The painting below emerged from an eight-week educational cohort on body healing that centered around social justice themes and was influenced by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Somatic Experiencing (SE). Somatic abolitionism (Menakem, 2022) served as the theoretical framework for this cohort; somatic abolitionism asserts that healing racialized traumas and striving for abolitionism—a movement dedicated to dismantling systemic oppression, especially the school-to-prison pipeline—requires each individual to engage in processing these micro-moments in their bodies and… Continue Reading I Am Not a Lone Person Scattered Here: Intergenerational Healing Through Somatic Experiencing and Research
Finding My Voice as a Hmong Woman and Creating Space in Science Everyone’s journey through science is different. For some, it is about discovery or building a skillset to ensure a promising career. For me, it is about unlearning the gender roles of my culture and finding my voice as a Hmong woman in science. The origins of my upbringing are rooted in scarcity and oppression, yet incredible strength and resilience. The Hmong people are… Continue Reading A Seat at the Table: Reflections of a Hmong Woman Scientist
How Hmong Women Reconcile Traumas Through Retelling Supernatural Stories On a Sunday afternoon in April, my partner and I arrived at our rental home in St. Paul, MN from Wausau, WI, where we returned from a Hmong traditional healing ritual for me. As usual, my partner parked the car on the street. I gently opened the door and slid my body out of the car to prevent myself from falling. When I stood firm on… Continue Reading The Manifestation of Transborder Love
Have you ever stepped into a kitchen with a handful of aunties preparing for a feast? They giggle and gossip all while passing plates and stirring pots at the same time. In such a cramped space, with so many bodies, it feels like a dance, always needing to make space, yet there always seems to be enough room for oneself. It’s as if hidden spaces are within the space, waiting to be squeezed out by… Continue Reading Kitchen-Table Talk
What follows is the transcript of a two-episode podcast series on caregiving that follows the author’s experiences as a caregiver to her elders to what she hopes caregiving can be now as a graduate student and future researcher. Episode I | In My Bones: Feeling Coercion Thank you to the Community of Scholars Program (COSP) at the University of Minnesota for making this podcast possible. And thank you to the folks at SPARK for working… Continue Reading Caring to the Bone: Healing From Coercive Care
The Black community is eager for revitalization, having long endured economic inequality with the slowest progress toward equity out of any racial group in the United States (Hamilton et al., 2015; DeNavas-Walt and Proctor, 2015). Rising above economic inequality is not unknown to the Black community. Before the tragic events of 1921, the Greenwood District in Tulsa, also known as Black Wall Street, was a thriving hub of economic prosperity within the African American community.… Continue Reading Black Economics: Reclaiming the Narrative for Economic Revitalization
I finished the first year of my doctoral program in counseling psychology in early May of 2020. About two weeks later, George Floyd was murdered. As a Black woman living in Minneapolis at the time of this unrest, I was processing both the all-too-familiar trauma of yet another police killing going viral and the new trauma of living in the epicenter of the largest racial reckoning within my lifetime. Despite my fear, anger, and sadness,… Continue Reading The Politics of Psychology