“Ways of Knowing”

The theme for the event is "Ways of Knowing: thinking about how we develop the knowledge that helps our clients and how we use this knowledge. “

● Different ways of knowing: lived experience, embodied/somatic, sensory, relational, narrative, cultural, Indigenous/decolonial, practitioner, artistic/creative, tacit, intuitive/pattern-based and collective knowledge.

● Different ways of generating knowledge: RCTs and quantitative research, qualitative inquiry, participatory/co-produced research, autoethnography, phenomenology, case studies, arts-based research, practice-based evidence.

● Knowing differently through neurodivergence: Autistic perception and meaning-making, monotropism, bottom-up processing, pattern recognition, sensory knowing, interoception, communication differences, different relationships with language and abstraction.

● What different methods let us see: what measurement captures and misses; group-level versus individual knowledge; diagnosis as one lens; what becomes visible through narrative or relationship that may disappear in standardised measures.

● Bringing knowledges together in practice: EBP as multiple sources of evidence; integrating research, clinical expertise and client knowledge; collaborative formulation; double empathy; knowing with rather than knowing about; working productively with conflicting forms of evidence.

● Limits and uncertainty: not-knowing, ambiguity, provisional knowledge, changing one's mind, unlearning outdated professional knowledge, limits of generalisation.

● Translation: how knowledge travels between research and practice, body and language, client and therapist, disciplines, cultures and neurotypes.