Teaching Fellow (Instructor of Record) & PhD Candidate
Columbia School of Social Work
Kelsey G Reeder, LCSW-R (she/they) is a Clinical Social Worker, Advanced Practice PhD Candidate, Teaching Fellow, and Writing Consultant at Columbia University School of Social Work, and Teaching Consultant in Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Kelsey has worked in therapeutic foster care, school social work, and community mental health. With post-graduate training from the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, she maintains a therapy and supervision practice focused on relationship challenges, family conflict, religious trauma, and the expansiveness of queer and trans experience. Kelsey spent six years providing clinical supervision to Lifeline counselors supporting LGBTQ+ youth experiencing crisis or suicidality, and is an activist for care worker rights, healing, and community. Their research aims to subvert social work education and practice through lenses of queer irreverence and mess. She explores conceptualizations of care that contribute to or disrupt collective queer and trans liberation (community-based vs. institutional care) and how social work is taught and carried out in ways that position social workers as sites of social control within their own communities. Kelsey’s work looks at how this dynamic impacts the personhoods of the clinician and client, interrupts collective liberation by enforcing unidirectional healing, and stems from settler colonialism and white supremacy. Teaching is among Kelsey’s greatest passions, and this practice experience and research inform her classroom pedagogy, which centers care, multidirectional learning (and healing), and wisdom birthed in the margins.
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