Calling-In: Cultivating Cultural Healing, Embodied Storytelling and Narrative Humanization

Learning Objectives:

  • How Calling in culture fosters accountability, forgiveness, empathy, respect and greater humanity towards
    ourselves & others
  • Cancel culture as a direct result and symptom of a culture driven by white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism
  • How self-awareness and somatic practices help build resilience in the face of problematic and/or challenging circumstances
  • What it means to be trauma-informed vs trauma-driven
  • How to use Calling in practices to unify people to work better together
  • Calling in as a strategy for a human rights movement

Dr. Loretta Ross

Public Intellectual. Author. Professor. Activist

Biography

Dr. Loretta J. Ross is an Associate Professor at Smith College. As a 2022 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award, she is an activist, public intellectual, and scholar. Her passion is innovating creative imagining about global human rights and social justice issues. As the third director of the first rape crisis center in the country in the 1970s, she helped launch the movement to end violence against women that has evolved into today’s #MeToo movement. She also founded the first center in the U.S. to innovate creative human rights education for all students so that social justice issues are more collaborative and less divisive. She has also deprogrammed members of hate groups leading to conceptualizing and writing a book on Calling In the Calling Out Culture to transform how people can overcome political differences to use empathy and respect to guide difficult conversations.

Loretta started her career in activism and social change in the 1970s, working at the National Football League Players’ Association, the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Black Women’s Health Project, the Center for Democratic Renewal (National Anti-Klan Network), the National Center for Human Rights Education, and SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, until retiring as an organizer in 2012 to teach about activism.

Her most recent books are Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, co-written with Rickie Solinger, and Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique. Her forthcoming book, Calling In the Calling Out Culture, is due in 2024.

She has been quoted in the New York Times, Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among others. In addition, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2023.