Meet Our Speakers

In recent years, successive humanitarian crises have profoundly reshaped the landscape of trauma exposure and response. Clinicians and organisations are increasingly operating in environments marked not only by extreme violence and massive displacement, but by the pervasiveness, chronicity, and apparent intractability of these crises. Conflicts are prolonged, repeatedly re-escalating, and often unfolding alongside multiple concurrent emergencies across the globe. For many affected communities, and those working alongside them, this has generated a profound sense of exhaustion, moral distress, and, at times, hopelessness. 

Practitioners working “in the trenches” are frequently exposed to ongoing danger, instability, and resource scarcity, while being called upon to provide care under conditions that challenge fundamental assumptions about safety, recovery, and continuity of support. These realities place significant strain not only on individual caregivers, but also on the organisations that support them, testing models of care, workforce sustainability, and the limits of service systems designed for less complex contexts. 

This plenary creates a space to engage directly with these challenges. Grounded in lived experience, it will bring forward perspectives from practitioners working in contexts of organised violence and ongoing adversity, highlighting both the clinical and systemic dilemmas they face. 

At the same time, the field of trauma treatment continues to advance. Developments in clinical science, neurobiology, applied neuroscience and culturally responsive practice are expanding our understanding of trauma and recovery, and opening new possibilities for intervention. Through contributions from leading international researchers and practitioner-authors, the plenary will explore how these advances are extending the frontiers of practice. 

The final segment will bring these strands into dialogue, examining how emerging knowledge and evolving models of care can meaningfully support practitioners and organisations working under increasingly challenging conditions. It will consider not only what innovations are available, but how they can be adapted, sustained, and ethically applied in contexts where the odds are often overwhelming. 

Underlying this discussion is a critical premise: while addressing the root causes of violence, injustice, and displacement must remain paramount, far less attention has been given to how we sustain and evolve clinical and organisational responses in the face of such enduring and complex adversity. This plenary seeks to address that gap, creating a space for reflection, exchange, and collective advancement of practice.