Online Seminars on Grief Literacy - Seminar 1: Introducing Grief Literacy, Lauren Breen, Australia
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.
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.
Registration
Attendance at this seminar is free
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.
Information
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. The seminars will be held online and are intended for a broad audience, including students, PhDs, staff, volunteers, citizens, and interested professionals/parties from (grief) networks or care institutions.Collaboration
Together we invest in a more grief literate society. This is a collaboration between the following universities, organisations and institutes:
- Informal care & Care ethics, University for Humanistic Studies, the Netherlands
- Compassionate Communities Centre of Expertise (COCO) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
- Curtin University Perth, Australia
- Policy Science Unit, Kyoto University School of Medicine, Japan
- Agora, knowledge and development organization: social approach to palliative care, the Netherlands
- Department of Human Centered Design, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
- Pharos, Dutch Centre of Expertise on Health Disparities, Netherlands
- The Local Social Policy Unit for City and PCSW Bruges, Belgium
- Centre of Expertise Perspective in Health, Avans University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands
- Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
- School of Social Work, Renison University College, affiliated with the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
- Department of Social Work and Social Administration, Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
- Caring connections: A Hope and Comfort in Grief Program. University of Utah College of Nursing
| Topic | Speaker | Date |
| Seminar 1 Introducing Grief Literacy | Lauren Breen Curtin University Australia | 24 SEPTEMBER 2024 2 PM CET |
| Seminar 2 | Mary Ellen Macdonald Halifax, Canada | 15 OCTOBER 2024 2 PM CET |
| Seminar 3 | Susan Cadell Ontario, Canada | 19 NOVEMBER 2024 2 PM CET |
| Seminar 4 | Carl Becker School of Medicine Kyoto University Japan | 4 DECEMBER 2024 2 PM CET |
| Seminar 5 Grief Literacy, societal impact | Bianca Neumann-Morris UK | 14 of JANUARY 2025 2 PM CET |
| Seminar 6 | Kathie Supiano Salt Lake City, VS | 20 February 2025 4 PM CET |
| Seminar 7 Measuring and Quantifying Grief Literacy: Towards a Grief Literacy Index | Yong Hao Ng Hong Kong | 25 MARCH 2025 10 CET |
| Contactpersoon | Anne Goossensen |
| Locatie | online |
| griefliteracy@uvh.nl | |
| Datum | 24-9-2024 |
| Openingstijden | 2PM CET |