Rie Thomsen and Tristram Hooley report on a workshop that has just taken place at this year’s IAEVG conference in the Netherlands.

We have just facilitated a workshop at the IAEVG conference which builds on the recent special issue of the British Journal of Guidance and Counselling entitled Critical Perspectives in Career Guidance Research.

In this interactive workshop participants at the IAEVG in Haag in 2023 came together to reflect on career guidance and development in the light of five core features of critical theory which were:

• creating a radical imaginary;
• attending to power;
• unmasking ideology;
• understanding individuals to be in a dialectical relationship with context; and
• viewing human beings as having a bounded but transformative agency

The workshop resulted in the creation of this blog post as inspiration for future directions for research and practice informed by critical theory. Prior to the discussion Anna Bilon, Majorie McCrory, Sanna Toiviainen, Suzanne Rice, Tristram Hooley and Rie Thomsen shared short presentations of their articles with a focus on co-agency, social justice, equality, power and emancipation.

We then asked participants to discuss these issues and raise concerns, questions and issues. We captured these through a padlet discussion.

Key issues and concerns raised by participants includes the potential for critical and social justice informed approaches to responsibilise practitioners. We discussed the need for new forms of training that more overtly recognised the challenges of a imperfect and unequal world. We also discussed the challenges of neutrality in the field and recognised that while careers practitioners should not become propagandists it is naïve to pretend that they can remain neutral within an unequal world.

Ultimately we agreed that critical perspectives raise challenges for practitioners, but that they are more hopeful than just accepting inequality and oppression.