OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Via personal reflection on my life as trained psychotherapist and anthropologist, I will scrutinise anthropologically a growing trend within contemporary therapeutic provision, especially with respect to how culture should be understood, managed and responded to in the therapeutic setting. My aim is to articulate a series of propositions, informed by anthropological theory, but broadly inconsistent with today’s increasingly manualised psychotherapeutic trainings, whether such trainings operate in universities, through NHS/IAPT initiatives, or private training institutes. I shall argue that manualised psychotherapeutic training, which aims to attain consistency in results and conations across practitioners, has in this pursuit become increasing culture-blind. Not through failing to articulate a concern for culture, or as is usually put, ‘cultural difference’, but through having become wedded to a concept of culture as something possessed – as something one has, rather than as something one does.