It is crucial to understand how Anti-Oppressive Practice and Trauma-Informed Care are mutually inclusive. Trauma is a response to single, acute event, but it can also be a response to a lack of basic care and consistent discrimination. Living at the intersection of multiple systemically disenfranchised identities often results in trauma. A practitioner who is inattentive to systemic oppression, their own intersections of identity, and their client’s intersections of identity are more likely to reproduce oppressive power dynamics that further marginalize and traumatize their clients. In dietetics special attention must be paid to the intersections of race and body size.
This presentation will explore these concepts from a contextual perspective, while also giving participants tangible strategies to immediately make their practice more Anti-Oppressive, Weight-Inclusive, and Trauma-Informed.
After this session participants will:
- Understand how anti-oppressive practice is essential to trauma-informed care.
- Understand the ways in which colonialism created food instability and a hierarchy of bodies, and how this effects people and systems in present-day.
- Understand the basics of trauma and how it is a response to an event, not an event itself.
- Reflect on how their intersecting identities influence their work.
- Be given tangible tools for making their work more trauma-informed and anti-oppressive.
This session was the opening keynote of the DC National Conference 2023.
Date of Presentation: May 25, 2023, DC National Conference
Speaker: Alexandra Shewan, MC, RCC
Materials:
- Video presentation (1 hour 42 min) which includes the opening of the DC 2023 Conference by Leslie Back, Board Chair and JP Cody-Cox, CEO as well as welcoming remarks by Elder Tom Dearhouse
- Handout (pdf)
- Audio file (mp3 file)
Cost:
- $19.95 for DC members
- $39.95 for non-DC members
- $9.95 for DC student members
