Published:
August 2022

Issue:
Vol.17, No.1

Word count:
number

About the authors

  • BA, MA, MFA

    Based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Vic has over 30 years’ experience working as a graphic designer and runs Dragonfly Design. They managed ANZATA’s, then ANZACATA’s, communications from 2008 to 2019, and has coordinated and designed the last 14 editions of ANZJAT and JoCAT. She is well versed in academic writing and referencing, and likes to write about art. She works with a number of artists and galleries in Aotearoa, and with other clients including creative arts therapies practitioners and cycling advocacy campaigns (and is a part-time bike mechanic). Vic is also an artist and has completed an MFA with first-class honours from Whitecliffe College.

  • BA(Hons), MA ATh, PhD, AThR

    Sheridan is Associate Professor of Art Therapy in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University, where she is also Discipline Lead for Arts Therapy and Counselling, and teaches in the Master of Art Therapy program. She is interested in arts-informed, narrative and new-materialist approaches with the potential to decolonise teaching, research and clinical practice. She works with others to question and reshape professional and therapeutic discourse, counter marginalisation and move beyond individualistic accounts of well-being. Sheridan has more than 30 years of field experience working therapeutically with the effects of violence, abuse and neglect on individuals and families, supervising and training other therapists and formulating new approaches to this area of work. She trained in psychodrama as well as narrative therapy and art therapy, is a practising poet, and occasionally participates in collaborative art exhibitions and performances.

This work is published in JoCAT and is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND-4.0 license.

Welcome to the new-look new-feel JoCAT: A different creative arts therapies journal experience

Vic Segedin and Sheridan Linnell

The golden wattle (Acacia pycnantha) – Karrank in the language of the Gunditjmara people of southwestern Victoria, Australia – glows with a sense of new beginnings. Here at JoCAT we are proud to launch our freshly revamped website and offer you, dear reader, a new and different, and we believe better, journal experience.

There will still be two issues of JoCAT, one in the middle and the other at the end of each year. But now, rather than having to wait for each issue to be released, you can see the latest offerings as soon as they are ready for pre-publication. At least monthly, the articles, reviews and creatives that are ready will ‘drop’ onto the website, and we will notify you so you can check to see if they are of interest. In this way, you will be able to keep abreast of the latest without having to wait until a whole issue is published. 

We recognise that many people want to receive information in a manner better suited to busy and more digital lives. When we first launched JoCAT online, we sought to mirror the experience of a hard copy journal. While moving from one to two issues per year, we still thought ‘inside the box’ of issues and pages. Then, as we started to explore the possibilities of the virtual environment, we began to see this traditional format as somewhat stuck in a late twentieth century paradigm.  

We want this new delivery to improve immediacy, relevance and accessibility to the innovative work that creative arts therapists are undertaking, and to enable you to find more easily the research and practitioner perspectives you are most interested in. We also hope to promote a greater reach, giving your journal a more prominent place in our regions and beyond.  

In this new-look , new-feel JoCAT website, each visitor is invited to navigate the entry points and flows of their own reading experience -–responding to whatever drops newly onto the page and takes your fancy; searching by topic or area of interest as well as author; browsing through whole current and back issues; or zooming in on what you need right now. 

So please take a look, explore the newly dropped articles, creative contributions and reviews, and reacquaint yourself with some of the previously published issues, now all accessible as a fully digital experience.

Exciting developments coming your way soon…

/podcasts

We are developing podcasts (or as we like to say podCATs). We know that this is often the preferred way for busy people to absorb new information. We are preparing some interviews and conversations between CATs, for your listening pleasure and will notify you when they ‘drop’. If you have ideas for a podcast you would like to create or to hear, please contact us.

/explore by themes

We are planning to offer a way of clustering current and previous articles around themes of interest, such as arts-based research and trauma-informed creative arts therapy. We hope this will make searching for references or for practice support much easier. Please let us know if you have ideas or themes that you would like us to know about. 

To receive notifications each time new content is uploaded, make sure you are subscribed to the JoCAT eNews, or are following JoCAT’s socials. Please share with your friends and colleagues, both near and far and in like-minded disciplines, to be part of this innovative and growing online research and creative space.

you can help…

A new website requires vigorous testing. We have had a team of people checking the pages and links. However, our new website is a large one with well over 100 pages, each containing multiple links and anchors. So we ask that if you come across any broken links, endnote anchors that don't take you anywhere, please get in touch.