Healing Justice Research Articles

Healing justice in multicultural counseling

AbstractPrioritizing healing for Latinx youth involves more than increased access to mental health resources. Community‐based educators are articulating a vision of healing justice that combines psychological healing and social change. In this paper, we draw on 2 years of collaborative community‐engaged co‐design with youth and young adults of color to propose a framework for healing justice in youth development and education spaces. We discuss the relevance of this healing justice paradigm for approaches to counseling Latinx youth.

Reimagining the urban through agency as healing justice: Stories from Kolkata and Chicago

To address violence against women in cities, urban scholars and planners have primarily focused on challenging problematic urban built environments, social norms and unequal power relations but have missed emphasising the healing of the harmed individuals and communities. In this paper, we are interested in the role that agency can play in the healing justice process of individuals and communities with experience of violence and spatial trauma. Building on healing justice scholarship, we argue for a multilayered approach to address the range of violences women and marginalised communities experience over time in urban spaces by repairing societal and urban faults while simultaneously tending to the healing and well-being of the impacted individuals and communities. Based on stories from the everyday lives of different groups of women in Kolkata and Chicago, we highlight instances of women reclaiming urban spaces in their everyday lives through varied acts of their agency while also building a sense of community agency, ultimately leading towards healing justice. The temporal component of healing is long-term, but fostering actionable agency is essential in moving towards communities being healed. Therefore, to facilitate healing processes, paying attention to the everyday acts of embodied agency may provide practical tools for urban scholars and planners to understand community needs and desires and make cities inclusive and safe.

Disrupting Disciplinary Norms and Advocating for Feminist Solidarity through Coalition Building, Healing Justice Lineages, and Collective Care

Disrupting Disciplinary Norms and Advocating for Feminist Solidarity through Coalition Building, Healing Justice Lineages, and Collective Care

Out-of-School Time Programs in the United States in an Era of Racial Reckoning: Insights on Equity From Practitioners, Scholars, Policy Influencers, and Young People

The out-of-school time (OST) field in the United States has a complex history. The push to offer programming reflects a legacy rooted in moral panics about racially minoritized youth. However, this field is populated by community spaces that act as multipurpose sites of culturally sustaining educational practices supporting positive youth development. We report findings from interviews with OST leaders, youth workers, policy influencers, and youth about how to create, sustain, and protect more liberatory and humanizing practices, demonstrating that racism and deficit-based thinking continue to inform programmatic practices and youth experiences. Furthermore, this study reveals that programs with expansive ideas of youth voice, healing justice, and whole-child approaches to youth development create better opportunities for connection and belonging.

The Downward Redistribution of Breath: Abolitionist Visions of Healing Justice from Chicago

Abstract A new generation of visionary artists, activists, and healers from queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour communities offer a crucial wellspring for insurgent ideas about breathing, healing, and justice that contrast the dominant militarized policing order in the United States. At a time when the proliferating calamities of global fascism, climate chaos, and endless warfare appear ascendant across the planet, how do minoritarian cultural workers living and labouring in the heart of empire make sense of this dying world order while breathing life into new worlds through their creative practices? The ecology of minoritarian aesthetics emerging from recent overlapping protest movements in Chicago are working to turn the tide against prisons, policing, and American warfare. They offer a powerful roadmap for indexing the dystopian here and now of US imperial decline and imagining rebellious futures that can move us from despair and isolation to coalition and transformation.

Transnational Feminisms in Development

This article joins feminist theory with testimony to deliver a manifesto for development and change. I begin with a review of the intersectional, postcolonial, and decolonial literatures, showing how transnational feminisms are rethinking development from below. Next, I share my growth as a white feminist scholar engaged with antiracist and decolonial praxis. Bringing theory into dialogue with lessons from the field, I identify six pathways for emancipation, or personal commitments to decentering whitestream logic in research and practice. These pathways have helped awaken me from the enchantment of a modern-colonial world-system engaged in endless warfare with difference. Recognizing that we do not have to be alike to be united in the struggle for global justice, I encourage you to share your own commitments to development. Through knowledge sharing, we may reclaim institutional spaces for the purpose of healing justice, helping address the trauma of systemic oppression from within as well as from without.

Adult Learning for Self-Care and Healing Justice: Black Women Living With HIV/AIDS Amid a Global Pandemic Voices From CBOs’ Service Providers

The aim of this article was to identify the perceptions of community-based organization (CBO) service providers regarding their experiences with Black women living with AIDS (BWLHA) during a global pandemic. Two CBO service providers were selected for the study through a purposeful sampling technique. Black feminist theory, informal learning, and trauma theory helped frame the study, and narrative and cultural analyses were used for data analysis. Social isolation, medical and telehealth concerns, perceived social categorization of us and them, and informal strategies for healing were the emerging themes. Findings from this study have implications for adult educators, health educators, and mental health professionals as the global COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need to develop a trauma care plan (TCP) for BWLHA.

The Black radical imagination: a space of hope and possible futures.

The radical imagination entails stepping outside the confines of the now and into the expansiveness of what could be. It has been described as the ability to dream of possible futures and bring these possibilities back to the present to drive social transformation. This perspective paper seeks to provide an overview of the radical imagination and its intersections with Afrofuturism, a framework and artistic epistemology that expresses the Black cultural experience through a space of hope where Blackness is integral. In this paper, I propose three processes that comprise the radical imagination: (1) imagining alternative Black futures, (2) radical hope, and (3) collective courage. I consider the neural networks that underlie each process and consider how the Black radical imagination is a portal through which aging Black adults experience hope and envision futures that drive social change. I conclude with considerations of what brain health and healing justice looks like for aging Black Americans- specifically, how invocation of the Black radical imagination may have positive brain health effects for a demographic group at increased risk for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.

Know Justice, Know Peace: Reflections from a community-based, action research collective

This article provides an overview of the community-based, action research project called Know Justice, Know Peace: A Transformation & Justice Community Collective, which took place with six local grassroots justice-oriented organizations in Southern California’s Inland Empire region. Together we explored if, how, and where, wellness, healing and trauma-informed practices and transformative organizing exist in the daily operations and strategic vision of these organizations. Through interviews, focus groups, and healing circles, as well as an 8-month, bi-weekly training program, we identified individual and organizational needs, barriers, and facilitators of actualizing healing, wellbeing, and justice values in daily operation and organizational culture. Overall, the findings of this collective echoed what our review of literature in the field found from a diverse range of interdisciplinary scholars and activists; that to thrive individually and organizationally we must transform the relationships and structures we operate in to actualize values to stay grounded and connected while advancing effective strategies that resist toxic and violent structures and replace them with transformative and sustaining ones. This article summarizes community participants’ internal and organizational struggles as well as the assets they build upon. It explores theoretical frameworks deriving from healing justice, transformative movement organizing, trauma-informed and healing-centered methodologies, and emergent strategy that propose critical analysis and applied tools to advance individual and community wellness and healing as well as restorative organizing models and alternative organizational structures for values alignment in the daily operations of social justice-oriented community organizations. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

REPERTOIRES OF CARE AND ACTIVIST SUSTAINABILITY IN U.S. SOCIAL JUSTICE ORGANIZING

Sociologists have a longstanding interest in how movements survive and how individuals persist in their activism over time (e.g., McAdam 1986; Downton and Wehr 1998; Corrigall-Brown 2011; Bunnage 2014). The role of care in activist sustainability stands out as a neglected domain for a better understanding of how movements maintain the human labor they need to survive. Some social theorists and on-the-ground activists have warned about the potentially individualizing and depoliticizing effects of “self-care” on movement culture. However, social justice movements, particularly racial justice movements, increasingly emphasize the role of healing, care, and the body in movement survival. Drawing on all 128 episodes of the Irresistible podcast (formerly the Healing Justice Podcast), its problematic founder, and its ultimate demise, I use a Black feminist framework that holds the tensions within political care to understand the conditional relationship between the functions and hazards of care within activism. Following and complementing Charles Tilly’s (1977) repertoires of contention, I develop this “repertoire of care” analytitoto better situate proliferating discourses of movement care within broader theoretical conversations around persistent activism and movement survival.

Race, Space, and Trauma

Problem, research strategy, and findings Discriminatory planning decisions and practices, guided by dominant White spatial imaginaries, result in physical, economic, and culturally racialized spaces of trauma, contributing to the unjust destruction of Black and Brown communities. The continuous cycle of planning injustice coupled with economic and physical neglect by planning in communities of color has amounted to what some scholars call slow violence. The healing process from slow violence requires planers to acknowledge, refuse, redo, and repair the harm they caused. We use two case studies from Richmond (VA) and Norristown (PA) as exemplars of healing justice through community accountability (CA). These cases illustrate how community groups are reclaiming their spaces, authentically telling their stories, and engaging in physical, economic, corporal, and cultural healing: moving from spaces of trauma toward healing justice. Unlike systems driven by the White spatial imaginary that have historically resulted in racist policies and programs such as urban renewal and broader global forces such as structural adjustment, CA encourages community-led solutions to problems caused by planners. Takeaway for practice Urban planners can reimagine their role in creating livable, sustainable spaces by centering healing (and justice) as core objectives in their work. Supporting and engaging communities with a CA framework must begin with acknowledging and truth-telling about past and present harms. Planners must ground their work in spatial imaginaries that reflect the values, needs, and cultures of the people and communities they serve. They must also play an active role in repairing physical, economic, and emotional harms using their influence and resources to dismantle the mechanisms (policies and practices) that created the racial spatial trauma. Engaging these communities in development decisions and codifying planning practices that reduce harm and ensure belonging can promote economic sustainability.

Healing justice: Engaging an ethic of care in the academy and within our communities.

Healing justice: Engaging an ethic of care in the academy and within our communities.

We Heal to Rebuild: Black Queer and Trans Healing Justice and Resistance in Minneapolis

We Heal to Rebuild: Black Queer and Trans Healing Justice and Resistance in Minneapolis

Khmer Girls in Action and healing justice: Expanding understandings of anti-Asian racism and public health solutions.

This community case study highlights how Khmer Girls in Action (KGA), a Southeast Asian young women-led organizing group in Long Beach, California, enacts healing justice. Healing justice is a framework for both transforming structures at the crux of health inequities and healing emotional, spiritual, and psychological wounds inflicted by structural violence. KGA also anchors the cross-racial and intersectional Invest in Youth (IIY-LB) coalition. IIY-LB youth leaders have successfully fought to increase the city's investments in the social determinants of health, especially young people's well-being. Meanwhile, the coalition has critiqued over-investments in criminalization and policing as devastating Black, Brown, queer, low-income, immigrant, and refugee youth and communities. This case study highlights how KGA's work expands understandings of both anti-Asian racism and public health solutions in the following ways: First, KGA cultivates youth leaders' critical analyses to define root causes of health inequities impacting Southeast Asian refugees as rooted in imperialism, disinvestment, and increased criminalization. Furthermore, youth leaders come to understand how their communities' struggles and liberation necessitate intersectional and cross-racial coalitions. Second, youth leaders forge public health solutions that involve divesting from criminalization and institutionalizing an Office of Youth Development, as co-created with young people. Third, KGA and other IIY-LB organizations cultivate youth's leadership skills and community's political power to move hearts and minds of decision-makers and community members. For example, youth leaders have passed a ballot measure funding youth, climate, and health programs in addition to the city-based Office of Youth Development. Fourth, KGA engages in a wide range of "inward" healing practices to salve wounds caused by intergenerational trauma. This case study contributes to Asian American health equity by highlighting the specific importance of organizing, while illuminating abolitionist perspectives on public health solutions- both of which are under-discussed in discourse about anti-Asian racism. KGA's work thus illustrates the importance of centering critical analyses and leadership of communities most impacted by structural violence in forging transformative public health solutions to anti-Asian racism.

Critical Empowerment Frameworks Paramount to Social Justice Work

As we continue to navigate the complex challenges of a pandemic and the urgent need for racial justice, social work faculty are well positioned to train the next generation of social workers in human rights work and structural change movements. Authors discuss how engaging key critical empowerment frameworks that include critical race theory, structural competency, together with a decolonizing and transdisciplinary lens within community-engaged research and practice can provide social work students models for collective impact. Leveraging university-community partnerships to directly provide faculty mentorship around human rights work will also be discussed. One author has been working with the institution’s law school and their Neighborhood Legal Assistance Project to provide support, legal resources, and advocacy. She has also co-founded and is developing a Chicago-based coalition to address intimate partner violence-induced brain injury. The second author has helped start and develop two coalitions to advance a coordinated structural response involving the provision of mental health resource support and psychosocial forensic asylum assessments within immigrant communities. Authors also discuss how students have been engaged in health equity work through a racial and healing justice initiative that values and provides training around healing circles within indigenous communities and communities of color. Through these rich learning experiences, students internalize the value of critical empowerment frameworks that inform participatory approaches in collaboration and coalition building that are essential to social justice work and the process of social and structural change.

Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of How to Survive the End of the World

Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of <i>How to Survive the End of the World</i>

Introduction to “Queer Healing and Transformative Justice”: A Special Issue of QED

Introduction to “Queer Healing and Transformative Justice”: A Special Issue of <i>QED</i>

Depathologization as Healing Justice

Abstract Healing justice, as with disability justice, and transformative justice/abolition, has largely been a queer-, trans-, woman of color-led intervention into the rights-based, reform-based, and neo/liberal agendas of whitestream movements. We see each of these movements for justice as deeply intertwined with the others, where interdependence and leaving no one behind are key commitments that are not compatible with the individualism of rights and reforms. In this roundtable conversation, we define depathologization and its relation to (queering) anti-normativity; discuss it as an important coalitional site of liberation; an intervention of abolitionist worldmaking. We argue that healing need not be understood in a corrective, carceral (medical) or ableist lens. Rather, healing justice models a philosophy and praxis of anticolonial resistance, communal interdependence, and abolitionist care. We offer the conversation as praxis and a way of learning and unlearning from each other.

“How We Are with Each Other”: Conversations on Queer Healing and Black Liberation

Charlene has worked as a local and national organization builder, organizational development facilitator, and movement infrastructure builder. Qui has worked as a healing justice practitioner, community accountability process facilitator, as well as a transformative justice practice educator and trainer. Both of our work centers a Black queer feminist lens grounded in abolition praxis. Together we sat down to reflect on how we are with each other as comrades working in movements for Black liberation; and the lessons we've learned doing that work over the past fifteen years.To say the past year has left us with lots to consider about how we are with each other would be an understatement. We are left with more questions than answers, but we also were left with new opportunities to recommit to ourselves and each other. What can a year of isolation teach us about building trust, honoring our boundaries, and prioritizing a culture of care? Where do we still have a lot to learn? And how can we figure that out together? We hope this conversation inspires you to break bread, think deeply, and share honestly with your comrades and communities. We've learned these moments together are a sacred and necessary part of dreaming the world we want to see into existence.

Emotional healing as part of environmental and climate justice processes: Frameworks and community-based experiences in times of environmental suffering

This paper seeks to discuss the political role of healing practices in the context of climate and environmental justice struggles. We rely on literature and practices that have identified healing as a means for liberation from structural oppression and physical and symbolic violence, to humans, non-humans and nature – namely emotional political ecologies, transformative and healing justice and communitarian feminism. We also briefly discuss the experience of three collectives in Mexico, Colombia, and Spain who develop healing strategies as a way to emotionally support local communities exposed to territorial, environmental, and climate impacts and injustice. We argue that by further addressing the political dimensions of healing in environmental and climate justice, researchers, activists, and practitioners could expand the conceptualisation of (a) the spatial and temporal scales of climate justice by further engaging with the inter- and intra-generational emotional implications of environmental injustice, and (b) environmental and climate justice as a multidimensional and nonlinear collective emotional process.