The purpose of this series of online seminars is to bring the concept of Grief Literacy to life by highlighting its various aspects and broad impact. There are seven one-hour seminars planned with international leaders in the field of Grief Literacy research and practice between September 2024 and March 2025. Each seminar will involve 30 minutes of presentation followed by 30 minutes of questions and dialogue. This seminar on 24 September is the first seminar.
Seminar 1: Introducing Grief Literacy Grief literacy is necessary due to the successes – and failures – of support in the wake of loss. The grief literacy movement aims to benefit all people experiencing death and non-death losses. In this presentation, the concept of grief literacy will be introduced and its similarities and differences with death literacy will be outlined. An overview of an ongoing project about grief literacy for young people will be provided.
Click here to register for free
Speaker: Lauren Breen, Curtin University, Perth Australia
Lauren J. Breen, PhD FT, is a professor of psychology at Curtin University. In 2022, she received the Research Recognition Award from the Association for Death Education and Counseling (USA). Lauren’s TEDx talk “Six myths about grief to bust for yourself, and your loved ones” has achieved over 50,000 views. Edited with Carrie Traher, her book The Routledge International Handbook of Child and Adolescent Grief in Contemporary Contexts was published in 2024.
Background Series of online Seminars on Grief Literacy
Grief and loss are fundamentally human experiences, touching on a very universal and existential layer of life. Yet there is great embarrassment in societies around this topic. Grief Literacy is a concept coined in 2020 by a sub-group of the International Workgroup for Death Dying Bereavement (IWGDDB). Grief Literacy is: a) The capacity to access, process, and use knowledge regarding the experience of loss. b) This capacity is multidimensional: it comprises knowledge to facilitate understanding and reflection, skills to enable action, and values to inspire compassion and care. c) These dimensions connect and integrate via the interdependence of individuals within socio-cultural contexts (Breen et al., 2020). The transformative value of the concept consists in making visible the extent to which current societies or cultures avoid grief and helping us to formulate new strategies to address it. Specifically, it addresses a lack of appropriate compassionate responses to people in mourning.
The purpose of this series of online seminars is to bring the concept of Grief Literacy to life by highlighting its various aspects and broad impact. We hope this series will contribute to a greater awareness and sensitivity of how people respond to their own grief or the grief of others, and will lead to an increase in the compassionate support of ordinary people among themselves.
