Where North meets South

Notes for the keynote – ‘Where North Meets South:  The Promise of Transnational Law as a Platform for Creative Collaborations’ University of Melbourne South of International Law symposium, July 2010 (2010) In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator created his first world map. This ‘double cordiform’ is a romantic design arranging the northern and southern [...]

A Proposal for a Re‑authoring Therapy: Rose’s Revisioning of her Life and a Commentary

David Epston, Michael White and Kevin Murray ‘A proposal for re-authoring therapy’ Therapy as Social Construction In S. McNamee & K.J. Gergen(ed.) London: Sage (1992) In the social sciences at least, it is now generally recognized that it is not possible for persons to have direct knowledge of the world; that an objective description of [...]

The Construction of Identity in the Narratives of Romance and Comedy

Kevin Murray ‘The construction of identity in the narratives of romance and comedy’ Texts of Identity In J.Shotter & K.Gergen (eds.)  London: Sage (1988) The business of this chapter is to explore the thesis that both personal and social identity are constructed by finding stories to tell about the self. Harré’s theory of personal being [...]

Literary Pathfinding: The Work of Popular Life Constructors

Kevin Murray ‘Finding literary paths: The work of popular life constructors’  In T.R. Sarbin (ed.) Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct New York: Praeger (1986) Social actors often need a past to satisfy the requirements of many different dramatic situations. These situations can vary from the extraordinary ‑ the television show “This Is [...]

Narrative Partitioning: The ins and outs of identity construction

Kevin Murray ‘Narrative Partitioning: The ins and outs of identity construction’ in Rethinking Psychology: Volume 1 – Conceptual Foundations  (ed J. Smith, R. Harre & Luk van Langenhove) Sage (1995) Introduction Narrative psychology is one of the many new fields of research that extend the narratological study of how stories work (Prince, 1982) into extra-literary [...]

Craft Unbound introduction

CRAFT UNBOUND: MAKE THE COMMON PRECIOUS (Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 2005) By Kevin Murray Introduction There was once a familiar order to things. On one side was the supermarket and on the other was the art gallery. There was the world of common things to be used up and discarded, and the realm of precious [...]