From Silence to Liberation: Healing the Wounded Activist, A Holistic Feminist Autoethnographic Inquiry

A free online event hosted by the Department of Transformative Inquiry.

Join us for a talk by recent Transformative Studies alumni Dr. Gillian Walters as she discusses her stunning arts-based autoethnographic doctoral dissertation, ‘From Silence to Liberation: Healing the Wounded Activist, A Holistic Feminist Autoethnographic Inquiry’. 

Dr. Walter's dissertation is an act of protest against and transcendence from the silencing of Womxn in animal liberation spaces and beyond. With unapologetic transparency and courage, she overcomes the stigma around womxn’s experiences of violence and trauma while advancing our understanding of the interconnected oppression of Womxn and nonhuman animals. The results highlight the particular power of arts-based autoethnography, and add to the fields of feminism, veganism, and trauma healing. 

Dr. Walters will discuss how she developed her effective and creative dissertation design and guided her own healing journey in the process. In this work, Dr. Walters developed several strong conceptual tools including her Trauma-Informed Intersectional Vegan Feminist Framework (TIIVFF) and Holistic Feminist Autoethnography (HFA), a 10-step guide that validates one through the vulnerability of memory recall while honoring and leveraging the researcher’s instinctive creative expression. 

The talk will conclude with a Q&A. Expect an eloquent, innovative, and moving presentation that bridges scholarship and lived experience.

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 Counseling Psychology from Seattle City University. She is a Registered Clinical Counsellor, a multi-species activist, author and artist.

Dr. Walters' work experience includes working with women, children, and diverse populations in residential addiction treatment, psychiatric settings, elementary schools and private practice. She has over a decade of postgraduate studies in trauma-informed therapies, including Expressive Play Therapy and Dance Movement Therapy.

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 developed a framework for understanding the intersections of ethical veganism, animal activism, and trauma, as well as a feminist autoethnographic method that grounds the researcher in trauma-informed practices.

She has written and illustrated two children's books and co-wrote a cookbook with her son. She is currently working on publishing a book on Holistic Feminist Autoethnography and teaching a course on the intersections of speciesism, racism and sexism.

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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 Program

Department of Transformative Inquiry