What happens when oral history becomes a tool for collective healing? In this session, we'll explore how oral history methodology can be used to create space for sacred remembering, feeling, and imagining. Drawing from three projects centering Black women leaders—a salon healing circle, an elder visioning session, and a podcast—I'll share how I've held different spaces to invite Black women to honor the wisdom in oral history and apply insight to modern life.

We'll discuss how oral history allows us to see patterns repeat and imagine something new. How moving from quick sound bites to depth becomes an act of collective suturing. How oral history, when practiced with intention, tends to both past wounds and present possibilities.

This session is for community healers, organizers, oral historians, students, community workers, therapists, and anyone curious about the intersections of Black women's leadership, ancestral wisdom, and oral history as healing work.

Dr. Shawna Murray-Browne, LCSW-C, is an integrative psychotherapist, cultural historian, and host of Return to Presence—a podcast drawing on nearly 100 years of Black women's oral histories to translate ancestral wisdom for modern leadership and living. With over a decade of study in QiGong, mind-body medicine, and healing ways of people of African descent, she guides leaders and communities toward decolonial healing praxis through psychotherapy, nature immersions, and the Liberation-Focused Healing Framework now adopted by organizations nationwide. Her doctoral research explored oral histories of Black women advocates during the civil rights movement—work that continues to inform how she helps leaders align with land, legacy, and their full humanity. Named by The Huffington Post as one of the "Ten Black Female Therapists You Should Know" and featured on PBS's Mysteries of Mental Illness and Therapy for Black Girls, she lives in Baltimore with her excitable 8-year-old and her husband, "B."