Rachel Aviv reports on psychiatry, medical ethics, and how institutions shape intimate life. Her award-winning features and bestselling book investigate how diagnostic and trauma narratives can both widen access to care and confine a person within a single story. In her forthcoming collection on mothers and daughters, she reconsiders earlier essays to surface disowned knowledge, recognition, and refusal. For this event, Aviv brings a reporter’s precision and ethical sensitivity to questions clinicians face daily: how to use language that names harm without reducing a life to diagnosis, and how to keep multiple frameworks in view while staying close to a person’s own words.

A scholar of modern Chinese literature and culture, Yiju Huang studies how large-scale social transformations are registered in aesthetic forms. Her book, Tapestry of Light, traces the psychic and cultural afterlives of the Cultural Revolution across fiction, memoir, painting, and film. Huang’s current work explores the spiritual dimensions of Chinese literary modernity and engages psychoanalysis, trauma, and memory studies. She will speak to how poetic and philosophical languages can open new possibilities for witnessing suffering.

Steve Sandage researches virtue, forgiveness, and spiritually integrative psychotherapy, with attention to practitioner formation, intercultural competence, and moral development. He consults widely with chaplains and clinicians on trauma, moral injury, and repair and has authored or edited multiple books and clinical resources. At this gathering, Sandage brings evidence-informed perspectives on how forgiveness, humility, and character formation can expand trauma-informed care and how clinicians can foster practices of repair that honor spiritual and cultural particularity.

David Goodman is a clinical psychologist whose work bridges psychology, philosophy, and the arts. At Boston College, he has taught in the Woods College, the Lynch School, and the Morrissey College, and previously held faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, Lesley University, Regis College, and Azusa Pacific University. As founder and director of the Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics, he convenes conferences, public programs, and publications that cultivate language for suffering and care. Goodman has authored or edited more than a dozen books over the last decade. For this event, he frames how psychological-humanities approaches can complement and expand trauma discourse so that institutions recognize harm without collapsing complex lives into reductive labels.

Joseph Gone is an interdisciplinary social scientist who collaborates with Indigenous communities to redesign mental health services through culture, spirituality, and history. His scholarship critically examines “Indigenous historical trauma,” compares Indigenous cultural psychologies with the logics of the mental health professions, and develops community-grounded initiatives such as the Blackfeet Culture Camp and the Urban American Indian Traditional Spirituality Program. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of multiple APA divisions, an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and a recipient of the APA Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research and the APF Gold Medal for Impact in Psychology. His work critically examines concepts such as “historical trauma,” develops community-grounded programs (e.g., culture camps), and challenges imported models that flatten Indigenous self-understanding. For our conversation, Gone will articulate when trauma discourse clarifies lived experience and when it obscures sovereignty, agency, and communal forms of healing.

Alex Pieterse is a counseling psychologist whose work examines the psychosocial dimensions of race and racism, racial trauma, antiracism training, and clinician self-awareness. He is a licensed psychologist and serves as Editor-Elect for The Counseling Psychologist. Recent publications address the relationship between PTSD and race-based traumatic stress, multiracial identity, internalized racism, and minority stress. His recent work on race-related stress and religious coping, the stress associated with antiracism advocacy, and racial discrimination and trauma in the social science literature informs how he sees “trauma” functioning in this research—when the trauma frame helps name racism-related harm and when it risks occluding structural violence, community meaning, and spiritual resources.

Allan Horwitz is a leading sociologist of mental health whose work traces how diagnostic categories emerge, expand, and take root in culture. Trained in psychiatric epidemiology at Yale, he is the author of influential books including DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible, PTSD: A Short History, The Loss of Sadness (with Jerome Wakefield), and All We Have to Fear (with Wakefield). His research explains how social meanings of harm and risk shape the boundaries of illness. For this event, Horwitz situates trauma and PTSD historically and helps us evaluate when diagnostic expansion promotes recognition versus when it blurs clinically useful distinctions.

A constructive theologian, Shelly Rambo writes at the intersection of trauma, witness, and theopoetics. In Spirit and Trauma and Resurrecting Wounds, she develops a “theology of remaining” that resists premature closure and tidy narratives of redemption. Rambo partners with chaplains and educators in post-conflict settings to design practices of spiritual care. Her work invites us to hold wounds in view without rushing to resolution, and to cultivate forms of care that honor the afterlives of trauma.

Zenobia Morrill is a psychologist and psychotherapy researcher whose work focuses on psychotherapy process, qualitative and mixed-method inquiry, and critical-liberation psychologies with attention to structural violence, global mental health, and the philosophy of psychology. Recent publications include “Critical-Liberation Psychotherapy” (American Psychologist, 2025, with Lillian Comas-Díaz), an international set of recommendations to broaden evidence for clinical guidance (American Psychologist, 2025, with Levitt et al.), a metamethod analysis in Psychotherapy Research (2025), and work on feminist-liberation psychotherapy in Women & Therapy (2024). Morrill’s work considers the hazards of uncritically adopting well-intended trauma-informed language in services, and how liberation-focused, relational practice can reframe power, risk, and care in clinical and community settings.

Ryan Olson is a classicist whose work examines the literary, religious, and cultural life of the eastern Mediterranean from the Roman era through Late Antiquity, using historical comparison to illuminate moments of intense cultural change in late modernity. He previously directed education and character initiatives at the Kern Family Foundation and has taught and written across classics, moral formation, and education. Olson is the author of Tragedy, Authority, and Trickery: The Poetics of Embedded Letters in Josephus (Harvard University Press) and co-editor of The Necessity of Character: Moral Formation and Leadership and The Content of Their Character: Inquiries into the Varieties of Moral Formation. 

Matthew Clemente works across continental philosophy of religion, literature, and formative education. He is Co‑Editor‑in‑Chief of the Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion, Co‑Director of The Guestbook Project, and series editor for two Routledge/Taylor & Francis book series. He has authored or edited more than a dozen books.

Justin Karter is a counseling psychologist whose scholarship examines historical and cultural formations of mind and subjectivity, the roles of activist and lived‑experience communities (C/S/X), and how mental‑health discourse shapes institutions and identities. He serves as President (2025–26) of APA Division 24 and on the Executive Board of Division 32, and previously worked as a Research Officer to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health.