Grandmother Goose: An Applied Liberatory and Indigenous Informed Visual Narrative Community Project
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
- Russell Vought, Director of Office of Management and Budget
During implementation of Project 2025, employees reported experiencing intense grief, anxiety, mourning, depression, suicidal ideation, with reported incidents of suicide associated with the psychological attacks taken (Riddle, 2025; Lyngaas, 2025).
To counter the negative psychological impacts, liberatory and Indigenous psychological methodologies (i.e., photovoice, visual narrative and listening circles) were drawn on to design a praxis to help public servants process the negative psychological impacts of the systematic institutional betrayal and dehumanization during implementation of Project 2025.
Some collaborators have agreed to anonomyously share their narratives publicly. A website is currently being developed that will showcase those stories.
Citations
Lyngaas, S. (2025, April 14). In a federal workforce racked by stress and fear, one family shares a story of death. CNN Politics. https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/politics/federal-workers-mental-health
Riddle. (2025, February 24). Mental health issues ripple through the federal workforce with firings. Shots — NPR Health News. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/24/nx-s1-5304255/federal-workers-fired-mental-health
CLICK SWAN below to see visual narratives from the community praxis project.
Selected Works
