Oral Presentation by Fern Sleeman¹
¹ University of Manchester, United Kingdom
TIME: Tuesday, 14 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 4
Session: 4
Abstract
Counselling psychology, particularly across North America and the UK, has long acknowledged the significant impact of socioeconomic factors on individual wellbeing and the role of counselling psychologists in adopting and promoting a social justice agenda, committed to the development of an equal society. Counselling psychologists are both scientist-practitioners and reflective practitioners, straddling empiricist and positivist scientific assumptions and the role of individual and structural influence and bias. This balance is challenged greatly with regards to social justice within the current neoliberal context. Neoliberalism has expanded from an economic philosophy to exert great influence on all aspects of individual life, promoting entrepreneurship, self-reliance, and personal accountability. This has resulted in the pathologisation and individualisation of the conditions and transitions of life, and the individual responsibility for and treatment of such stressors. However, if social justice is concerned with equal distribution and interdependence across society and neoliberalism enforces hyper-individualisation and interpersonal competition, can counselling psychology meet its social justice commitment whilst existing within neoliberal systems? This paper will explore the complicity and challenge of counselling psychology in relation to its structural position and contributes how a both-and approach can advance the counselling psychology social justice agenda in a neoliberal era.