What can be learnt from trauma healing in responding to the Anthropocene? Join us for a public seminar that brings insights from experts working with trauma healing on the ground into the larger context of living in the Anthropocene.
This seminar is jointly hosted by the Transformative Futures theme and the ReFRESH-SPIRIT project at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Anthropocene Laboratory at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Global Resilience Partnership. No registration is required.
Laura Calderon de Barca
Collective Change Lab, Mexico—Senior Associate
Psychotherapist, consultant and cultural analyst specialising in individual, intergenerational, collective and systemic trauma. Senior Associate at the Collective Change Lab (CCL), where she explores healing as the key to Systems Change. Lead-author of the ‘Healing Systems’ article published by Stanford Social Innovation Review in February 2024, the most viewed article on SSIR that year. Beside her private practice, she leads webinars and online workshops on trauma and healing colonialism, and has offered workshops on these topics in Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Kenya, Canada and online for Argentina and Latin America. She has presented her work at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford University, The Wellbeing Summits in Bilbao, Bogotá, and Saltillo. She facilitated support spaces for people of color and Spanish-speaking participants for spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl at the Academy of Inner Science and the Pocket Project, where she also participated as a panelist and host of the Collective Trauma Online Summits from 2019-2023. She is currently preparing a documentary on Healing Systems with CCL and Pirata Films which should be available by mid 2026.
Jean Pierre Ndagijimana
SolidMinds, Rwanda —Mental Health Senior RegionalManager of Strategy and Partnerships
Based in Kigali, Jean Pierre examines collective trauma, relational healing, and social transformation through African, community-embedded, and historically situated frameworks. His research and practice explore how community understandings of suffering and healing in post-genocide contexts challenge dominant psychiatric approaches while informing efforts to decolonize mental health. Informed by lived, professional, and collective engagements with post-genocide recovery in Rwanda, he explores how communities cultivate capacities for healing and social repair following collective violence and historical rupture. Through youth mental health leadership development and peer support systems in universities, he brings these commitments into culturally grounded approaches to healing that extend from campuses to communities across Africa and the Global North.
Karen O’Brien
Uppsala University, Sweden —Zennström Visiting Professor of Climate Change Leadership, cCHANGE—Co-Founder
Karen O’Brien is a human geographer whose work focuses on the social and human dimensions of environmental change, particularly in relation to climate change. She is currently the Zennström Visiting Professor in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University, as well as a Professor Emerita of Human Geography at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is also co-founder of cCHANGE, an organization that works with society to promote transformative change for a just and sustainable world. She is interested in integrative approaches to sustainability that bring together the practical, political, and personal spheres of transformation. Karen’s current research explores fractal approaches to scaling transformative change and the potential for quantum social change. She has participated in four IPCC reports and was co-chair of the International Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Transformative Change Assessment.