In the words of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “disabled folks are the most brilliant folks we know, both in the ways we navigate an ableist colonial reality and the ways in which we create beautiful new worlds and forms of resistance.” Through these interview series, we hope to bear witness to the rich wisdom from the…
Alternative Identity Project: Rejecting Personal Failure and Locating Failure in Systems
Alternative Identity Project was a 4-day gathering that invited 8 young people from the margins to come together and engage in conversations that reject the idea of personal failure and place failure in the unequal systems and unjust structures around us. Through externalization and reauthoring over rainy July afternoons, the young people journeyed together to reclaim their…
Children’s Picture Books as scaffolds to Re-author Stories of Disabilities
One of the powerful ideas that align narrative practices and disability justice is that people are not the problem, the problem is the problem. That the problems are not in our bodies, heads or hearts but in the social structures of injustice, in a world that’s industrialized, medicalized, ableist. In a conversation with Vikki Reynolds,…
‘हमारे जुगाड़’ – A collective document of mothers’ know-hows of taking care of themselves
हमारे जुगाड़/Our Jugaad is a collective document about different ways in which mothers take of themselves, their mental health. This Covid lockdown across India has been a particularly difficult time for caregivers of children with disabilities with restricted access to supportive spaces, everyday resources, medical and therapy services, change in everyday routine. The Mental Health…
Podcast: Therapists as Co-travellers on Caregivers’ Journey
The Mental Health Team at Ummeed Child Development Center, Mumbai has been facilitating a series of events in the month of June, as a way to advocate for the mental health of caregivers of children with disabilities. As a part of the series, the team is launching this podcast that is a conversation between the…
‘Collective Feeling’… Ananya on Artwork and Mental Health
Bruner once said, “Stories become transformative only in their performance” This week, we are in conversation with Ananya Broker Parekh who calls herself a “freelance illustrator, a picture-maker and a storyteller.” In this conversation, she lets us into some of her profound, yet accessible storytelling through her artwork around mental health and what moves her…
Jugaads, the ‘little’ doings
A quaint and a colourful little book at a first glance, Jugaad is a storehouse of decolonized and unabashed knowledge about mental health by 14-young people between ages 14 – 19 years. It is a book carefully and collectively crafted by the young people that is rooted in their lived-experiences, and seeks to be…
Story-beings by Alfonso Diaz
In many ways, stories are similar to living beings: They seem to have their own interests. They compel us to share them and, once told, they begin to grow and change, often becoming longer, stronger and more elaborate. Stories find each other, they intermingle, and multiply. Stories need our attention to thrive in the world:…
Let’s Talk Narrative… with Jehanzeb Baldiwala
Narrative Therapy India is resuming the interview series, as a way to bear witness to and archive the unfolding of Narrative Ideas and Practices in India. Our guest this week is Jehanzeb Baldiwala, a therapist, supervisor, trainer and part of Ummeed Child Development Center’s management team since 2004. She has aligned herself with narrative…
Re-authoring stories of gender : Children’s picture books as scaffolds
In narrative practices we strongly believe that all the problems in this world are rooted in the oppressive structural systems rather than in our identities or our bodies. And one such oppressive dominant idea is that of Binary Gender, the defined prescribed way to be either of the one: Woman or Man(in…
Narrative Therapy India 