Through the lens of cultural studies methodologies, Julie will take an alternative look at pop culture’s influence on youth.  By making space for young clients to talk about their relationship with pop culture, Julie will demonstrate conversational practices that afford youth opportunities to engage in meaningful and critical ways with pop culture . The presentation will take a both/and look at pop culture, viewing it as a potential site for productive meaning making and identity development as well as a source of negative influence and reinforcement of limiting identity conclusions and consumer consumption. Therapists will learn to use conceptual and conversational resources from cultural studies that legitimate their engagement with media texts and honor young peoples’ ways of making meaning in the world.

In this engaging and lively workshop Julie will focus on cultivating relationally and culturally responsive practices that bring forward and honor queer young people’s preferred identities. Linking conceptual resources with the craft of question-asking, Julie will help you put queer theory into therapeutic action. Narrative therapy and queer theory will be featured as praxis allies that invite you and your clients into a reflexive and generative relationship with ideas that instigate hopeful resistance to prevailing cultural discourses.

Julie goes beyond the notion of “celebrating” or “embracing” diversity and delves into an examination of the ubiquitous issues of power and privilege that serve as the under girding of systems of oppression and marginalization. Participants will explore issues of racism, classism, hetoronormativy, homonormativity, ageism, ableism, sexism, and intersectionality. The format is interactive and experiential, encourages reflexivity, and includes practical strategies for clinical work.

This experiential, practice-based workshop will examine the cultural contexts that influence transgender youth, the important people in their lives, and the therapists that seek to help them.  Participants will be introduced to practices informed by queer theory that honor a proliferation of identity conclusions, respect the need for therapy separate from evaluation, and that challenge conventional ideas and practices about working with transgender youth and families.

A well-received and very happy-making workshop for therapists, educators, and social service providers, Fire Up! invites participants to re-claim, re-discover, and re-member why they are in the field they chose, what they bring to it, when they are at their best, what others most value about them, and what it is that can keep them going—individually and as a team.  This is a generative process that privileges the stories and knowledge of the participants.  In this interactive, experiential, and hope-full workshop, participants will tell and hear stories that reconnect them back to their passion and purpose while also clearing a way to the future.

Julie will facilitate an interactive and practice-based workshop that introduces participants to ideas and practices that encourage generative, culturally resonant, and responsive conversations between youth and the adults that work alongside them.  Drawing on ideas from constructionist philosophy, post-structural and queer theories, cultural studies methodologies, anti-oppressive practices, and liberatory education, she will provide opportunities to try on practices that position helpers as conversational partners with young people.