Colin James Sanders, Ph.D.

CITY University of Seattle
Vancouver, BC 

Email:
 cjsmetanoia@telus.net

Colin is currently Director of the Canadian Master of Counselling Programs for City University of Seattle, located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Colin has taught with the CityU Canada community since 1998. Colin initiated and took the lead in creating the theoretical direction of Vancouver’s “Peak House” community, now in its 27th year of community service, between the years 1989-2004, where he ushered in narrative, collaborative, social justice and liberation psychological perspectives and related practices. Colin was also the lead on Vancouver’s first assertive community treatment (ACT) team, part of a 110M research demonstration project initiative funded by the Mental Health Commission of Canada, with Vancouver’s RainCity Housing First community agency.

Colin is interested in and inspired by poetry, theology, and philosophies of the east and the west, interconnections and relationships best described in his Taos Institute PhD program dissertation (2014), Narrative Poetics of Resistance: Towards an Aesthetics of Engagement, which he is currently editing for publication with Taos’ WorldShare imprint.

Colin is a past Associate Director of Yaletown Family Therapy, and taught with the Vancouver School of Narrative Therapy from 1993-2013. 

Colin’s current research interest is in creating dialogue with graduate students struggling with the neoliberal agenda to disappear critical thinking from education, and graduate students who struggle with succumbing to the medicalization of therapeutic practices within community agencies and programs.

Relationally, Colin and his partner, Gail, continue to be delighted and enlightened by grandsons’ Declan, Anu and Faelan!

Colin James Sanders Dissertation