Kelsey G Reeder

Research Interests: conceptualizations of care; liberatory care work; settler colonist projects and anti-colonialism; non-profit industrial complex; personhood; Critical Participatory Action Research; disability justice; Clinical practice with the expansiveness of queer and trans identity: non-normativity as a roadmap; queer irreverence; LGBTQ+ suicidality; queering death

Kelsey G Reeder, LCSW-R (she/they) is a Clinical Social Worker, PhD Student in Advanced Practice, and the Senior Lead Teaching Fellow at Columbia University School of Social Work. 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, and the expansiveness of queer and trans experience, and provides clinical supervision to lifeline counselors supporting LGBTQ+ youth experiencing crisis or suicidality. Kelsey’s 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, as well as how this impacts the personhoods of the clinician and client, interrupts collective liberation by enforcing unidirectional healing, and stems from settler colonialism and white supremacy.