Dancing the Dance of Disruption
摘要
We-the-authors (respectively, a female Ugandan British psychotherapist, a female working-class British-Jamaican psychologist (awaiting registration) and a privately educated White European male) work in the UK National Health Service (NHS) in a multicultural urban setting. We operate as agents of the State—we draw a salary from the State, implement or enforce its laws and reproduce its discourses—in a structurally racist healthcare system. In this chapter we interrogate the ethical challenges involved both in representing such systems in the culturally diverse communities we serve and in seeking to disrupt—from inside, but from the edge—the dominant discourses of the organisation which employs us. We foreground the intense emotional work of what we think of as “dancing the dance of disruption,” and we attempt to map some of the challenges and surprises of staying in the dance. We also ask how we may credit ourselves with actual or effective practices of “creative disruption,” when there is no tangible evidence that structural racism in the NHS has been meaningfully disrupted. In the spirit of ethical consistency, we aim to see if we can also creatively disrupt the conventions and structures of how chapters in books such as this one ordinarily get written.