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 19 November is the third seminar.
Seminar 3: Grief Literacy: Vignettes and beyond
The original conceptualization of grief literacy included vignettes to illustrate the answer to the question: How would we know if we lived in a grief literate world? This presentation will discuss the original vignettes as well as ways in which they have been used since.
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Speaker: Susan Cadell, School of Social Work, Renison University College (Canada)
Susan Cadell, PhD, RSW (she/her) is a social work researcher and Professor of Social Work. Susan's research concerns death, dying and bereavement, particularly positive outcomes of caregiving and grief. Susan’s most recent projects concern grief in Canada, after Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), queering grief and healing tattoos. She is the co-founder of Grief Matters.
Attendance at this seminar is free. After registration the zoom link will be sent to you a few days before the seminar. More information and registration for other seminars go to the overview below.
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.
