Grief: Catalyst for Social Change

For as long as humans have existed, they have experienced love and loss. Indigenous cultures across the world have offered ways to sit with, process and deal with bereavement, intentionally ritualising one of the most intensely emotionally charged experiences a human can go through. This course, through a wide range of text and practices analysis, aims to explore the catalysing power of grief and why we should embrace remembrance as a practice of resistance that can invoke social change. From sorry business, to Vietnamese altar-making, to the AIDS quilt, to Black Lives Matter, this course will explore the ways communities across the world have intentionally responded to death, and what those responses can teach us in the face of our current sociopolitical climate, the daily witnessing of genocide and a world that’s becoming less and less not only death literate, but (seemingly) death affected

Key course themes: 

• Embracing grief as a decolonial practice
• Sorry Business (guest lecture by Steve Kelly)
• Grief as a catalyst for societal rebellion and change
• Remembrance as Resistance
• Altar-Making (guest session with Hiếu Phùng)
• Non-clinical therapeutic models in supporting bereaved folks
• Archiving loss via creativity

Delivery mode: In person at IPCS, 78-80 Curzon Street, North Melbourne, 3051, Wurundjeri Country

Days/times: Tuesdays 6:30PM-8:30PM AEST.

• Week 1: Tuesday 7 July
• Week 2: Tuesday 14 July 
• Week 3: Tuesday 21 July 
• Week 4: Tuesday 28 July 
• Week 5: Tuesday 4 August
• Week 6: Tuesday 11 August

Scholarship places: full fee scholarship places are available for First Nations or unwaged participants. Please email info@ipcs.org.au with a brief EOI to apply.

Accessibility: Please note that IPCS is not wheelchair accessible. There are several steps to the room from the front door of the building (78-80 Curzon St). Masks and hand sanitizer will be available. If you have any accessibility queries and/or requirements, please reach out to us at info@ipcs.org.au

Educator:

Jon Bellebono is a grief facilitator, cultural producer, writer and editor. Jon has a BA in Social Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies from SOAS, University of London, and currently works as a Suicide Bereavement Program Coordinator at Switchboard Victoria. Jon is the founder of Queer Good Grief, a peer support group by and for bereaved LGBTIQA+ people, and fragments, a newsletter centred on losing a sibling. Jon has facilitated workshops centred on grief for the Stuart Hall Library, QUEERCIRCLE and TATE in London, and the Australian Queer Archives in Naarm. Jon's writing has been featured online on Novara Media, VICE UK and AU, Huck Magazine, gal-dem, in print on Skin Deep and Polyester Zine, and in anthologies East Side Voices and Letters from the Grief Club. His first publication, The Simple Life, an autoethnographic zine exploring queerness in isolation, was published by Cahyati Press in 2026.   

IPCS is located on Wurundjeri Country. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri peoples of the Eastern Kulin nation as the sovereign owners and custodians of the land; sovereignty was never ceded and connection to Country is ongoing. IPCS stands with Indigenous struggles for liberation from settler colonialism and imperialism on this land and globally.