Celiane is a lecturer, researcher and practitioner working at the interface of psychology, health/wellbeing, community building, education, process design and organizational development. Her work focuses on relational forms of practices that enable the creation of environments where more effective means of collaboration and decision-making are enhanced. She holds a Ph.D. from her native Brazil, at the University of Sao Paulo. While completing my doctoral dissertation, she expanded her research to explore communication theory at the University of New Hampshire, USA where she spent one year as a visiting scholar.
She has lived and worked in many parts of the world. As a Brazilian, moving to England, then to the USA, Taiwan, Singapore and finally to The Netherlands, she has cultivated a cross-cultural understanding and a sensitivity to differences. All these movements, and the intertwined experiences that have accompanied them, have given her a fluid professional identity. With this interdisciplinary background, combined with a cross cultural experience, she is engaged in blurring disciplinary boundaries and integrating different ways of knowing to help tackle complex matters.
She is faculty at Breda University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands and visiting professor and guest lecturer at several universities around the world such as University of São Paulo in Brazil, Polytechnic Institute of Leiria in Portugal, University College Aspira in Croatia, among others.
Celiane is also the founder of Designing Conversations (www.designingconversations.us), where she consults, designs and delivers workshops and process design within a diversity of areas where creativity, imagination, innovation and dialogue are central. She is involved in international projects where she facilitates organizations and communities in joining together to initiate change. Among her projects are her collaboration with NGOs in Uganda, with sustainable local tourism in Cape Verde, and with community activism in Brazil. She has more than 30 publications in journals and books on participatory research, Imagineering, design approaches, PlaceMaking and community development.
Sheila McNamee, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of Communication at the University of New Hampshire and co-founder and Vice President of the Taos Institute. She has held visiting professorships at the University of Parma, Italy; Utrecht University, Netherlands; University of Sao Paulo, Brazil; and City University of Hong Kong. Her work is focused on dialogic transformation within a variety of social and institutional contexts.
She is author of several books and articles, including Research and Social Change: A Relational Constructionist Approach (with D.M. Hosking, Routledge, 2012), Relational Responsibility: Resources for Sustainable Dialogue (with K.J. Gergen, Sage, 1999), and co-editor of Education as Social Construction: Contributions to Theory, Research, and Practice, (with T. Dragonas, K. Gergen, & E. Tseliou, Taos WorldShare, 2015), the Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice (McNamee, M. Gergen, Camargo-Borges, & Rasera – Sage, 2020), and the forthcoming Practicing Therapy as Social Construction (with E. Rasera & P. Martins, Sage).
Professor McNamee actively engages constructionist practices in a variety of contexts to bring communities of participants with diametrically opposing viewpoints together to create livable futures. She lectures and consults regularly, both nationally and internationally for universities, private institutes, organizations, and communities.
If you would like to know more about their book, Design Thinking and Social Construction, you can follow the link here.
