This blog is written by Mieke Snijder (Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies) and Brigitte Rohwerder (Researcher, Institute of Development Studies).
“Oppression is the distribution and concentration of trauma into bodies and communities designated less powerful. The mechanism that leaves these same bodies and communities without the money, time or support to heal”
Prentis Hemphill (2024), What it takes to heal: How transforming ourselves can transform the world
These ‘bodies and communities’ that Prentis Hemphill mentions are the ones that we work with in our participatory research: people who are marginalised by systems of oppression such as capitalism, racism, ableism, militarism, patriarchy, and colonialism. We are in an era of polycrisis. We see an increase in natural and human-made disasters linked to the climate crisis, rising inequality across the world, and heightened violence. With these crises, the presence of trauma increases too, alongside unresolved intergenerational trauma resulting from colonisation and living in extreme poverty. Exploring how individual and collective trauma can be healed could therefore be an important avenue to enable system change that contributes to systems that promote wellbeing for all in a flourishing web of life.
In our participatory research work, we have seen indications of how these methods and approaches can contribute to healing. We convened a workshop of IDS-based participatory researchers to collectively explore how healing has shown up in our participatory research and practice. In this workshop, we explored our past research, what we mean by healing, healing as a mechanism for system change, and where we would like to take this work.
In this blog series, we want to share our emerging thinking resulting from this workshop. We would like to thank Marina Apgar, Sofya Shahab, Chloe Skinner, Jackie Shaw, Tessa Lewin, Marjoke Oosterom, and Mariah Cannon, who participated in the workshop and played a crucial role in conversations feeding into this blog series.
What do we mean by healing? An initial conversation
It wouldn’t have been a workshop led by participatory researchers if we didn’t use the participatory and creative methods we love working with. We therefore started our exploration with a creative exercise in which we visualised our own research journeys in “rivers of life.” We supplemented this with presentations of our research, including the powerful work on healing justice as a feminist organising framework in Africa from Jackie Shaw and Tessa Lewin, and Sofya Shahab’s Future Fellowship on the role of creative methodologies, heritage, and cultivating peace.
Based on this exploration, we discussed what we mean by healing.
Healing is a political process
Healing is not a linear process, nor is it an endpoint. Collective healing is a political process when we place justice at the centre of healing. Justice in healing means we need to change the systems that are traumatising people so that healing becomes possible. However, this leads to important questions: Is it possible to heal within ongoing oppressive systems and during continuing conflict and violence? Can healing individuals lead to healing systems?
Across different parts of our work (in Mali, in Palestine, and in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq), we have seen processes of healing where people and communities hold violence and peace at the same time. In these contexts, healing can become an act of resistance. Framing healing as an act of resistance makes healing both a psychological process and a political one. Healing the individual and healing the system can be iterative political processes of systems change — but under what conditions can healing take place?
Healing as a collective process
Healing is a collective process, where people come together and share their experiences. In Western psychology, trauma and healing are generally approached individually, but the individual cannot be separated from the collective. As such, healing is a collective process: it is the process of understanding our own experiences (as a collective) by realising that others are different in similar ways to how we are different.
The importance of shared reflection
Processing together gives us a deeper understanding of each other and our shared experiences. This can be done through creative practice and reflexivity.
Healing therefore requires taking space and time out of the everyday to reflect on our experiences — this is one way that participatory methods and processes can provide opportunities for healing, as they allow people to step out of their everyday routines with others and reflect collectively.
This reflective space can be created with human and more-than-human others, as nature can similarly provide this opportunity by giving people “a space to breathe.”
Reconnection and embodiment
Healing is about reconnecting with our own bodies and with other bodies — including the more-than-human. Trauma creates disconnection from our own bodies and from others, inhibiting our ability to connect and relate. Given the embodied nature of trauma, healing must also be an embodied process.
Ritual, music, dance, and other embodied practices can help us reconnect with others. Ritual and spiritual practices connect us with one another across spacetime: they create a space to connect with those physically present, as well as with people who have come before us and those who will come after. The liminal space of ritual forms a tunnel toward a new reality where healing can take place.
Hope and looking forward
Hope is essential in healing. We need hope that change is possible, that this new reality exists, and that we can collectively move toward it. Undertaking participatory action research with others — where we prefigure a “new now” by implementing change together — can also be healing, because it reinforces the belief that this “new place” is attainable.
Healing is about moving toward a new place. It is forward-looking, acknowledging both the existing scars and the systems of oppression that create trauma. As French and colleagues (2020) summarise when discussing radical healing:
“Staying in either extreme — the despair of oppression or the imagination of possibilities — could be detrimental. On one end of the spectrum, one could get lost in an overwhelming sense of disempowerment. On the other end, only focusing on dreaming for a better future removes oneself from current reality.”