Location: Umrath Lounge
https://www.momentsofrefuge.com/
Dr Amit Bernstein, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Observing Minds Lab and the Moments of Refuge Project, in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Haifa, delivered the 6th talk in our Mindfulness and Anti-Racism Lecture Series . He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Center for Healthy Minds and the Department of Psychology, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Amit was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a doctoral student at the University of Vermont, and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and the Palo Alto VA. Amit’s research has focused on internally-directed cognition in mental health, and the (mal)adaptive ways that people process, relate to, and respond to their internal states. His group’s translational work has focused on re-training internally-directed cognition to promote mental health and to buffer the toxicity of adversity and trauma. With his students and colleagues he has published over 160 articles, he is an alumnus of the Israel Young Academy of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and his group’s work has been featured in popular media around the world.
The global human rights crisis of forced displacement has led to a global mental health crisis among tens of millions of refugees and asylum-seekers in communities around the world. The large majority of forcibly displaced people and communities are black and brown, often marginalized and minoritized prior to displacement, and often exposed to institutional and communal inequities, discrimination and systemic injustice post-displacement. Likewise, even fast-emerging climate crises, which are creating a new generation of “climate refugees”, have predominantly impacted minoritized and marginalized communities around the world. Yet, despite the magnitude, urgency, and projected growth of this global crisis of social exclusion and injustice, our collective scientific knowledge and capacity to prevent and heal the devastation of forced displacement is years behind the challenge.
In his lecture which can be found at this link, he shared his group’s mission over the past decade and their vision for the coming decade, to help build a psychological and contemplative science dedicated to the mental health and restorative social justice of forcibly displaced people. Dr. Bernstine described how they have aimed to include and to empower diverse communities of refugees and asylum-seekers to heal and thrive; through a community-embedded, inter-cultural, community-participatory model to psychological science and social impact, developed with and for forcibly displaced communities.