Oral Presentation by Elisabeth Fessler¹, Manuela Ditzen¹
¹ Stiftung Ambulantes Kinderhospiz München, Germany
TIME: Tuesday, 14 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 4
Session: 4
Abstract
Crisis and counselling encounters in Germany’s ‘Migrationsgesellschaft’, as described by Paul Mecheril, are embedded in structural power relations shaped by racialized discourses, neoliberal norms, and dominant ideas of family, vulnerability, and responsibility. These forces shape the interaction between professionals and clients and restrict which stories can be told, heard, or acknowledged. The crisis service RUF24 of Stiftung Ambulantes Kinderhospiz München accompanies (expectant) families facing acute psychosocial emergencies when a child and/or parent becomes critically ill, is severely injured, or dies suddenly, with the aim of preventing long term trauma. This contribution brings together the method of (self-)critical, power aware listening with the principles of narrative therapy, as developed by Michael White. While (self-)critical listening seeks to recognize and interrupt forms of epistemic violence—a concept articulated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—within the counselling situation, the narrative therapy approach offers ways to question dominant discourses and collaboratively develop alternative, client authored accounts of meaning. In doing so, it opens spaces in which marginalized perspectives can become audible and in which people in crisis appear not merely as affected individuals but as active interpreters and agents of their own experience. The joint crafting of new stories counters individualizing, pathologizing, and neoliberal framings and re-grounds crisis experiences within social, relational, and collective contexts. The analysis demonstrates that trauma prevention is not only a clinical task but also a socio-critical one. Integrating (self-)critical listening with narrative re-authoring provides concrete practices that can strengthen resistance, solidarity, and transformative potential. In line with this, the approach contributes to developing psychosocial work that challenges hegemonic meaning structures and—drawing on Norman K. Denzin’s notion of Performative Social Science—intervenes in dominant dramaturgies of crisis while offering a stage for alternative, emancipatory modes of meaning making to emerge.