SHCP Alumni Weekend 2026 | Sexual Violence, Somatics, and Justice-Oriented Practice: A Relational, Ecological, and Justice-Centered Approach to Embodiment

Saturday, September 26, 2026, 2:15 PM–6:30 PM ET

Online via Zoom

Continuing Education Offered

• 4 hours general social work synchronous interactive online
• 4 hours AASECT synchronous interactive online

Description

This webinar introduces an integrative framework for understanding trauma, embodiment, and healing through somatic psychology, ecological systems thinking, disability justice, and relational practice. Participants will examine how bodies organize in response to safety, coercion, and sexual violence while exploring ethical approaches that emphasize agency, consent, and non-pathologizing care. Through didactic instruction, experiential reflection, discussion, and applied clinical examples, participants will develop practical strategies for supporting people who have experienced sexual violence by cultivating therapeutic relationships and broader ecologies of care that expand choice, connection, and long-term well-being.

Objectives

1. Describe how embodiment, ecological relationships, and contextual conditions influence human adaptation, organization, and responses to sexual violence.
2. Identifying one way bodies organize in response to changing environmental and interpersonal conditions.
3. Differentiate between pathology-based and relational, non-pathologizing approaches to understanding trauma.
4. Apply principles of ethical accompaniment, consent, and embodied choice to support agency and reduce the potential for therapeutic reenactments of coercion or disempowerment.

Agenda

Saturday, September 26, 2026

• 2:15pm–3:15pm Reimagining Embodiment: An Intro to Somatics and Underlying Philosophies
• 3:15pm–4:15pm Understanding Embodied Organization
• 4:15pm–4:30pm BREAK
• 4:30pm–5:30pm Understanding Sexual Violence Through an Embodied Lens
• 5:30pm–6:30pm Cultivating Embodied Ecologies of Care

Instructor

Erin E. Hipple, PhD, LCSW, MA is a social work educator, scholar, therapist, politicized grief tender, song carrier, therapeutic game master, and enthusiastic inhabitant of the places where disciplines get a little unruly. Their work wanders among politicized somatics, disability justice, relational pedagogy, care labor, grief, ecojustice, tabletop role-playing games, and the question of how people shaped by extractive institutions might collectively practice becoming otherwise. Erin is especially interested in story-worlds, collective imagination, and the radical possibilities of asking better questions before reaching for tidier answers. When not teaching, writing, facilitating, or gently complicating things, they can often be found paying attention to plants, other-than-human (and human) animals, singing to rivers, rescuing tadpoles from evaporating puddles, and pondering the occasional fictional villain who probably deserved a more contextual assessment.

CE Approval Statement

This program meets the requirements for the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) and is approved for up to 4 CE credits. These CE credits may be applied toward AASECT certification and renewal of certification. University of Michigan Sexual Health Program, Provider #06-104D. Completion of this program does not ensure or guarantee AASECT certification. For further information please visit http://www.aasect.org/

The University of Michigan School of Social Work, provider #1212, is approved to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: 5/15/2026–5/15/2029. Social workers completing this course receive 4 continuing education credits.

Please see the CE Policies page for more information about continuing education.