Doctor Sheridan Linnell

Sheridan Linnell coordinates the counselling and art therapy programs at the University of Western Sydney. She is interested in narrative, poststructuralist and arts-based approaches to therapy, teaching and research. Sheridan worked in the community sector for over twenty years, as well as in independent practice, before becoming a full time academic in 2008. She has expertise in counselling, narrative therapy and community work practice as well as art psychotherapy. She has extensive field experience working as a therapist with children, young people and families, as well as in the training and supervision of other counsellors and therapists. For many years, she specialised in working therapeutically with the effects of violence, abuse and neglect and formulating new approaches to this area of work. Sheridan's  doctoral and postdoctoral work conceptualises how the subjectivity of therapists is formed and performed within contemporary regimes that situate moral responsibility primarily with the individual.   She has adapted narrative therapy and community work interview processes for the purposes of research, critically evaluated the potential of this approach, and has applied it to an enquiry into the effects of risk discourse on the work of counsellors and art therapists. Her book, 'Art therapy and narrative therapy: an account of practitioner research', is an autoethnographic account of working as a therapist. Sheridan is a published poet and has participated in collaborative art shows with her art therapy colleagues.

This information has been contributed by Doctor Linnell.