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A Creative Guide to Exploring Your Life

A Creative Guide to Exploring Your Life

Graham Ramsay | Holly Sweet

(2008)

Abstract

An award-winning psychologist and professional photographer join forces in writing this unique creative guide to exploring and understanding your life: who you are, what you value, and what you wish to achieve.

A Creative Guide to Exploring Your Life brims with imaginative exercises and examples that use the power of photography, art, and writing as tools for self-discovery. It provides clear and accessible guidance on how to explore different parts of your identity: take a photograph of yourself in a role you don't typically play, draw a visual timeline of your life and consider its key turning points; explore your sense of place in history by writing about a major historical event that has changed your life. Exercises are accompanied by searching questions for self-reflection, and are complemented by examples of each exercise to provoke ideas and inspiration.

Featuring additional guidance for teachers, counselors, and other professionals running the exercises in group settings, this book offers a dynamic and enjoyable way for you to explore different aspects of your life.


Graham Gordon Ramsay is a professional freelance commercial and fine art photographer and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His fine art images have appeared in galleries and private collections throughout the US and Europe, and his commercial images have appeared in publications such as Time Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Figaro Magazine. Holly Barlow Sweet Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and a lecturer at MIT. She maintains a private practice in the Boston area and has given numerous talks and workshops at both local and national levels on self-esteem enhancement, creativity and self-exploration, and gender roles and relationships. She is Co-Director of the Cambridge Center for Gender Relations and, in 2005, received the 'Practitioner of the Year' award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity, a division of the American Psychological Association.

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
1. Towards cities as engines of human development
2. Justice, City-making and the Capability Approach
3. Drivers: Evictions and well-being of dwellers in Lagos waterfront informal settlements, Nigeria
4. Practices: Experiences and claims for participation in London’s Euston area, United Kingdom
5. Aspirations: Re-imagining urban regeneration in Woodstock, Cape Town, South Africa
6. Abilities: Housing (un)freedoms in Nova Primavera estate, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil
7. Opportunities: Democratising urban governance through Neighbourhood Planning Associations in Kisumu, Kenya
8. Agency: Claiming rights through the occupation of vacant buildings in inner São Paulo, Brazil
9. Trajectories: Pursuing ‘Buen Vivir’ through participatory neighbourhood planning in Quito, Ecuador
10. Learning: Expanding capabilities through knowledge co-production about city-making in Freetown, Sierra Leone