About our workshops
The Centre’s workshops bring together people who want to learn more about a specific topic, share creative activities, gain particular skills, or develop initiatives that are meaningful for anti-oppressive communities.
Our workshops are a place where you can engage as little or as much as you want, with the flexibility to be very interactive or to reflect quietly and take in new information.
At the Centre, we recognise that all of us are learners and teachers. Each person brings unique lived experiences, insights, skills, and challenges to our learning space. Our workshops are flexible spaces designed to support people with a range of disability, neurodivergent, cultural, and other access needs.
People with neurodivergent, queer, non-binary, and disability needs are given essential consideration and valued and prioritised all our work. The Centre is committed to intersectional anti-racist practice. We prioritise making workshop participants who have experienced marginalisation and exclusion in other learning environments feel safe and supported throughout their learning experience.
Join your first workshop with us today to experience what’s special about the Centre!
“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.”
Audre Lorde (she/her)
Single-Session Workshops
Our single session workshops give you a chance to focus on specific aspects of a broader topic without any further commitment. Single sessions are a way to explore something that interests you in a shared group space. You can participate in whichever ways work for you. Some people will enjoy interacting with other participants, while other people might prefer to observe and reflect silently. There is no “right way” to show up. We want learners who have felt excluded or oppressed in normy spaces to feel as included and comfortable as possible. Experience our welcoming space and join a workshop today!
March – September 2025
Restoring rickety chairs:
What’s missing from “person-centred” care?
Thursday 27th March 7 – 9:30 pm AEDT
1 hour pre-workshop content + 2 hours live session = 3 CPD hours
What’s wrong with being an “ally”?:
Growing into Accountable Solidarity
TBD – Coming soon!
What’s wrong with being an “ally”? Are you a person with dominant societal privileges and are ready to shift from performative allyship toward accountable solidarity? Are you a person with marginalised lived experiences who wants to shift from healing space toward liberation space? Using the emotion-centred and anti-oppressive 4 Quadrants Approach for examining privilege and challenging oppression, this workshop will guide participants through a series of reflective activities, develop scripts that fit each person’s societal position and capacities, and apply techniques that you can use to address non-consensual power dynamics and systemic oppression in everyday situations.
No keys, no bowl:
A queer woman demystifies
Swinging communities
Thursday 8th May 7 – 9 pm AEST
Relationships are a constant work in progress, not only for those in the relationships or around the relationships, but also for relationship therapists. Many relationship practitioners apply a monogamous-centred approach develop by and for a white anglo-dominated Overculture. So how can therapists work supportively and respectfully with people who are part of Swinging communities? What direct knowledge, if any, do you have of Swingers and Swinging communities? Does all your “knowledge” come from media representations and stereotypes? Do you understand the distinction between polyamorous and Swinging relationships and how they can overlap? Do you know how to support people to safely investigate an area of sexual exploration in which you may have no knowledge, experience, or understanding? Are you able to identify any misconceptions, myths, and lies about Swinging? As a therapist, do you know how to recognise unhealthy, harmful, or abusive behaviours in the Swinging community? Are you dealing with “jealousy” or “envy” in the relationships when problems arise?
This workshop will explore the terminology used by people in Swinging communities, safer sex guidelines, erotic pleasure, consent, fluid bonding boundaries, along with Swinging community norms and values. This session will examine how ableism, racism, cisgenderism, classism, and sexism, can negatively impact the experiences of all Swingers, also the extended harm heteronormativity, mononormativity, and homophobia have on queer Swingers of all genders. This workshop will help you to develop a new understanding of Swinging that overturns popular notions of “wife-swapping couples”, guilt-free hookups, and no rules, no-strings-attached, free-for-all sex parties.
It’s not all in your head:
Trauma-and-violence-informed care (TVIC)
Option 1: Tuesday 22nd July 7 – 9 pm AEDT
Option 2: Sunday 31st August 1:30 – 3:30 pm AEDT
Anglocentric clinical approaches treat trauma as a solely internal problem. In contrast, trauma-and-violence-informed care (TVIC) also considers how our relationships, communities, and society can affect our internal functioning. Do you understand how systemic oppression, relational and structural power dynamics, and environmental influences can affect our neurobiological functioning? Or what’s oppressive about the popular concept of “regulating” your nervous system? Explore anti-oppressive ways to support healing and liberation in therapeutic, peer support, and caregiving contexts.
live session = 2 CPD hours
More workshops coming soon!!!
“Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
Marie Skłodowska Curie (she/her)
Multi-Session Workshop Journeys
Our multi-session workshops are designed for people who want to go on a deeper journey than a single session workshop. Explore challenges and share critical reflections with a small group, get to know people who are asking questions, raising concerns, and questioning dominant societal norms that contribute to the oppression of marginalised and historically underrepresented communities and lived experiences.
Community care and self-care: Making anti-oppressive resistance sustainable for you
Do you feel guilty taking time off just for you? Do you struggle to integrate your limits into your value-based commitments? Are you feeling like the work is never done, but you desperately need a break?
This multi-session workshop will begin by reviewing the working class activist origins and later middle and upper class corporate co-opting of ‘self-care’.
We’ll explore anti-oppressive ways that fit for each of our respective societal positions and cultures, developing a personalised map of the community and personal sources of nourishment from which you can draw strength. We’ll draw on existing language and concepts in each of our cultures to find new ways to explain our needs and figure out what healthy relationships and balance of spacetime work for us. We’ll explore multiple ways of thinking about and doing Time and interrogate ways the dominant societal norms about Time, emotions, and interpersonal connections conflict with our own needs in everyday life.
This 5-session workshop series is for those who know the struggle is long and the need for rest and interpersonal connection endures. Register to be included in scheduling polls for this experience.
“The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.”
Paulo Freire (he/him) – Pedagogy of the Oppressed