The Leicester Conference in the Chilterns
The year 2021 continues to provide spatial challenges for the Leicester Conference. In 2020, the conference Director, Leslie Brissett, relocated the conference to Germany and, together with a small team of staff and members, led a memorable event.
This year, Leicester University, which traditionally has hosted the conference every year since 1957 (with three exceptions in 2006-7 and 2020) announced it is not going to reopen for events before the autumn.
After an intense search period, I am delighted to be able to say that we have secured a new home for the Leicester Conference 2021 – Lane End Conference Centre: near High Wycombe, 30 minutes from Heathrow and 45 mins from central London. This is a comfortable venue in the middle of beautiful National Trust countryside offering us a welcoming space for our two-week temporary institution, in the middle of what continues to be a turbulent and volatile time. The venue is a #SafeonSite environment.
The Tavistock Institute is also moving to a new space in June, responding to the global pandemic creatively and imaginatively as an organisation in its context. The changed venue for the Leicester conference, I believe, is a parallel opportunity to that of the Tavistock Institute. The latter being the permanent Tavistock Institute home and the former being its temporary, annual manifestation, with both looking to study and respond to the impact of this global trauma on us as humans and professionals, as managers, leaders and change agents, as educators and consultants, therapists and coaches, who need to contain in ourselves, as well as help others process and move forward; to birth, lead and learn, to live in our new and emerging world.
The Leicester Conference in the Chilterns will offer a secluded yet not isolated – built yet surrounded with nature – space for inquiry, curiosity, liminality, embodiment, thinking, creating, framing and reframing of our essential questions:
What is our collective and individual – Task?
What is called forth in us – what is our – Authority?
How are we going to form our – Organisation?
I am confident that this optimistic and adaptable haven will offer us exactly the container that we need – within which we can playfully, seriously, safely – explore and study birthing, learning and leading in times of post-pandemic and re-find and reshape our Tavistockian TAO.
Join me and the staff in this birthing quest. We are waiting for your applications.
Eliat Aram
Conference Director, Leicester conference 2021
For further details including timings, fee, and discounts, download the brochure.
If you have any questions about the conference, contact Leah Ashton-Hurst, Pre-conference Administrator.
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