This 12-session course will guide participants through an exploration of the growing recognition of the emotional effects of oppression.
This course emerges from the radical framework of Collective Racial Healing, developed by Professor Emiko Saldivar in her course “Caring for Change” at the University of California Santa Barbara, USA, and her work with Professor Moreno Figueroa with the Colectivo para Eliminar el Racismo (COPERA) in Mexico. The course invites participants to reflect on the personal, political, academic and emotional dimensions of living with and researching racism, sexism, colonialism, and other intersecting injustices.
Through collective practices centred on active listening, we seek to reconnect thought, feeling, and experience—recognising healing as a shared, transformative process that strengthens both scholarly work and social justice efforts. Their approach is integral and collective, linking the individual with the structural experiences of oppression and harnessing the power of doing this work with others.
In this course/workshop, we will use a series of exercises and reflections to discuss and experience what it would be like to heal from the effects of oppression. As researchers exploring the multiple dimensions of oppression and social justice work, we are well aware that the history and stories of different oppressions – racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, fat oppression, ableism, adultism, etc – are full of intense emotions: anger, shame, sadness, isolation, powerlessness. We listen to those stories, analyse them, discuss them and we have also gone through them ourselves or benefited, even if unintentionally, from some forms of privilege. However, many of us struggle, mostly in isolation, to bring together how these stories make us feel with how we analyse them for academic and/or political purposes.
Global Racisms Institute for Social Transformation 