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The purpose of this paper is to explore the conviviality between practices of narrative therapy and the emerging field of critical suicide studies. Bringing together ideas from narrative therapy and critical suicide studies allows us to analyze current suicide prevention practices from a new vantage point and offers us the chance to consider how narrative therapy might be applied in new and different contexts, thus extending narrative therapy’s potential and possibilities. We expose some of the thin, singular, biomedical descriptions of the problem of suicide that are currently in circulation and attend to the potential effects on distressed persons, communities, and therapists/practitioners who are all operating under the influence of these dominant understandings. We identify some cracks in the dominant storyline to enable alternative descriptions and subjugated knowledges to emerge in order to bring our suicide prevention practices more into alignment with a de-colonizing, social justice orientation.

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“Cultural competence” is often part of contemporary discourses of practice in child and youth care and is often referred to in curricula and documents that lay out the expected competencies of practitioners. This article represents an effort to critically examine the notion of “cultural competence”, paying particular attention to how “culture” and “competence” are taken up in the literature, and how they are positioned in relation to each other in the context of practice. Efforts are made to critique the idea that “culturally competent” practice can be attained through the linear and proceduralized acquisition of pre-specified competencies. Rather, an argument is made for the development of a practice that is critically reflexive, relational, and constantly in motion while working inbetween, across, and within difference.

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