Hybrid Creatures: Art therapy education in Australia. Memory foam - re-tracing and re-searching my steps - from there to here and back again.

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Westwood, Jill. 2019. Hybrid Creatures: Art therapy education in Australia. Memory foam - re-tracing and re-searching my steps - from there to here and back again. In: , ed. Art Therapy in Australia: Taking a Postcolonial, Aesthetic Turn. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill | Sense, pp. 157-211. ISBN 9789004315181 [Book Section]

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368262_006

Abstract or Description

This chapter presents a qualitative PhD research project located in the paradigm of personal knowledge and subjectivity. The information is based on accounts of subjectivities and lived experiences of a particular time and context and therefore it is temporary, incomplete, complex and layered. Using a bricolage of methods (McLeod, 2006), information was gathered from several sources (literature, institutional sources, and key educators, including myself) and then analyzed. This included investigating other places and educators in the world shown to be influential (USA and UK). See Westwood (2010) for a full account and also these related articles (Westwood, 2012, Westwood & Linnell (2011).

As a migrant who has boomeranged from Britain to Australia and back again, I have a view from outside and within Australia. My biases have evolved towards experiential, arts-based learning and progressive psychodynamic, and group systems perspectives including post structural and critical, race, feminist viewpoints. These preferences have influenced my use of visual processes to explore, develop and open up ideas. This chapter foregrounds these preferences and the visual, heuristic auto-ethnographic aspects in order to open up meanings and develop understanding relevant for the field of art therapy and the region. Please note - this version is the content accepted for publication and the final treatment in published form embodies the visual emphasis alive in this book of collected work.

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Book Section

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https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368262_006