Dancing Through Trauma into Healing: An Intersectional Vegan Feminist Autoethnographic Journey

How does one idea blossom into a Ph.D. dissertation? Recent Transformative Studies graduate Dr. Gillian Walters will present her just finished, gorgeous and powerful, feminist auto-ethnographic dissertation on healing and liberation. 

Join Dr. Jennifer Wells as she introduces Gillian to present her dissertation process and results. Journey through Gillian's dissertation to discover how a specifically designed framework was created and applied to expand understanding of the intersections of trauma, social location, and vegan animal activist identity. The results are a woven tapestry of story and artistic expression, guided by theoretical rigor and a commitment to self-inquiry.

Meet the Hosts

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Gillian Meghan Walters, Ph.D., earned her doctorate from CIIS in Transformative Studies. She has a Master of Arts degree in Counselling Psychology from Seattle City University. She is a Registered Clinical Counsellor, a multi-species activist, and an artist. Dr. Walters's embodiment of ethical veganism informs her life and scholarly work. Her work is guided by her dissertation, titled "From Silence to Liberation, Healing the Wounded Activist: A Holistic Feminist Autoethnographic Inquiry." In her dissertation, she created a framework for understanding the intersections of ethical veganism, animal activism, and trauma, as well as a method of feminist autoethnography that grounds the researcher in trauma-informed practices.

Gillian is a single mother to both human and non-human children. Besides reading and research, she enjoys music, weight training, the beach, and gardening.

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Jennifer Wells researches human ecology and social change. Her research aims at bringing uplifting and imaginative responses to the growing poly-crisis. She draws from the theoretical areas of complex thought, real utopian studies, and degrowth, and from leading Indigenous, BIPOC and Global South scholarship. Wells has degrees from Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Sorbonne, Paris IV. Since 2020, she has been a Visiting Scholar at the Sorbonne, Paris I, Center for Contemporary Philosophy and the Institute of Legal and Philosophical Sciences, in Paris, France. Currently, she is focused on a book project on discourse and praxis that shifts everyday thinking and worldviews towards a more complex and creative vision for the 21st Century. Her last book was the internationally recognized Complexity and Sustainability (Routledge 2014), on the contribution of complex thought to global sustainability. Her doctoral dissertation focused on complex thought and climate change (2009). She has done extensive public speaking, particularly in Paris and around the SF Bay Area and on the topics of applying systems and complex thought as well as imagination and creativity, to the climate crisis. Over her career, Wells has visited over 100 sites of ‘real utopias’ over four continents. She previously co-authored a book on the emerging biosciences, funded by and written for the Ford Foundation. After college, she worked for a few years as a writer at the United Nations Association and as Director of the Sustainability Education Center in New York, NY. She also helped to found and develop a writing and arts retreat center on an organic farm in Colebrook, Connecticut. Wells has a passion for new emergent sciences, humanities and arts, such as recent research in animal and plant intelligence and the environmental humanities.

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Related Academic Department
Transformative Inquiry