Fall Workshop: Mind & Matter: Using Social Science to Facilitate Social Justice in Our Social Services

Dr. Aziza A. B. Platt

Event Description:

This interactive workshop will focus on using information about how our minds work to help us integrate anti-racism into our clinical work. Attendees will explore common pitfalls in our reasoning, language, behavior, and interactions, and practice leveraging social science in the service of social justice in a rapidly awakening and evolving society.

Workshop Objectives:

The participant will be able to:

• Identify and describe cognitive and behavioral challenges that contribute to biases and inhibit anti-racist action in clinical, professional, and institutional settings

• Describe and analyze the functions of these challenges in intra- and interpersonal, institutional, and systemic racism

• Distinguish between pseudo and passive anti-racist actions and actual and intentional anti-racist actions

• Practice strategies to become an ethical therapist including increasing cognitive flexibility and negotiating our own mental barriers around race, racism, and anti-racism

3 Ethics CEUs available for Social Workers, LPCs, LMFTs

About the presenter:

Dr. Aziza A. B. Platt is a licensed psychologist providing culturally-responsive individual and group psychotherapy, family therapy, and psychological assessment. She treats various concerns and specializes in racial-cultural issues, trauma, and grief. She was inspired to get into mental health to contribute to efforts to make therapy more acceptable, accessible, and affordable, particularly for marginalized communities.

Social justice and liberation are an indelible part of her work. For patients, she aims to eliminate barriers, structural and otherwise, to seeking and receiving quality and culturally competent mental health care, especially for underrepresented and underserved communities. As a practitioner, she strives to help the field and practitioners become increasingly more culturally aware and responsive. As a scientist, she focuses on health disparities and evidence-based research to inform culturally responsive clinical practice. As a consultant, she endeavors to help create culture shifts around cross-cultural engagement toward achieving equity.