Listening Across Culture, Social Position and Power

      Presented by: Michelle Maher, PhD

"Listening across Culture, Social Position & Power" highlights that the therapeutic alliance occurs within social, historical, political, economic and cultural contexts.  In the United States, residents have inherited a history of difficult and often hostile relations across particular categories of difference: race, ethnicity, tribe, geography, sex, gender, class, sexuality, ability, phenotype, body size, etc. How we speak often unwittingly responds to the social position projected upon us through those institutions, a position between oppression and privilege. The counseling professions (psychotherapists, counselors, social workers, human service workers) seek authentic therapeutic relationships, where clients feel safe enough to reflect upon and affirm their experience and goals in a space of acceptance, non-judgmental positive regard, and receptivity. In order to do that, we must be able to identify forms of cross-cultural miscommunication and listen across social locations to the insidious trauma of institutionalized discrimination and experiences of oppression. This workshop for counseling professionals initiates a closer look into how discussions about difference can be heard from particular social positions.

About the Presenter: 

 Dr. Michelle Maher is an author, university teacher, and public speaker in private practice in Eugene, Oregon.  She grew up in a multiracial family. Michelle is a former alternative high school principal and child and family therapist. She has provided cross-cultural trainings in education and counseling since 1993.  She brings an awareness of how the form of colonization in the U.S.A. organized the forms of social and economic inequality we see widening today.  Dr. Maher is a Syracuse University Fellow. She currently teaches the Sociology of Education and Cross-Cultural Counseling and Education at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.  She also taught as an Instructor/Assistant Professor in Lewis and Clark College’s Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program in Portland Oregon. She has presented internationally on the institutionalization of inequality and multicultural education and counseling.  Michelle is particularly interested in the powerful critiques youth labeled “at-risk” have of public schooling about their education in inequality. 

Join us for a warm breakfast and an opportunity to network with other behavioral health professionals from 8:00 - 8:45 am.  

       Please be prepared to have found a seat and make sure you have class materials by 8:30am as the instruction will begin promptly at 8:45.  

3 CEU's

Online registration is required to attend.

Flat fee of $20.00 payable online or at the door.

Credit Card Payments can be made online when you register.

Only cash or checks will be accepted at the door.

Please make your check payable to Cedar Hills Hospital.

Register Now!