An advocate's winter menu

I've just spent a thoroughly enjoyable day cooking, something I should do more of really. I do regularly cook for myself, almost always from fresh ingredients, and I try to be good to the environment as well as my body (although I do have quite a few bad habits...).

Anyway today's food was a bit special and unusual, and hopefully I will be able to make your mouth water as you read about what we ate:

• Celery and celeriac soup: put in very big chunks into a casserole with stock and some extra flavourings and baked for 4 hours on a very low heat before being roughly blended - very tasty cooked slow like that!
• Stoved jerusalem artichokes with walnuts, almonds and cashews
• Braised red cabbage with anise, cardomom, cloves, juniper berries, cinnamon, and lemon
• Steamed broccoli tossed in Tamari sauce with toasted sesame seeds
• Baked sweet potatoes
• Organic italian brown rice

I actually had a very abstemious christmas because I've been feeling a bit poor and unemployed, but this was an absolute feast and thoroughly delicious. The fact that I cooked everything (except the rice and broccoli) so slowly and in advance and then reheated it when we were ready to eat made it even more full of flavour.

Hopefully this marks the beginning of a year of doing more entertaining and experimenting with more delicious flavours...

Bon apetit!

Cool Yule

Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year, celebrated as Yule in the old Celtic calendar.

This solstice was well known a long time before people developed instruments to measure this sort of thing. People were aware of it because they were aware of the changes in the seasons and the wider world around them. From tomorrow the days start getting lighter and the nights start getting shorter.

When the 'pagan' celebrations were taken over and lost by things like christmas, we lost.

I hope you can enjoy some sort of celebration tomorrow - have a cool yule!

I'll also wish you a happy new year, and all the best for 2007.

(Although actually the Celts celebrated new year at the Spring Equinox, 21st March, when the daylight becomes longer than the night. This is also the New Year in Iran, Afghanistan, and the Kurdish lands amongst other places, known as Newroz.)

Spam Shakespeare

If we sat a load of spammers in front of computers, gave them drip-feeds and catheters so they had no need to go anywhere, eventually, the story goes, they would spam us all with Shakespeare (if we haven't all ripped out our internet connections in terror before then...)

Actually sometimes I find we're not so far from that already. I get quite a lot of spam that appears to be made up of sentences gleaned from various web pages and then cut up and reorganised. I don't know which websites they use, some seem quite literary, some pretty trashy, some boringly technical, presumably none too high profile.

I remember the first time I got one I thought it was very strange and interesting. It was very short, had no links or images, and I spent a while wondering whether it came from a real person or was an attempt to get me to confirm my email address. In the end I waited, and sure enough more started to come in. Now I don't usually bother looking at them, but this one today reminded me of that first moment... There are too many of these really, and I've deleted a lot, but take any bit on its own and see if you can make any sense of it, it's quite an amusing distraction (these lot would have enjoyed it at least).

Together firmly mandates outcome determined upcoming wishes problem. Cia, married, arrested escapes kills. Handles seventytwo, traffic while consumes sixteen.

Playing isnt, fun, debut earlier.

Again, illuminate job guides talking printed. Zealot generally turn down speaking those? Join book club australia categories arts childrens literature.

Moonraker bernard lee spoof cut cast crew bondrobert.

Locate outside must mind when assessing benefits proposed affect.

Defying, sounded, cool drag solid progressed slow fake hookey.

Xmas list

Not that I believe in this sort of thing really, but take a look at this for an inspiring list (and I own none of them yet!)

The Atlas Arkhive

:-)

visctrix

visctrix is an important name for me, and now seems the right time to say something about it. As I explained on my Wikipedia user space, a visctrix is a space of creation of bodily affects that cannot be put properly into our usual words or names. I use it as my email address and as my online identity, especially in web forums, ICQ and games.

This comes from the Latin viscera or visceral - relating to feelings, affecting the internal organs - and playfully mixed with the end of the word matrix which is Latin for womb (a space of creation).

This name was created about six years ago when I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to run a 'cultural studies of the internet' course in the Fine Art dept of Leeds University. It picked up on a range of themes that can be found explored both in internet based spaces, but also in various discourses around art and identity politics (I prefer the word ethics to politics).

It is a name that doesn't like the concept of naming, a name that is constantly, hopefully, in progress or transition. Right now I'm certainly in a process of transition, and this needs to be managed carefully somehow - the aim is to be able to sustain myself and to be able to create... Part of this is a re-evaluation of where I find myself and where I'm going - a process in itself that people often write about in journals, diaries, and today, blogs.

So I am going to try to remember and rethink what the name visctrix means to me. The aim is to bring together some of the previously sustaining pathways that are beginning to diverge and disappear, and to try to reinvigorate them. I do think that this will be relevant to readers as it's also another way of naming my approach to life and philosophy, and hence my work, my thinking about advocacy, and this blog.

1. The Name
It seems Plato bears a lot of responsibility for this one, which has dominated the way we think in the West. Many people, including myself, think that the Name (with a capital N, meaning that it is somehow special, and Known, and a sort of fixed thing) is damaging and restrictive. Writers and artists and mystics and all sorts of people who fall outside the mainstream economic system have instinctively realised this and used pseudonyms and false names throughout time. The Name comes from the tendency towards control, originally from the wish of various people in history to control power, money and knowledge, now prevalent as the managerial and bureaucractic system we're all so familiar with.

Three examples will be quite grounding and constructive here. The first is about Joanne Bloggs whose community care assessment identifies eligibility for substantial access to care services. Unfortunately Joanne presents as a very angry young woman, so angry in fact that services are beginning to be withdrawn or withheld. I'm sure most advocates have met some people in similar situations where social care professionals simply seem to have labelled them 'Joanne Bloggs' - meaning aggressive, demanding and difficult. Of course they are demanding and difficult because their lives are demanding and difficult, but 'Joanne Bloggs' is well documented and she just can't sit down quietly and gratefully accept the help we offer. Often, not documented, there is joanne, or jo, or josey, or... These others don't have capitals, and in some ways they may feel they're better off without all that paperwork and managerial pressure. Outside the realm of paperwork and benefits and housing they put a brave face on life, have a laugh with their friends if they have any, and work their way through various problems in between. But then people come along and call them Joanne (even if they say 'Jo'), and ask horrible questions, and don't seem to listen, and they get upset and angry, and then the police are called or they get sectioned and everything goes even further downhill. Joanne is a Name, jo is a person, and tomorrow jo could feel much more friendly and pleasant because the sun's out - if only you'd come for the assessment the next day...

The second example is something I touched on in my note about the NAN Conference. This is about the Name of Advocacy (if Advocacy is a proper Name, it gets a capital too). It's a constant question, not just of Rick's, about whether we should rename 'advocacy'. No one understands it, some say. It gets confused with legal advocacy. The definition is too long and unwieldy, or too short and imprecise. To define something is the same as to Name it - once it has a definition we Know what it is, it's somehow special, and it's kind of fixed. This is useful for the legislators and commissioners, even the managers and the trainers: we can give people rights to it, we can manage contracts, and we can construct advocates to do the work. Maybe that's enough reason for you - we have to live in the real world, and if that's the way to get more advocates what's the problem? I would say wait though. Think for a moment about the link between Joanne and advocacy. At the moment advocacy has no capital - it's still a fluid concept, and it's practised in different ways. Without a capital, advocacy is a bit like jo, slightly out of reach of the catogorising tendencies of some of the people we work with. At the same time we seem to be able to communicate better with jo and others like her than many professionals. It's a subtle prediction, but something I think many of us kind of feel in our bones (or our viscera), that if we move too far into the realms of Advocacy, everything will become more defined and controlled and we'll end up only being able to communicate on Joanne's level again just like all the other Names. I think it's also important to remember that most of the people like jo seem to cotton on to what advocacy is pretty quickly after they start working with a good advocate. They don't need paper definitions, they need feelings, and I think many advocates, and many other people too, also work very productively in this space: let's celebrate and protect this slight vagueness and stop talking about burying advocacy under the tyrrany of the name.

My final example is just a quickie. Of course Social Worker, Psychiatrist, Police are all names, all names which are used to limit, constrain and abuse ordinary jos and johns who are often trying to give something back to the world, who often do extraordinarily sensitive work, and who are not described in my examples above. We are stuck with this tyrrany in some ways, and stereotypes are always breeding other opposing stereotypes. I am just trying to indicate the positions we find ourselves in as advocates when we meet the clients of some of the less accomplished practitioners.

Now this has already got long enough for one post. The other things I wanted to write about are listed below (they will become links as I write them up, hopefully soon). Feedback welcome as always.

2. Creation
3. Communication and movement
4. Community
5. Spirituality

At Chapeltown Carnival

Me at Carnival 06
Originally uploaded by visctrix.

Thank you Suna for the photo (see her other photos here, or find other Leeds carnival photos on Flickr here). Congratulations to everyone who joined the Black and Dred (Harrison Bundey) troup - 71 of us on stage! - and everyone else who participated in the carnival - there were some fantastic costumes, though I didn't get to see much.

Congratulations also to Ruth who won best individual, and I'll give you another foot massage any time :-)

And to my readers: next year Leeds West Indian Carnival is 40 years old - it's the oldest Carnival in the UK - so come along, join in, dance and be happy...

Universal human needs

I found this in a little book written by some management consultants. Not my usual reading matter, and not very well written, but some interesting things nonetheless.

The book is The Thin Book® of Naming Elephants. It was about how to raise issues in organisations that no one wants to talk about, and it was interesting (if a little obvious) to hear how badly this affects businesses as much as social services, the NHS, care providers. It was a little short on practical advice though.

Anyway, right on the last page it had this little gem. They talk about what they call the 'three universal human needs.' Casting aside any difficulties we may have with the terminology here, it was very refreshing to not see those tired old platitudes of food and shelter; and what came out instead, from these management consultants of all people, is certainly worth mentioning. They list:

• Have a voice and be heard
• Be viewed as essential to a group
• Be seen as unique and exceptional

They also point to a couple of other alternative versions, including this:

• A positive view of self
• The desire to see oneself as competent
• The need to experience coherence and continuity

As an advocate I'm really happy to see 'have a voice and be heard' at the top of the list, and also the 'desire to see oneself as competent' seems to me a key issue. At the end of the day I obviously have issues with both of these lists, but I think it's been well worth my time thinking about them in the joint contexts of people with learning disabilities and people in multinational corporations; or people using mental health services and say the workforce of a small local company...

I wonder if anyone would like to suggest a list in a similar vein that could be used more directly in an advocacy context, hopefully both for our partners and for the organisations we work in.

Refugee week events

The first event in Wakefield for this year's Refugee Week has just finished, and I ate and danced and helped clear up and still I'm home at a reasonable hour to blog, which is an added bonus.

It was the Iranian Cultural Celebration tonight, and there were a couple of live performances as well as DJs and lots of delicious food. First up on violin was a former member of the Iranian Philharmonic Orchestra (from the time of the Shah). There was a bit of a band going on here, but I sadly missed most of it as I ended up working the door. Later a different man with the same name played a saz I think (see pictures here) which is very similar to an instrument an old Turkish friend of mine used to play which he called a 'ballamer' (phonetically, approximately). In and around these performances the DJs kept the party dancing.

Later in the week we have a 'refugee day' event hosted by the local MP on Friday (invitation only) and an African Night in Wakefield Cathedral on Friday evening (free, just turn up). Then on Saturday, 6-10pm, there is a Kurdish Cultural Celebration in Lightwaves Leisure Centre again (ticket required, call RASA on 01924 368855).

Someone said to me that these events weren't very cohesive or didn't seem to promote integration: Iranian, African and Kurdish events on different nights...

I think there are two responses to this. First I can't help but remember the joint Eid/Xmas party I organised in 2003. This tried hard to combine all the cultures in Wakefield, and we had Iranian and Kurdish DJs, people came from many different countries including quite a few from Albania/Kosovo, and from different parts of Africa. As the finale we had a proper 5 piece African salsa band (afficionados may know that salsa originated in Africa - like 'all' music - and was transported to South America on the slave ships...). Anyway this band started playing, and 5 minutes later 146 people had left the room - and there were only 150 to start with. Even the African people, faced with this mass exodus, got up and walked out too.

Now I've personally always taken the approach that if some people are willing to go to the effort to perform for me, then I'll at least give them the courtesy of listening and then applauding their efforts (if not necessarily their musicianship or their taste). I learnt that night not to expect such polite conventions from refugee audiences.

There is in fact a whole article, to be carefully written, about racism and discrimination and refugees. Of course I know that there have been bitter conflicts in many parts of the world where refugees come from, and the memories of these conflicts and the deep seated prejudices that come with them are difficult to forget. They have also not had the advantages of the strenuous and focused anti-discrimination campaigns we have learnt from in the West over the last century (starting from women's suffrage, and moving through the American civil rights movement, etc). And finally, refugees tend not to discriminate against English people in my experience, but people with darker skin than them for example are more likely to lose out (along with their traditional enemies) in a movement that we can see being replicated around the world again and again.

I don't want to make any sweeping generalisations here, but I always half expected refugees who had fought for freedom and justice for people in their own societies to still be standing up for freedom and justice in their new lives in the UK, and I've usually been disappointed (although I love working with them anyway, and they're no more intolerant than many English people, just in different ways).

So all sorts of clarifying statements are rushing into my head, and I know what I've just written could be contentious, but with all that in mind I'd like to move swiftly on to the second response to the lack of cohesion/integration suggestion.

These people are living in the UK every day. Sure there are positive steps we can make towards integration, and we're taking them on many of these days: finding work, getting on ok at school, bringing our children up well, etc. All this needs integration. This is happening every day.

So why can't we, one or two days a year, have a day to celebrate native cultures? In fact I think it's imperative to do this: refugees need to do it for their mental health, to help them maintain their sense of identity and history, and to help their children understand their origins; and the rest of the population need occasional days like this to add a bit of colour and spice to their lives and relieve the exhausting boredom.

And who are we to say that these different cultural traditions should be celebrated within the confines of a single event, or that refugee week events should be concentrated on being more cohesive and on delivering the Government's integration agenda? In fact there were quite a few English people there tonight, quite a few Kurdish people, a chinese woman, and an African man (with a work permit of all things :-) ). There was integration here as well as cultural stimulation and mental tonics.

I'm looking forward to the next event - but you have to have an invitation to attend, so how integrational will that be...?

A practical novel

I read an interesting book this weekend, Benjamin Zephaniah's first novel, Face. The reviews on Amazon are indicative: the first two say the book is real and fantastic, and the second two say it's simplistic and empty...

I think this disagreement is because it's a very practical book. It was dedicated to the Changing Faces charity, whose aim is to 'change the way we all see disfigurement', and Zephaniah seems to be targeting a specific audience of people who have come into contact with some sort of disfigurement (either themselves or through a friend or family member). The book is not really targeted at 'the good readers of literature' however, and this is where the latter two reviewers fall down.

One of these reviewers even suggests that Zephaniah should stick to poetry, which I think also manages to miss the point that his poetry is very practical too, and arguably no more 'literary' (in the egotistical and elitist sense) than the text of Face. I've seen Zephaniah perform a couple of times, I met him very briefly last year when my friend Shaun arranged for him to come and perform in Leeds, and I have the greatest respect for the guy. I hope he doesn't think I'm damning him with faint praise (he shouldn't, given the context of this blog) but I think what does it for me is the simplicity and directness of his poetry, and it's clear entertainment value, especially in performance.

There are no literary pretensions in this poetry (except in the eyes of some Amazon reviewers): the aim is to talk about politics in life stories that will make people laugh and cry and think and talk instead of just turning off. There is more debt to the (Afro-Caribbean) history of story-telling and entertaining than the modern experience of poetry. The literary elite may say that there needs to be more 'poetry', more space, more fluidity, more depth; but then the sort of talking they end up doing often does little to help the rest of us...

Face doesn't have these poetic niceties, but I'm very happy that I've read it, and I thought it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I see it, apart, obviously, from being a novel, almost as an extended case study. Martin, the main protagonist, obviously has a unique story just like anybody else, but he is real enough for many of us to believe in, and recognise in lots of ways. I see that the book is in some English curriculums, and I can certainly see it's pedagogical value. I think it would also be of value, not only to the specific target audience I've already mentioned, but to a wide range of people who suffer discrimination because of something about how they look.

I'm always looking out for good case studies, and I think we should encourage more books like Face. This isn't the sort of thing you could fit on half a side of A4, and neither is life. For many people we need to get longer case studies, but they need to be practical, and not too poetic.

intueri: to contemplate

This is an interesting blog. From a link from Mental Nurse again. Well written and creative and questioning ethics in an interesting way. The posts are even longer than mine, but still worth reading...

Here is a little snippet.

[This] was in relation to a (psychotic) patient becoming angry with Muller (the analyst) who ultimately yelled at him for reasons that were not entirely clear to him.

I don’t know—again, maybe it’s just me utilizing “primitive defense mechanisms”—but the above just sounds like he’s blaming the patient. “Yeah, it’s most probably your fault that you took what I said personally—I wasn’t persecuting you at all. You just can’t handle understanding yourself, but your ego structure is so weak that you need someone to understand it for you. I mean, yeah, perhaps the yelling thing happened because I was feeling anxious, but most probably it was your fault.”

That’s crap. Where is the empathy in that? The warmth? How about reframing the situation, just describing it for what it is? (There you go again, Maria, being all concrete.) How about: “Something about this interaction between us didn’t go well; maybe I was pushing too hard; maybe I didn’t communicate my ideas too well; maybe you misinterpreted what I said; maybe you misheard. I don’t know exactly why this happened, but I’d like for the interaction to proceed better. What can we do together so this doesn’t happen again?”

"We all have an obligation to intervene"

'In his first interview in an English newspaper, 83-year-old Portuguese novelist José Saramago [is asked if he believes] that the artist is obliged to take on a political role?'

"It isn't a role," he says, almost sharply. "The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it's the citizen who changes things. I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level."

Still a street-fighting man in yesterday's Observer

The space not enclosed by words...

feelings - beliefs - thoughts - actions - perceptions - life - the universe - race - sexuality - culture - quiet - music - dance - spirituality - messages - dreams - movement - rhythm - light - darkness - childhood - knowledge - fire - water - art - creativity - touch - smell - ...

Mutabaruka, the Jamaican dub poet, is asked:

"Muta. All the while I 'ear Rasta talk 'bout 'I and I' - what the 'I' mean to you?"

Muta seh: "Well the 'I' is the space not enclosed by words."

And truly, although I am far from Rasta, here we meet. And we dance. And objectivity is the tool of the babylon system that we must fight.

Peace and love and respect for our brethren. And may the babylon system soon fall.

Next performance is at the annual Community Dance Platform, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Chapeltown Road, Leeds, 7-9pm on Saturday 20 May. Tickets £4/£3 call 0113 219 3018.

Big up to David Hamilton, the Reggeyeshun Dancers, and Back Bone.

Can we apologise for our beliefs?

Should we apologise for our beliefs?

If we believe something happened, if we have friends who also believe what we believe, if we have heard subjective evidence to suggest that similar things have happened to others in the past...

If someone who wields power and deals in objective evidence and makes demands doesn't believe us...

Should we apologise? Doesn't this compromise us in the deep sense of the word? Don't we lose a part of our integrity by apologising in the face of our beliefs?

On the other hand, could it be better to lose our integrity and compromise rather than suffer the fate that those with the power and authority would like to see?

We'll have to see...

A few good books I've read recently

Cereus Blooms by Night, Shani Mootoo (Granta, 1996)
An old woman is brought bound to a stretcher to an Almshouse on a fictional Caribbean island. The only person who will go near her is a gay nurse, himself ostracised from the community. Through his care he pieces together her story and his life changes at the same time. A beautiful and inspirational book.

The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss (Penguin, 2006)
A beautiful and inspirational book again, though probably less relevant to advocacy. While the old woman in Mootoo's book needs to be coaxed back to life, the old men in Krauss's are vividly alive, as are the other characters. One of the best books I've read for a long time.

The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho (HarperCollins, 1995 - orig. 1988)
A simple beautiful book about listening to and following your heart. Short enough that no one has an excuse not to read it.

Stick Out Your Tongue, by Ma Jian (Chatto & Windus, 2006 - orig. 1987)
I bought this after the January NAN meeting to read on my train journey home, and I was a little disappointed that I finished it before I even got to Kings X! On the other hand, this is a truly different voice, and the increasingly haunting dream imagery was more than enough justification for the purchase.

Memoir, by John McGahern (Faber, 2005)
Rooted in the landscape and people of northern Eire, this is a deeply affecting picture of a community which McGahern continued to give voice to all through his life in apparently one of the most important careers of contemporary Irish writing. Sadly he died of cancer last month, but I'll be reading more of his books.

The Possibility of an Island, by Michel Houellebecq (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005)
I was blown away when I read Atomised in 2001 and I've since read all of Houellebecq's books. The Possibility of an Island ended up being a bit heavy going for me, although maybe I just wasn't in the mood. It is still a very good book I think, and the reason he comes across as such a misanthropist seems to me to be the fact that he really loves the potential of people, only to be constantly disappointed... He seems to want to shock people out of their apathy: if you understand him you'll laugh your head off, otherwise prepare to be properly shocked and probably disgusted.

Reading and self development

Note: This post lacks focus and didn't achieve want I wanted, but I'll leave it here for completion and because it's not without value. Henry, 17 April

I read a good book yesterday, which I'm happy to recommend: Erasure by Percival Everett. Currently available for 99p from Waterstones, in what looks to be a Faber promotion ('Try me for 99p').

I seem to be reading a fair amount of fiction these days which I'll come back to later. I've certainly read a lot in the past, and a lot of non-fiction too. In between I go for long periods without reading much. I fear becoming like Rimbaud's 'Sedentaries', who I always see as people who get too bound up in reading and don't take enough action. Of course Rimbaud gave up Poetry at the age of 19 and eventually became a gun runner and slave trader in Africa, which is maybe more action than was necessary (I have a private theory that he was Joseph Conrad's model for Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, and then later in Apocalypse Now!).

But as long as we don't get too lost in fiction, what happens to us when we read? Certainly for me yesterday, reading Erasure, I recognised a lot of things. I recognised people like me, and I recognised some of the challenges that were being faced (both in the novel and in the novel-within-the-novel, the race issues, the issues of creativity and self-creation, of work and place-in-the-world, and the references to continental philosophy). At the same time there were recognitions of difference. Of course I'm not an 'African-American' academic, but this is a banal observation: it is only through the initial recognition (I don't want to use the word 'identification') that we can begin to recognise the important subtle differences, and it is largely the subtle differences that are important...

So I come back to the idea of incorporeal transformations. Erasure is a book that made me think quite a lot, particularly through those subtle recognitions and differences. In part it made me see who I am, who I'm not, what I might be, and what I'd like to avoid, all in slightly different ways than I've seen before (which is what every book has the possibility of doing).

It's possibly changed me, or at least it gave me the possibility for change. So I may not be the same person I was two days ago, and the way I interact with other people could well also have changed.

This is what people say after they read books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (check out this link, it's excellent) or Stuart - A Life Backwards (even though Mark Haddon is so naive and annoying). Of course these are two examples of books for which big claims are made - they'll make you understand autistic or homeless people - which are quite ridiculous really.

Nevertheless, this is the reason why many books are worth reading: they give us access to other voices, which help us to understand other people, which help us to listen to other people with more open minds, which changes us as individuals.

It certainly seems to me that exploring other voices through literature is a very helpful way of opening up advocates ears and eyes to the experiences of their partners, and the possibilities of their own interventions.

Incorporeal transformations*

I tried this idea out during some training I delivered recently, and it went down quite well. Then yesterday I was talking to an advocacy scheme manager and a trainee social worker who also really appreciated the thought, so despite the unwieldy title...

'Incorporeal' means 'not of the body', or perhaps more importantly for us 'not visible', or often even 'not communicable'. So these sorts of transformations are hard to see or describe, but they are very important, and we can certainly feel them and recognise them.

My favourite example comes from a novel called Remembering Babylon by the Australian writer David Malouf. The book focuses on Gemme, a character caught between worlds and spaces, but in this scenario Gemme is not so important. What is important is that he is the excuse for Janet (13) and her younger sister to go often to tea at Mrs Hutchence's house. They would be joined by Mrs Hutchence's niece Leona, and two local lads, George and Hector (all around 18 years old). One day, a day apparently like any other, the children and the young adults are playing their games around the tea table, Leona in charge as usual, when Janet suddenly starts to see things she has never seen before. In particular she sees the way Leona is managing George and Hector, and the way George and Hector are competing for her favour. Suddenly a whole range of subtle signals becomes visible to her as this new understanding settles in. Janet feels as if she has changed (transformed).

I would say (and I don't think Janet or Malouf would disagree) that she had learned something in the true sense of the word: like learning to ride a bike, Janet now has access to some knowledge that is 'in her body' that was not there before.

If that is a bit difficult to understand, think back to your own experiences of learning to become an advocate. At first there are some rules and methods; you see other advocates working, but it's generally very like what you've seen before from social workers or whatever. At some point however it's likely that something will have 'clicked', that you stopped asking such directed questions of your partners for example, and could now feel the advantage of people struggling to express their problems in their own voices. Or maybe you didn't have this moment of realisation, but you can still look back and feel a transformation in your practice between starting out as an advocate and now.

The reason for my interest in incorporeal transformations is threefold:

1. How does it affect the people we work with?
2. How does it affect the way we work?
3. How does it affect the way we learn (about advocacy)?
   

I will end with some brief thoughts in response to these questions.

Many of the people we work with are lacking in knowledge in one way or another. They may not know what they want, what they are entitled to, or how to get it. The traditional model of knowledge says 'give someone the information so they can know it', but again and again we see that giving people information is not enough. What is needed is an incorporeal transformation where that knowledge gets into people's bodies: so they can feel able to ask for something, so they can feel like they know what they want, so they can feel that when they look at things around them they are more confident, understanding, and independent.

I think our work as advocates often addresses these issues already. The pioneers of advocacy were pathetic in the true sense of the word (in touch with feelings and experience - it still has this meaning in French), and their methodology naturally reflected these needs. We are not advice workers, we don't deal with information in the same way as other professionals. It is still beneficial to have an awareness of the feeling of incorporeal transformations however because this helps us to see them when they happen, and it helps us to see that if we are seeking to support change, this is one of the best ways for this change to happen in our partners.

Finally, in terms of learning, the traditional approach as still seen in schools is to give information and then test the memory. This is a very 'intellectual' approach (in the crude sense of the word) and is completely inappropriate for large sections of society, including many advocates and other caring professionals. I believe that part of the reason for the delays in agreeing national standards, definitions and training programmes for advocacy is advocates' natural aversion to these traditional educational approaches. The advantage of our current approach, although it often creates some confusion at the start, is that it opens itself to that moment after a bit of practice wher it all clicks, and we have a much deeper and more physical understanding of the process as a result.

There are many alternative approaches to education which implicitly value these sorts of approaches - check out those of Freire or Steiner for example.

* Note on title: I could choose a more readily understandable name for this concept, but the advantage of 'incorporeal transformations' is that it is unlikely to be confused for something else, and hopefully the idea will stick in people's minds. There is also a philosophical precedent for the term in the work of Deleuze & Guattari.