Allyson Caseley, Psychologist
A Few Words About Allyson
I’ve been a psychologist for over 40 years.
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It was only a few years ago that I thought how odd it was that, for a profession that claimed expertise in human behaviour, I had been trained and am consistently expected to focus on the exceptional. I haven’t been taught a model of the ordinary, a way of understanding all the nuanced versions of humanity that we encounter every day.
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If I don’t turn up with psychometric tests or questionnaires, what do I do, how am I a psychologist? And yet in the lives of people, the number of exchanges with and the time spent with a psychologist is minuscule. So why is the voice of psychology so compelling as a source of authority? Why don’t we have a model that lets us understand how everyday behaviour happens, that accepts that it is the everyday exchanges where the ‘real’ making of people’s behaviour happens?
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I fell in love with agential realism when I first read a paper by Karen Barad in 2004, ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’. I knew immediately that I was reading the potential for a more ethical, democratic way to understand our behaviours, all behaviours… mine, yours, ours, theirs. This paper opened the door to a tomorrow for psychology, moving away from the colonial assumption of one person telling another one what they are, what their behaviours mean.
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In reading that first paper outlining agential realism principles, I saw how we could shift the focus away from behaviour-naming to understanding the process of behaviour-making. In doing so we could challenge psychology to adjust its relationship to cultural and social changes and to challenge the assumptions that the profession makes about its own authority. Agential realism spoke of dynamism, relationships, intra-actions, fluid connections to possibilities that challenges the staid, filed and boxed classification of behaviours based on difference.
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There’s been a lot of reading, thinking, applying agential realism principles to learning and behaviour interventions over many years. In this blog I am exploring, sharing ideas in the hope of contributing to the growing conversation with agential realism about making people possible.
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I hope that anyone who reads this blog finds it interesting and thought-provoking and moves them to consider how their actions and words make people possible.