Retreat Website
Two Full Days of a Coastal Faculty Retreat for BIPOC and BIPOC-WOC
Rockaway Beach, Oregon
August 18 and August 19, 2022
A small group of six participants will spend two full days at Oregon’s beautiful Rockaway Beach, (only 1.5 hours away from Portland) in a house overlooking the ocean and the famous Twin Rocks and with a gorgeous deck to engage in some trauma informed guided workshops. In the retreat, co-facilitated by faculty, writers and professionals trained in understanding various manifestations of trauma and institutional betrayals we will immerse ourselves in deep discussions, meaningful writing, and thoughtful reflections on academic trauma, micro-aggressions, betrayals and healing. The co-facilitators will use anti-racist and justice-oriented approaches to the workshops and the goal of the retreat will be to focus on academic well-being and wellness by building some intentional community and coalition building to break through the isolation of experiencing academic trauma in the academy.
Lunch and light refreshments will be included and we will set aside some time to take a stroll on the beach (weather permitting).
Retreat Day 1: August 18, 2022
10:30am – 5pm (includes lunch)
Writing and Reflecting on Academic Trauma, and Strategies for Coping and Healing.
Co-Lead by Janice Lee and Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt
The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. It is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature. –Thich Nhat Hanh
Identity is the factoring out and performative denial of our own perceptual immersion or entanglement with forces that generate and undo the boundaries with which we mark ourselves as different from others. – Bayo Akomolafe
How do different bodies and worlds articulate each other, or, how do we learn to be affected? How might writing, both private and public open up space while processing trauma or grief?
In the first segment of this workshop will explore how the presence of unresolved corporeal history and the impossibility of articulation or expression lead to new encounters in language, and encourage you to imagine new futures that don’t depend on replicating the energies of the systems we seek to dismantle or the patterns we seek to heal from. We will investigate and reframe our relationships with our trauma, imagine identity and being through the lens of assemblage and permeability, and explore new and porous ways of working towards individual and collective healing through writing prompts, guided meditation, and personal medicine work.
In the second segment of the workshop (post lunch) we will have some deep and honest conversations about locating the sites and various manifestations of our academic traumas and betrayals. By sharing our own stories and identifying our common struggles, we will work towards processing some fundamental questions. How do we protect ourselves? How do we strategize to move forward in ways that are meaningful for us? How do we build coalitions and acts of resilience that allow us to break through our isolations and heal? We will also discuss some opportunities and venues for public writing and publishing.