“Politics Of Trauma” / “generative somatics”: Collective watching of an embodied social justice online course

“The Politics of Trauma” is a online course led by Erika Lyla, Brandon Sturdivant and Staci Haines that explores the intersection of trauma, power, and social justice. The course examines how trauma is shaped by systemic oppression, its impact on individuals and communities, and offers tools for healing and collective action. It emphasizes trauma- informed practices in social and political activism.

Together we want to watch this course with people we feel affinities with: people who are fighting for a world free of colonialism, exploitation, patriarchy, statism, racism, queer- and transphobia. We want to create a caring, radical and heart-warm space.

The idea is to meet on 8 evenings in total, to watch this online course together home-cinema style on a projector. We intend to practice the exercises collectively, most practices are done in pairs. Of course there is always the possibility to skip practices you don’t feel well with.

We don’t expect to agree with everything in the course – still we find much of the content valuable for our communities and fights. There will be space to talk about the content of the course, and to reflect and exchange about what was being said. That is also why we want to watch the course together.

Practicalities: → The language of the course and our exchanges will be english.

→ We want to meet on 8 Tuesday evenings from 18.30 (arrival) to 21:00. These are the dates:

2.12., 9.12., 16.12., 30.12., 13.1., 27.1., 3.2., and 10.2.

→ There are 6 + 2 modules with 2 videos per module, each of these videos is about 80-100 minutes long. We will start on our first evening with the Welcoming Video that already includes basic practices to try out. The idea is to then watch one video of each of the 6 modules individually (during the week between the sessions) to prepare for the collective screening+practice evening, where we watch the second video of the module. => In total there are 14 course videos (8 to be watched collectively, 6 to be watched individually).

→ Contact: Since we want to practice the embodiment exercises, there will be place for around 15 people If you are interested, please write us on signal to our username: apesd.01 If you don’t have signal, you can write an email to: apesd@riseup.net

→ Location and accessibility: derknoten.wien (Heinzelmanngasse 17, 1200 Wien)

The space unfortunately has some barriers, it’s a souterrain room where you have to descent some stairs. If you have accessibly needs, please write to us, we will try to support you within our possibilities

→ Contribution: Time and care: We would like our group to be mostly self-organized. We want no service roles to develop and therefore share tasks like opening and closing the room, cleaning, taking care of different needs, making it comfortable, taking care for snacks and food (if we want), communication etc. between all people who participate

Money: There is a course from 2024 that is accessible offline. It was given to us as free, so no money is needed to access this course. The access to the 2024 course videos will be shared on our first meeting. If you don’t want to participate in the group but still want to have access to the course, please let us know or ask your friends if they have access.

🔥We find it important that everybody with little or no money gets access to somatic and trauma skills and knowledge, and people who do have access share their privileges with others. We suggest that persons with privileged access to money buy the current course themselves or donate to the Generative Somatics CEE group (bank account details will be shared later). Since our location relies on donations, there will be a free donation box.

We are both nonbinary and white. We don’t want to reproduce any coolness or scene codes that exclude others. It is important to us to actively create a space that is as free of discrimination as possible. We want to meet on eye level, aware that we can all learn from each other.

Feel free to forward this invitation to friends and people you think might be interested, please don’t share on data mining social media (instagram, facebook etc).