came to London in her mid 20’s. She is, now, a chosen migrant to the UK and London is her second home. A psycho-social or contextual perspective has always influenced the way she makes sense of being human-with-other humans and is at the heart of her practice. She continues to see psychotherapy and education as both a creative and a political activity.
There will be a Q & A after Katherine’s talk, which will be followed by a series of creative presentations. If you would like to participate in the second half by sharing a poem, a painting, or some prose, please let me know by Oct 23rd (we still have a couple more empty slots).
