Call For Papers

We invite submissions — articles, case studies, clinical reflections, or creative pieces (such as poetry or short prose) — engaging with this year’s theme: “Connected, Committed and Contained”.

We are particularly interested in contributions that explore how relationships between people — whether in therapeutic groups, professional communities or wider social contexts — involve connection, responsibility and care: how we hold parts of one another’s lives; how we engage and commit ourselves to others; and how we contain the vulnerability and potential that arise when we truly meet another human being.

Possible angles may include, but are not limited to:

How group dynamics foster both closeness and distance — and how groups can function as a holding space in which people feel seen, heard and supported.

How clinical or organisational practice carries responsibility and care: how our encounters with others may shape whether their lives — psychologically, socially or personally — flourish or falter.

How difficult experiences, crises or trauma — individual or collective — may be met with commitment and containment, creating opportunities for healing and restoration.

How ethics, responsibility and containment are integrated into therapeutic or social practice, with attention to vulnerability, community, boundaries and mutual accountability.

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Abstract Guidelines
Abstracts (maximum 300 words) should include:

Title and author(s)
Background and context
Aim or purpose
Methods or theoretical/reflective framework
Expected outcomes, key insights or guiding questions

We welcome empirical (quantitative or qualitative), theoretical, reflective and creative contributions — whichever format best expresses how “connection, commitment and containment” are experienced in relationships, groups and practice.

We look forward to receiving your submissions — and to creating a space together in which we explore what it means to hold part of another person’s life with care, connection and responsibility.

CONFERENCE THEME:

Connected, Committed and Contained

“The individual never has to do with another human being without holding something of that person’s life in his hand. It may be a very small matter, involving only a passing mood, a dampening or quickening of spirit, a deepening or removal of some dislike. But it may also be a matter of tremendous scope, such that the individual can determine if the life of the other flourishes or not.”

The citation is from ‘The Ethical Demand’, written by K.E. Løgstrup in 1952, when he was the professor of theology at the University of Aarhus.