Disturbing professional practice discourse : re: writing practices

From a sociological and poststructural viewpoint, professional practice discourse is a productive set of relations that makes practice possible, including many progressive, supportive and creative ways of practising professionally. At the same time, even progressive iterations of the discourse tend to reflect and sustain already established power relationships and limit the possibilities of thinking/doing “otherwise” (Foucault, 2000). Writing marginalia into the professional practice discourse is a political act intended to unsettle this tendency towards establishing and reinforcing dominant power relations, so that something different that we are yet to even envisage may emerge. To enable established and sedimented truths to move, we may need to unsettle not only content but also form: in particular, the forms of re-presentation that reinforce and construct the domain of professional practice and its limits. Doing writing as an enquiry (Richardson & St Pierre, 2005) into dominant and taken-for-granted assumptions and practices can disturb those discourses which further marginalise and pathologies those who are already most marginalised in society. In the chapter we write onto and into professional practice discourse through a collaborative dialogical process that we call just writing. We expand this phrase beyond its suggestion of spontaneous creative writing in order to link our writing practices with our passion for social justice – with writing for justice.