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 15 October is the second seminar.
Seminar 2: Grief Literacy & Truth and Reconciliation Grief and grieving are always individual, social, and political. Each grief experience is shaped by the griever’s socio-cultural background, their shared experiences within their social network, and by their political context. In this presentation, the lens of grief literacy will be used to reflect on the Truth and Reconciliation process unfolding currently in Canada as the country is grappling with its colonial past, present, and future. Orange Shirt Day and the Every Child Matters movement commemorating Indigenous children who were forced into residential schools will be a particular focus in this presentation.
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Speaker: Mary Ellen Macdonald, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada)
Mary Ellen Macdonald, PhD (Anthropology) holds the J&W Murphy Foundation Endowed Chair in Palliative Care at Dalhousie University. Her research program focuses on understanding and enhancing death and grief literacy. She is co-founder of Grief Matters, a Canadian project enhancing grief literacy. Her recent TEDx talk is on ‘Grief, memory, and caring for the dead.’
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.
