Activists' Use of Trauma-Informed Frameworks

Abstract

Women and girls have been made vulnerable to human traffickers, rampant femicides, domestic violence, state terrorism, and the difficult circumstances of earning a living wage in villas, or shantytown communities, throughout Argentina. In spite of these hardships, activists have found mechanisms to fight for change within their neighborhoods through social movement organizing and popular education projects that foster leadership and camaraderie building, along with opportunities for personal and communal growth. This chapter will explore one activist project, the social movement The Union of Popular Organizations (UP), and the trauma-informed pedagogical practices displayed during a series of gender-based, popular educator training workshops held in the city of Buenos Aires. Here, popular educators and activists found ways to make women’s trauma pedagogical - through “public grieving” practices and curriculum entrenched in “difficult knowledge.” Using ethnographic findings on trauma-informed teaching that occurred around a series of gender-based workshops, this chapter reveals what happens when activism intersects with trauma in popular education curriculum - how it creates opportunities for girls and women inside classrooms and communities in conditions of precarity.