Presentations (1 - 2.5 hours)
Visionary Organizing: A Holistic & Healing Approach to Social Change
This presentation charts the history, development, and practice of visionary organizing by talking about its roots with James and Grace Lee Boggs in Detroit and its development beyond.
Transforming the Tide of Racial Violence: White Nationalism & Antiracism for the Twenty-First Century
This presentation charts connections between patriarchy, racism, capitalism & nature, examines white nationalism as a response to the crisis of patriarchal racial capitalism, and explores how a holistic approach to anti-racism can curb the spread of white nationalism by facilitating the emergence of a new system.
Systems Change is Not Radical: The Structural Limits of Capitalism and Systemic Transition
Demonstrating how capitalism is undermining its ability to reproduce itself over the long term, this presentation names systems change as a practical need and explores opportunities and strategies to facilitate it.
Praxis Labs (3-4 hours)
Visionary Organizing: A Holistic & Healing Approach to Social Change
Over 3-4 Hours participants will:- Develop a vision for their neighborhood, city, community, or issue
- Work backwards from that vision to explore ways to make it reality
Endings & Beginnings: Exploring Systems Change
Over 4 hours, participants will:
- Develop a working definition of systems and systems change
- Explore how systems emerge, develop, and decline
- Explore the role of critical connections and relationships in facilitating systems change
Beyond Allies: Antiracism, Visionary Organizing & Co-Liberation
Over 3 hours, participants will:
- Explore how social justice movements have unintentionally internalized a culture of domination
- Explore what an antiracist language and practice for the world we want to live in looks like
Transforming White Antiracist Guilt & Shame
Over 3-4 hours, participants will:
- Explore the roots and emergence of whiteness
- Explore white identity in relationship to the roots and emergence of whiteness
- Explore visionary organizing
Transforming a Culture of Domination, Creating a Culture of Contribution
Over 3-4 hours, participants will:
- Explore the ways we internalize a culture of domination
- Explore the concept of holistic power
- Explore what kinds of practices and projects can facilitate an emerging culture of contribution
Multi Session Praxis Labs (7-10 hours total)
Having and Being: Nature, Capitalism, and Systems Change
Over two sessions, participants will explore:
- The role of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and sexism in human beings separation from nature
- How that separation facilitates either/or thinking
- How our separation from nature has initiated a structural crisis in the world-economy
- How this crisis makes the emergence of a new social and economic system practical
- Developing a vision for a new system
- Ways to transform ourselves to facilitate systems change in the interests of sustainability and human dignity
Uprooting Oppression: Race, Gender and Systems Change
Over two sessions, participants will explore:
- The historical emergence of a system of patriarchal racial capitalism
- The roles of patriarchy and white supremacy in enabling and maintaining the system’s growth
- The role of oppressed peoples resistance in undermining the system and initiating its structural crisis
- Practical opportunities for the emergence of a new system
- Developing a vision for a new system
- Developing an anti-oppression language and practice rooted in this vision
Visionary Organizing for Systems Change
Over two sessions, participants will explore:
- Differences between holistic and reductionist approaches to social justice organizing and what it means to foster change utilizing critical connections rather than critical masses
- How racism, sexism, the exploitation of nature, and economic exploitation exist interdependently
- Place and space as incubators of critical connections and explore how relationships between things like housing, education, jobs, and food create connections that can be used to transform place
- Developing a vision for a place
- What organizing locally to make reality resemble that vision might look like
- How people must transform to fulfill this vision and do this kind of organizing
Visionary Organizing to Confront White Nationalism
Over two sessions, participants will explore:
- The role of whiteness and white identity in the emergence of a system of patriarchal racial capitalism
- The role of whiteness and white identity in that system’s growth and expansion
- The transformative impact of the social movements of the 1960s on whiteness, white identity, and the world economy
- The impact of neoliberalism and climate change on white people
- White nationalist violence as a response to economic and environmental crisis
- What organizing projects and practices that address the roots causes of white nationalism might look like