Third Space Practice emerged not as an initiative but as a necessary unfolding—an accumulation of shared conversations, refusals, and long apprenticeships in fractured systems. Between us, we had decades of work in psychotherapy, psychoeducation, medical anthropology, humanitarian response, intercultural supervision, and reflective teaching. But there was always something missing from the spaces we inhabited: a language for contradiction, a tolerance for not knowing, a container large enough to hold the historical, political, and personal all at once.
We met as supervisor and supervisee, but soon realised the dialogue between us was less about roles and more about method: how we think, how we notice, how we stay with discomfort. Our work had taken us into post-conflict zones and lecture halls, sacred spaces and refugee camps, classrooms and homes. But too often, institutions asked us to abstract from the very conditions we were most shaped by – displacement, structural violence, religious rupture, and epistemic erasure.
What we shared was not simply an approach, but a commitment: to stay close to the real. To the murky places where identity and belief fracture. To the stories that don’t fit case notes or academic journals. And to the people – activists, educators, parents, survivors, students -trying to live with integrity in systems that don’t reward complexity. Third Space Practice became a place to gather those fragments. A space where presence is ethical, not performative. Where trauma is not pathologised but traced through history, language, and embodiment. Where supervision becomes witnessing, and witnessing becomes a political act. Where decoloniality is not a slogan, but a continuous practice of unlearning, re-seeing, and re-locating ourselves in relation to others. We offer no final answers, no template for change. But we hold a commitment to the work…quiet, careful, relational, and to those trying to make sense of themselves and their worlds, without abandoning either.
