Recipes for Resilience: Art, Story, and Self-Care in Social Justice Work
Anchal Jain, MSW (she/her); Logan Knight, PhD (she/her) & Sheridan Waldrop, MSW (she/her) | September 23 | 1:45-2:45 pm EDT
Topic: Art, Direct Service | Knowledge Level: Intermediate
This presentation explores the presenters’ lived experiences as social justice agents engaging in emotional labor in anti-trafficking work, and underscores self-care as an essential means for remaining present, effective, and compassionate in the pursuit of justice. Grounded in a critical feminist framework, they conceptualize emotional labor as legitimate labor and draw on lived experience to illustrate how self-care is not an individual indulgence, but an ethical and professional necessity. They will begin by sharing how their work as researchers, practitioners, and advocates is emotionally demanding, requiring sustained, wholehearted engagement and attunement with people. The personal impact of such work has included overwhelm, and physical and emotional fatigue. To manage these impacts, restore balance, and maintain wholehearted connection to the work, they have found creative and embodied practices to be necessary, such as poetry, painting, collage, theatre, cooking, journaling, and nature mapping. They also found other relational and protective practices such as community care circles and digital boundaries to be essential. They will share stories of these practices and will provide attendees with opportunities to identify personally meaningful and sustainable care practices. Their experiences are not unique; researchers, practitioners, and advocates in this field routinely engage in intensive emotional labor, including witnessing trauma and its aftermath and navigating systems of injustice. Such work creates heightened risk for burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary trauma. This presentation thus concludes with a call to action for researchers, practitioners, and advocates to recognize emotional labor as legitimate labor and to integrate sustainable self-care practices into their daily lives.
Presentation Objectives:
• Describe the role of emotional labor in social justice and anti-trafficking work through lived experiences and narrative reflection
• Describe how sustained exposure to trauma and injustice impacts practitioner well-being from the viewpoint of lived experience
• Demonstrate creative and accessible self-care practices that support emotional processing and resilience
• Facilitate participant reflection to identify and apply individualized self-care strategies that promote sustainability in research, practice, and advocacy