Bhupie Dulay & Abby Chow | Connective Intentions: Roots of Shared Liberatory Practice

Kick off the summit with us as we explore the intentions and roots of shared liberatory practice, influential thinkers and dreamers that shaped our development, and the most impactful lessons we’ve learned to date.

Rachel Ricketts | All About Love…As Activism

Addressing bell hooks' definition of love as the foundation for radical change, community care, accountability and transformative justice in our individual and collective lives.

Jennifer-Lee Koble | Decolonize? We are not there yet...

An invitation to connection and practice, rather than tips and tricks. How do we lean into relationship, wisdom, and fullness; embrace the unknown, resist fixing and knowing and instead BE.

Gabes Torres | Revolutionary Healing in the Global South

This talk will explore the tendency to centralize the West's methodologies of healing, and what to do with this tendency. We will then look at how healing spaces in the global South have looked like, with more attention to the colonized islands of the Philippines. What can we learn from the islands about healing, without taking a consumerist, 'gaze-y' approach? How can we learn about the intersection of healing and justice practices from teachers who live in the most stifled and oppressed parts of the world? How can communities and practitioners in the West integrate these models of care in their own practices and spaces?

Ji-Youn Kim | Intro to Disability Justice & Mad Liberation in Therapeutic Practice

What is wellness and mental health without addressing disability & madness? Ableism and sanism are too often dismissed in anti-oppressive discourse without the recognition of how abled supremacy is at the core of so many systems of oppression. Given how the mental health industry is built upon categories of normal and deviant, healthy and unhealthy, this conversation offers an introduction to understanding and analyzing mental health and therapeutic practice through Disability Justice and Mad Liberation.

Xu Wang | Ambiguous Soup: Queering Therapy and Care

In this conversation, you are invited to expand on what we call therapy and relational work through query. With an exploration on how to bring queer therapy to life in our practice, we explore what care is in relation to therapy and how we invite that into our practice.

Travis Heath | Contemporary Narrative Therapy: Resisting Neoliberalism and Late Capitalism in the Modern World

Individualist ways of relating to the world are so present in our current realities that they often are taken for granted as the only ways of being. Ideas of personal responsibility and the self as a brand or a commodity to be bought and sold can have profound effects on peoples’ lives. This is especially true with the proliferation of social media and other forms of digital branding. Dominant approaches to therapy often unwittingly reinforce neoliberal ideals and story them as mentally healthy (and thus anything that deviates as unhealthy or pathological). In an effort to demonstrate these ideas in practice, this video will highlight work with a couple that attempts to tend to the effects of neoliberalism and late capitalism on the life of their relationship.

Ashley Lagrange | The Personal is Political: Self Disclosure as a Tool for Radical Transparency

This conversation will explore the value of lived experienced providers and the ability to use self disclosure as a means of trust and connection building. Self disclosure will be expanded on as a means of honoring radical transparency and exemplifying to folks the layers of politicization within our identities. 

Bhupie Dulay & Abby Chow | Reflexive Directions Beyond the Talks

Unlearning is generative. Join us as we unpack each conversation further with common themes, sparks of insights, and practical transformations. Get ideas for what’s next in our shared work and how we can dream it into reality.

And beyond:

We will be releasing a bonus video with Vikki Reynolds in the coming months further informing the lineages of resistance we’re connected to in our work. Stay tuned for updates!

Vikki Reynolds | Activist Orientations and Histories of Liberatory Practice and Revolutionary Love (Nov 2024)

In this dialogue Vikki will engage with Bhupie and Abby around the influences and mentors whose shoulders her work stands on, across time, in relation to Liberatory Practice and enacting Therapeutic Love.

We will circle around Popular Education movement and teachings of Revolutionary Love which Paulo Freire describes as solidarity with others and commitment to their cause. We will touch on the history of Ignacio Martín-Baró being executed by an American backed Salvadoran Death Squad in the 1980’s, and why he was so dangerous to oppressive rulers was his call for Liberation, in all sectors of life including our work. Martín-Baró said, “In order to have a Liberatory Psychology, Psychology must first be liberated” and taught that resistance to political violence and torture is never individual, but always social and an act of communal love. And we will also touch on how The Mothers of the Disappeared of Argentina inspired and educated Vikki's practice in framing love as a liberatory communal practice of solidarity, courage and dignity.

These threads have interwoven love, dignity, and liberatory practice as community projects and profoundly influenced Vikki's frame of justice-doing in community work.