Therapeutic practice as transmaterial worlding

Transmaterial Worlding (Simon & Salter, 2019, 2020) is a way of engaging people-in-context through actively working on not separating people from the multi-layered, temporal, interconnected worlds affecting them. We recognize that for those of us living in countries influenced by and promoting capitalism, dissociation may be inevitable and a contributing factor to people's struggles. We offer examples of transmaterial worlding questions and activities which address complexities for individuals and communities and connect them with wider systems of influence. Transmaterial worlding as a theory and an activity offers a fluid, responsive approach for postmodern practice. Transmaterial worlding is an ideological premise of how we create social and material worlds with activities designed to enable well-being and challenge social injustice. It shows and addresses power relations between human and beyond-human actors. It supports practitioners who seek to challenge colonial structures and develop therapeutic spaces and activities that reflect the changing needs of communities and our environment and decenter human systems. All matter is understood as living, as having an ecological role and rights. We extend Barad's concept of “worlding” (2007) and draw on new materialism, social construction, and Indigenous studies to develop therapeutic practice for a world in panmorphic crisis (Simon, 2021).