This workshop challenges conventional understandings of grief by examining it through a decolonial, disability justice, anti-racist, land sovereignty, anti-capitalist, and harm reduction lens. Participants will engage in critical conversations that reframe grief beyond individualistic approaches and recognize its inherently political nature.
"Decolonizing Grief" moves beyond basic grief concepts to explore how systemic oppression, colonization, and imperialism create barriers to processing grief authentically. We will examine how grief intersects with identity, community, liberation, solidarity, and ancestral connections, while challenging how policies rooted in cis- heteronormative understandings of grief and family can affect how we collectively understand our inherent right to grieve.
During our time together we will also speak about the multifaceted ways that grief can show up and affirm participants in their experience of grief. Finally participants will come away with far more expansive understanding of grief that is not a monolith, along with an understanding of the ways that grief can show up.
Key topics include:
-
Debunking prevalent myths surrounding grief
-
Addressing that most of us have never been taught how to grieve ... and that is deliberate
-
Understanding grief as inherently political and effects our material reality
-
Examining intersectionality and how grief experiences vary across communities and lived experience
-
Discussing state-sanctioned violence and its relationship to communal and diasporic grief
-
Exploring grief's connection to land, land sovereignty, and immigration
-
Addressing the grief associated with ancestral pain and navigating grief through ancestral knowledge
-
Creating spaces where grief can exist collectively and dismantling individualism
-
Developing community-centered approaches to supporting each other through grief