Sue Lindsay

This paper offers an interdisciplinary perspective to those interested in humanistic psychology perspectives to love when working in communities. This includes for example community psychologists, psychotherapists, humanistic psychologists, youth workers, community development practitioners and allied health professionals. It offers the opportunity to reflect on how love manifests as an element of practice. Emphasising the place of love within practice and how ‘professional love’ enhances relational working. Through engaging in psychological, sociological and philosophical debate, we offer a framework, within which transferable skills, knowledge and approaches can be utilised to further radicalise contemporary work within communities. Furthermore, this paper clarifies the potentiality for therapeutic and sociological disciplines to contribute critique, with the golden thread throughout of professional love and ethics as a foundation of practice. Radical love seeks to encourage the practitioner to have courage to work through their own prejudice and privilege. This enables them to work with relational depth and embrace the underlying philosophical assumptions of humanistic psychology. In conclusion, recommendations are given which inform the reader of the possibility of social change, empowerment of communities and demonstrate how love in professional practice offers a shift in relational power, thus highlighting a radical, integrated approach to contemporary community work.

This paper will discuss ways in which virtual reality can be used as a vehicle within GBL as well as exploring some of the constraints and challenges in developing assistive and interactive technologies. Our research, albeit in its early stages, evidences that virtual reality offers a powerful tool from an engagement and immersion perspective with which to experience and investigate options within various social situations. The aim of the YMCA project was to educate students about the importance of creating a positive consent culture by advocating access to inclusive sex and relationship education at University. This is both and emergent and timely topic, which is being addressed in a number of pedagogical ways, but we felt a GBL approach would have the potential for greater impact. The narrative we developed focussed on the subjective nature of sexual consent and misinterpreted social cues within a fictional encounter. The paper will examine how we developed the narrative structure of the game, before moving on to reflect on issues emerging from the development of the VR prototype.

YMCA: using virtual reality in narrative spaces