November 2016 Collab Salon: Justice-Doing in therapy & community work

Vikki & Michael offer an alternative approach to work with trauma, which focuses on the resistance of victims of violence and oppression. Drawing from a decolonizing and justice-doing stance, their activist analysis resists the neutral and medicalised language of ‘trauma’, and names the contexts of social injustice that create the conditions for suffering. Honouring the wisdom of the people we work alongside in their acts of resistance and responses to trauma brings forward their agency and wisdom – creating identities of knowledge, autonomy and strength, as opposed to victim/survivor identities, or other spoiled identities.We will address structuring safety as the foundation of the work, alternative understandings of the way trauma works, and the duty of the witness to work towards justice-doing, connection of private pain with public issues.