An infinite time has run its course before my birth; what was I throughout all that time? I…I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors…(Jorge Luis Borges)
Top Left Photo credit: Aesthetics of Crisis,Flickr. Photo taken 2015, Athens, Psirri, Greece
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Current Work: Challenges and Opportunities to Using Restorative Approaches for Gender-Based Violence
In recent years practitioners in gender-based violence (GBV) and restorative justice (RJ) spaces have received increasing inquiries about how to use RJ practices to respond to GBV. Given the important differences between GBV and situations where RJ is more typically assumed to be appropriate (e.g. property crime), it is imperative to assess the feasibility of using RJ in GBV contexts. People working in both GBV and RJ have often hesitated to use RJ for gender-based violence due to the complexities of the power, sexism, and patriarchy undergirds contemporary society and that fuels gender-based violence. However, the fact remains that people are seeking responses to harms outside the legal system and it is incumbent on the fields of RJ and GBV to explore how to respond in the most just, responsible, victim-centered way to best facilitate healing. Expanding opportunities for those harmed by GBV to participate in RJ requires careful consideration of power dynamics and safety. Accordingly, the University of Minnesota partnered with Seward Longfellow Restorative Justice in a research process to explore this complex and urgent topic.
Select a link below to view the reports:
Summary Report
Practioner-Focused Research Report (with more extensive quotes, interview guide, and full references).
In recent years practitioners in gender-based violence (GBV) and restorative justice (RJ) spaces have received increasing inquiries about how to use RJ practices to respond to GBV. Given the important differences between GBV and situations where RJ is more typically assumed to be appropriate (e.g. property crime), it is imperative to assess the feasibility of using RJ in GBV contexts. People working in both GBV and RJ have often hesitated to use RJ for gender-based violence due to the complexities of the power, sexism, and patriarchy undergirds contemporary society and that fuels gender-based violence. However, the fact remains that people are seeking responses to harms outside the legal system and it is incumbent on the fields of RJ and GBV to explore how to respond in the most just, responsible, victim-centered way to best facilitate healing. Expanding opportunities for those harmed by GBV to participate in RJ requires careful consideration of power dynamics and safety. Accordingly, the University of Minnesota partnered with Seward Longfellow Restorative Justice in a research process to explore this complex and urgent topic.
Select a link below to view the reports:
Summary Report
Practioner-Focused Research Report (with more extensive quotes, interview guide, and full references).
land and plHow I got here
I was a clinician, researcher, educator and policy practitioner working in HIV/AIDS for 4+ years before realizing, through my own experiences, the experiences of those that I love, and the experiences of those that I worked with, that I wanted to make more systemic change aimed at mitigating body/desire associated shame and the deleterious consequences of feeling like “you are not OK” in your own skin. That sent me down another path; that of more graduate school sure, but also the scary and messy path of deep self-exploration. My own experiences of feeling like I need to be “a certain way” to be acceptable (in control, accommodating, without needs or desires, “perfect”) manifested in rigidity, self-monitoring and exclusively "living-in-your-head" space that sucked me of any joy and spontaneity in life (but at least it was “safe”). I needed and wanted to awaken to my own embodied/feminine side; the side that gives emotions and affect value and trusts intuition and experience as a way of knowing and being in the world.
As well, my professional work involved primarily gay and bisexual men; who had been told clearly by our cisheteronormative social customs and associated practice and policy, that their bodies and desires were not OK. Bodies and their messy, experiences, emotions, and desires are spaces of shame for a lot of people and carry with that shame health impacts in the immediate and across the life course. I want that to change. And for those who don’t now and maybe have never felt shame or discomfort in their own skin; wow! Awesome! I want to learn from you so that all people may feel the freedom and ease in accepting themselves just as they are and knowing that they are connected and loved.
These experiences of our bodies, identities, feelings, and selfhood, go far beyond the interpersonal and are in dynamic, synergistic, and ever-evolving relationship to culture, systems, and structures. to the structural and systemic. My work, builds on the shoulders of giants such audre lorde, RW Connell, James Baldwin, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha, Meg-John Barker, adrienne marie brown, Martha Nussbaum, Mari Ruti, Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Eve Sedgwick, Jane Ward, Alok Vaid-Menon, RuPaul, and many others, seeks a co-constructed, liberated world that centers pleasure, connection, and care. I draw upon post-structuralist, new materialist, and feminist embodiment perspectives and apply queer, critical race, affect, and feminist theories to frame my research.
My research areas include the process of sexuality and gender across the life course, with particular focus on early childhood through emerging adulthood (18-30 years). Relatedly, I explore the implications of gendered and cisheter/homoonormative socialization that is reinforced through relationships between individuals, and within families, communities, and institutions. At the micro level, I focus on how these assumptions manifest in psychological aggression, violence, and negative sexual sequallae in intimate relationships. I am also interested in how this connects with larger patriarchal state surveillance projects which normalize monitoring behaviors under the discourse of benevolence. I hope that, by working transdisciplinarily and across all levels of the social ecology; men, masculine people, and their sexual partners will experience increased health and well-being via deeper connection to self, others, and the wider world, and that those relationships will be supported through policy that prioritizes equity, compassion, care, and interdependence.
I use mixed methods in order to work and communicate across disciplines, currently dominant in my substantive area of research. In doing so, I provide a social work perspective to a field that has been traditionally represented by public health, sociology, and psychology. I focus on conceptual and intervention research that has practical implications for translation into social work and public health practice, education, and policy. My use of community-based approaches and feminist and creative methodologies is both a responsible way to approach my research questions, and is aligned with my social justice commitments. It is important to me that my work include community collaboration and participation that is congruent with social justice frameworks and best understand the nuances of identity formation and maintenance and relationship and sexual beliefs and behaviors. Using ecological and critical feminist frameworks in my substantive area of interest will further scientific knowledge of socialization and development and inform interventions regarding innovative strategies to create and maintain more flexible "ways of being" for all genders that support positive relational and sexual outcomes and mental and physical well-being.
I was a clinician, researcher, educator and policy practitioner working in HIV/AIDS for 4+ years before realizing, through my own experiences, the experiences of those that I love, and the experiences of those that I worked with, that I wanted to make more systemic change aimed at mitigating body/desire associated shame and the deleterious consequences of feeling like “you are not OK” in your own skin. That sent me down another path; that of more graduate school sure, but also the scary and messy path of deep self-exploration. My own experiences of feeling like I need to be “a certain way” to be acceptable (in control, accommodating, without needs or desires, “perfect”) manifested in rigidity, self-monitoring and exclusively "living-in-your-head" space that sucked me of any joy and spontaneity in life (but at least it was “safe”). I needed and wanted to awaken to my own embodied/feminine side; the side that gives emotions and affect value and trusts intuition and experience as a way of knowing and being in the world.
As well, my professional work involved primarily gay and bisexual men; who had been told clearly by our cisheteronormative social customs and associated practice and policy, that their bodies and desires were not OK. Bodies and their messy, experiences, emotions, and desires are spaces of shame for a lot of people and carry with that shame health impacts in the immediate and across the life course. I want that to change. And for those who don’t now and maybe have never felt shame or discomfort in their own skin; wow! Awesome! I want to learn from you so that all people may feel the freedom and ease in accepting themselves just as they are and knowing that they are connected and loved.
These experiences of our bodies, identities, feelings, and selfhood, go far beyond the interpersonal and are in dynamic, synergistic, and ever-evolving relationship to culture, systems, and structures. to the structural and systemic. My work, builds on the shoulders of giants such audre lorde, RW Connell, James Baldwin, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha, Meg-John Barker, adrienne marie brown, Martha Nussbaum, Mari Ruti, Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Eve Sedgwick, Jane Ward, Alok Vaid-Menon, RuPaul, and many others, seeks a co-constructed, liberated world that centers pleasure, connection, and care. I draw upon post-structuralist, new materialist, and feminist embodiment perspectives and apply queer, critical race, affect, and feminist theories to frame my research.
My research areas include the process of sexuality and gender across the life course, with particular focus on early childhood through emerging adulthood (18-30 years). Relatedly, I explore the implications of gendered and cisheter/homoonormative socialization that is reinforced through relationships between individuals, and within families, communities, and institutions. At the micro level, I focus on how these assumptions manifest in psychological aggression, violence, and negative sexual sequallae in intimate relationships. I am also interested in how this connects with larger patriarchal state surveillance projects which normalize monitoring behaviors under the discourse of benevolence. I hope that, by working transdisciplinarily and across all levels of the social ecology; men, masculine people, and their sexual partners will experience increased health and well-being via deeper connection to self, others, and the wider world, and that those relationships will be supported through policy that prioritizes equity, compassion, care, and interdependence.
I use mixed methods in order to work and communicate across disciplines, currently dominant in my substantive area of research. In doing so, I provide a social work perspective to a field that has been traditionally represented by public health, sociology, and psychology. I focus on conceptual and intervention research that has practical implications for translation into social work and public health practice, education, and policy. My use of community-based approaches and feminist and creative methodologies is both a responsible way to approach my research questions, and is aligned with my social justice commitments. It is important to me that my work include community collaboration and participation that is congruent with social justice frameworks and best understand the nuances of identity formation and maintenance and relationship and sexual beliefs and behaviors. Using ecological and critical feminist frameworks in my substantive area of interest will further scientific knowledge of socialization and development and inform interventions regarding innovative strategies to create and maintain more flexible "ways of being" for all genders that support positive relational and sexual outcomes and mental and physical well-being.