Sandplay is often used in therapy to enable sensitive conversations and visually represent personal experiences. The method involves providing interlocutors with a large tray of sand and displaying a choice of miniature figurines to incorporate into their stories about their past, present, or imagined futures. In this paper, we report on a collaboration to develop and trial narrative sandplay as a qualitative research interview. We outline the historical background and epistemological underpinnings of narrative sandplay, offer a practical step-by-step guide to the interviewing method, and report on lessons learned from its use in a project about COVID-related border closure in Australia. The technique, we argue, offers five methodological opportunities:

1) Embedded reflexivity: the researcher must first experience a narrative sandplay interview themselves, a political act that encourages reflexivity about the historically entrenched power dynamics in the research process and disrupts the often extractive nature of the researcher’s gaze; 2) Multistoried people: the fluid nature of sand and ability to continuously change the tableau allows people to decentre dominant narratives and move towards more inclusive and empowering ways of conceptualising their lives; 3) The powerful possibilities of play: the nonconformist and imaginative element of play enable new possibilities for understanding the self and finding solidarity with others ; 4) Attunement to space: the use of objects, movement and space sets a tone for the interview that is sensitive to materiality and the more-than-human; and 5) Recursive dwelling: recorded sandplay conversations are audio-visually rich, enabling researchers and participants to revisit, dwell in and dialogically accrue new insights and reflections from the material. In all, sandplay is a valuable contribution to the qualitative toolkit, offering rich, restorative and decolonising potential for both participants and researchers.

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Helena and Poh met online at the end of 2021. It was Poh’s first winter in Quebec and Helena had moved in with her parents following her father’s diagnosis of terminal cancer. Helena was looking for something but did not yet know what this was. She got in touch with curiosity about Poh’s narrative therapy consultancy practice after learning about her ‘storying experience cards’. They agreed on engaging in a couple of practitioner-centred conversations as an experiential way of encountering ideas and practices. The video fragments included in this piece were from their second conversation. Their collaboration has grown from these conversations to include facilitating a workshop together and co-writing.

When we saw the ‘Beyond Binaries’ - Call for Papers from Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice we welcomed this as an invitation to explicitly explore our shared conversation through the lens of binaries and hierarchies which has been a treasured aspect of this shared conversation and our multi-storied bodies practices. The space existing beyond binaries starts to give language to a location we found ourselves encountering in conversation. We wanted to lean in and exchange around this emerging space that seemed to welcome and host a multiplicity that lay beyond binary's singular truth-seeking gaze. Together we found it wasn’t simply a task of naming a singular binary in action but rather tentatively and creatively navigating the intersecting and overlapping dichotomies, ladders and rankings. As we would learn, opportunities to expose the competition, hierarchy, and processes of disqualification that prop up these ladders and rankings would become available to us through some unexpected and surprising conversations.

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Xiaolu Wang & Poh Lin Lee

in Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing and Liberation(2025)

Xiaolu and Poh first encountered one another at a workshop Poh gave (Departures from migration of identity) at a final Doc X lab event where Xiaolu was a fellow of the program. 

“The DocX initiative entered its next phase of evolution: to support BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) artists and thought leaders working across the nonfiction landscape and charting more accountable, nonextractive documentary paths and practices. To reimagine what documentary work looks and sounds like, DocX nurtured the imaginative exploration and questioning of artists and curators of color who boldly interrogated form and ways of collaborating.” (https://documentarystudies.duke.edu/docx)

Following this encounter Xiaolu requested a series of consultations with Poh centering a film in development and also more broadly a space to examine the complexities of image and community making within her current political and social realities. 

We found together how the presence of dominant ideas of the hero’s journey seeks to embed itself into the filmmaking process and how we could create intentional space for the otherwise dismissed and overlooked practices, stories and ways of moving.

We are deeply appreciative of the care editors Carolyn Ureña (from the University of Pennsylvania) and Saiba Varma (from theUniversity of California, San Diego) offered through this project and are grateful for their willingness to include video fragments of our conversations embedded in the chapter (rather than written transcripts).

Excerpt 

Peter: I first met Poh Lin Lee in late 2019, almost by chance. I was perhaps (though I cannot be certain) the only

filmmaker attending the last day of a conference on narrative therapy in Antwerp. Once I had been identified as such, it did not take long for someone to think that I should be introduced to Poh. She was there, both as a narrative practitioner herself, but also more specifically to screen a film about her work with people seeking asylum in Australia during their confinement in mandatory detention on Christmas Island – a project in which she was not just a participant, but also, in some sense, one of the (many) authors. I was there because I had been introduced to one of the central practices of narrative therapy – “definitional ceremonies” – during a somatic training course I had joined, looking for a way to reinvent my relationship to my own embodiment (including as a filmmaker). I had come away with the conviction that this radically redistributive approach to engaging with others might hold the key to liberating documentary filmmaking (and not just documentary filmmakers) from some of the more stubbornly extractive aspects of their heritage. “Narrative practice” (as it has come to be known) refuses those boundaries that would assign certain people to positions of fundamental passivity, and seeks to embody the belief that all authorship is co-authorship – that the most natural and appropriate form of story-telling is “multi-storied”, seeking not only to acknowledge but to activate and live forward from multiple possibilities which can only be discovered by embracing a radical diversity of points of view. Formulated in the 1970s and 1980s by two social workers, the Australian Michael White and the New Zealander David Epston, it is explicitly driven by a commitment to justice, both epistemic and social. In this, they were largely influenced not only by constructivist psychology, feminism(s) and postmodern theories of power, but above all by what they learned from their collaborators as they sought to establish concrete forms of equality and orient to the co-production of knowledge and practices – in particular through White’s work alongside Aboriginal colleagues and communities in Australia. So Poh and I met on a staircase in Antwerp, for about 30 seconds, temporarily suspended as we rushed in opposite directions. Six months later, having watched her film (and discovered in the process that we had both worked with the British producer Samm Haillay), I contacted her to see if she would be interested to engage with me in what would turn out to be the first of Collateral’s Conversations on conversations. Not suspecting then how deeply involved she was in working with artists, I wrote her wanting to know whether the CxC project might make sense to her, and how she could imagine unfolding the work she did with her clients in the context we were imagining. I saw this conversation in part as a test of whether our concept was good to think with – whether it would survive, or even flourish, in the atmosphere of precise reciprocity that narrative practice cultivates. We discussed whether it might make more sense, in the context of a journal such as Collateral, embedded as it is in the teaching and research that revolve around an art school, to start from an instance of her work supporting artistic processes, specifically with filmmakers.

Poh: In this initial conversation with Peter, despite us speaking about my work alongside filmmakers and creatives, Mehmet kept coming to my mind. The timing was uncanny, Mehmet and I had recently paused after a three month series of regular therapeutic conversations, and I wondered what it might be like for Mehmet to be invited to select and join us in a close reading of certain parts of our conversation that had felt significant in some way for him. For me this invitation offered the possibility of an accountability practice by unpacking the process and its effects with Mehmet – challenging professional discourses about who does the unpacking and for what purpose.

Peter: And so we found ourselves embarked on a trilogue that had less to do with “art”, conventionally understood, but that spoke directly to another part of the journal’s brief – that of “cross-cultural” close reading. The result is a remarkable document that opens up the therapeutic process itself – something that is most often kept hidden in our society. That Mehmet agreed to allow the videos of his sessions with Poh to be published, and to join myself and Poh in speaking to and from them, speaks not only to the depth of trust which therapy can achieve when practiced well, but also to the way in which such radical practice, whether it is explicitly “narrative” or not, displaces and resignifies the idea we may have of what is a person, and where the boundary between the “private” and the “public” lies. In this way, I hope that this three-way dialogue may contribute not only to a better understanding of one very particular form of therapeutic practice and its potential lessons for other disciplines (including creative artists), but also help initiate what Collateral hopes will be a larger, ongoing conversation around the (often damaging) history and politics of “conversation” as one of the key places in European societies where roles are distributed and places assigned.

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This article introduces a series of ethics, positioning, and practices (not methodologies) that resist solely clinical, biological, and scientific approaches to our bodies, by acknowledging them as having multiple members each with their own stories, relationships, and access to power. Thinking of our bodies as “multi-storied” sets free the multiple stories of our bodies. These practices have been emerging alongside people and groups across diverse contexts, especially in response to experiences of displacement, injustice, and exclusion (Brady, 2018; Lee, 2013, 2017, 2018).

In this article I am going to introduce the metaphor of our bodies as a community of members—each with their own histories, positions, and context-shaped identities and relationships. I will also develop the possibilities that emerge when we position our bodies as multi-storied. We are able to co-research with curiosity, after seeking permission, the multiple relationships and the hive of activity circulating through us and not just around us.

What are traditionally called parts of the body are called members here. Calling them members grants them greater autonomy instead of relegating them to the status of being secondary parts of a larger whole, thereby reinforcing bodily hierarchies. This invites us to consider how the ranking of bodies (Taylor & Brown, 2020) is not just a wider political practice, but also circulates between the members within our body communities, creating hierarchies based on cultural, social, and political value being assigned.

Recognizing the personhood (D. Paré, personal communication, March 31, 2022) of each member asks us to not assume that they are passive recipients acted upon; instead, they can be engaged in ways that recognize their own particular access to language, memories, experiences and context. These practices invite us to shift from observing and watching our bodies to getting into conversation with them, which in turn allows us to take up a position as co-researcher alongside the members of our bodies that choose to participate and to take up a position as a witness: for members of our bodies to be seen in their own expressions and on their own terms.

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This article offers a practice‐based inquiry that considers the combined possibilities of narrative practice and sandplay in response to the multiple ongoing trauma and injustice faced by people seeking asylum in Australia. Set within the context of mandatory detention, this article seeks to describe the way in which a poststructuralist approach to sandplay offers a therapeutic practice that intends to counter the effects of restriction, of limited choice, agency, and movement. The inclusion of a transcript highlights how a narrative conversation can take place while a sandtray is unfolding, demonstrating the ways in which stories can be multiple and simultaneous, spanning different realms of experience—audio, visual, embodied, and so forth. The article also considers, through stories of practice and accompanying reflexive inquiry, what is required to ensure a therapeutic approach that centers ethics of care and collaboration and social justice and focuses on the context of people’s lives.

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In the context of providing counselling to people who are being held within mandatory immigration detention, this paper seeks to explore the possibilities and dilemmas of inviting people who act as interpreters to reposition as meaningful witnesses to asylum seekers’ performances of preferred identity. These moments of witnessing, when offered in ways that attend to the complexities and dynamics of culture, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, education, ability and age, can contribute to the honouring and thickening of the alternative stories and robust identity claims of people seeking asylum, who are exploring ways to respond to multiple, ongoing injustices. This paper offers ideas for making visible practices of solidarity and shared cultural knowledges and understandings between people seeking asylum and people who interpret.

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This paper explores bringing together a series of narrative principles and practices in response to those who are seeking asylum in Australia and also experiencing the consequences of torture and trauma. This work is a description of ongoing co-research with asylum seekers into conversations that can be meaningful in a context of unpredictability and instability. This invitational approach makes way for rich alternative story development, re-membering conversations, and bringing to light moments that sustain and nurture through hardship. This work emphasises an approach of ‘making now precious’ by creating pathways for narrative conversations to be carried in nomadic, transportable ways in the hearts of people as they face the long tumultuous journey of seeking asylum, safety and belonging.

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Keynote at the 11th International Conference of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, 2013