Landscapes of the Self, Evora, Portugal, November 2010 Dr Teresa M Cairns and Denis Doran, UK 1 SCATTERED LIVES Mediated landscapes of the self The stories we are told? Brief glimpses, nothing more. Sometimes there is only one opportunity to talk, maybe a second, rarely more than that: arrangements are made and changed and rearranged and then cancelled, these are chaotic lives that people live. We collect these stories, attempting to tease out the narrative threads of their lives, of their involvement with Catch 22 1 . The stories we hear, brief as they are, circulate around school as a site of conflict, care from an early age, prison. These are also stories about the importance of Catch 22 as an advocate and agency for change, but a change that may come painfully slowly, often with breaks and ruptures along the way. Resilience is a key factor in this process, both for the individual and the organisation, as well as the wider community. John Andrews, who leads Catch 22 in Northamptonshire, recognises this: When you ask any of us to change a piece of behaviour we find it difficult, the more entrenched it is the more difficult it is…and yet it always feels, from the point of view of a practitioner, that there’s some expectation that there’s going to be a huge change in people very quickly, and that just isn’t realistic and its not people’s experience of change, and yet bizarrely we have that expectation of others whose behaviour we find unacceptable or unpalatable. But it isn’t realistic, and the whole issue about punishment versus treatment…the default position being you punish people for bad behaviour, you lock them away…is a sort of…it’s a panacea really, to the public who have this sort of understanding of themselves and that change is difficult…but somehow can’t extend that…knowledge and that sense, to those who offend them and so, rather than thinking, ‘well, I know it’s difficult to change, we need to help people to change, it’s hard work’, they think it’s much easier to lock them up, much easier to punish them. (Scattered Lives, 2010) 2 He understands that people might register surprise when they hear that there are significant issues in such a rural county. Talks about the county being made up of one large town, ‘Northampton town, [the] largest non-metropolitan conurbation in the country, and a number of small towns that have grown up around specific industries.’