Spring!/next PAR workshop/info webinar
Spring is here!
We hope that you are finding ways to celebrate!
We just had a really meaningful circular time workshop in Tennessee in collaboration with our partners at Sequoia Samanvaya and locally with Growing Roots. We had such a great group come and join us: academics, nonprofit leaders, artists, Indigenous ceremonialists, church leaders, educators, and various community members. Everyone left wanting more. These participatory approaches to time really shift how we relate to one another, to ourselves, to nature, and to how we can engage together. Because this workshop brought together many different members of the community and their subsequent organizations, we looked into how is it that they can better understand how to better work together. Too often, we ignore the harms that our dominant culture's attitude and expectations around time have on wider ways of relating with one another- which can halt critical movement-building processes.
I recently read this beautiful quote from Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, talking about the cyclical nature of time in his aboriginal heritage, and how time and place and intertwined:
"Kinship moves in cycles, the land moves in seasonal cycles, the sky moves in stellar cycles, and time is so bound up in those things that it is not even a separate concept from space. We experience time in a very different way from people immersed in flat schedules and story-less surfaces. In our spheres of existence, time does not go in a straight line, and it is as tangible as the ground we stand on."
It was also the first time that our core staff - Krissy, Stephanie, and Ashlei - all got to be at the same place at the same time since both Krissy and Stephanie are now on board! So that was fun too!
We've got a lot of seeds, both real and metaphorical, that we are planting, even as we are also building up the appropriate structures, fences, and netting to protect our gardens - both real and metaphorical!
One of those is around the importance of participatory action research.
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Our last Participatory Action Research (PAR) workshop was at Alnoba, in MA in the Fall.
Here is what one of the participants said about that gathering:
"The workshop was a call for us to remember the importance of our collective community actions and research work locally and globally and especially with children, the next generation of leaders we need for a brighter future!! I applaud all of you and send love and light your way today and every day." - K.M.
This next one will be at Highlander Center for Research and Education, in Tennessee.
Some of you may be familiar with Highlander. Myles Horton and Don West founded the Highlander Folk School in 1932 in Monteagle, Tennessee, with the goal of educating rural and industrial leaders for a new social order, focusing on labor and civil rights issues. It has been engaged with these issues ever since then and has played a critical and leading-edge role in multiple movements.
Rē has known many people from Highlander; both the philosophy and history and many community members have played an important role in shaping Rē's own understanding of ongoing education for communities. Dr Felix Bivens, who will be leading the PAR workshop, is currently on Highlander's board.
So, we are really excited to be partnering with this long-standing institution.
We are offering an informational webinar for anyone who might be curious about attending this in-person workshop.
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We also want to lift up a few other interesting articles/podcasts that have been a part of our recent conversations.
This is from our partner Ramasubramanian in Chennai, India, thinking about local economies. It came out of some of our recent conversations about strengthening local and rural economies.
One of the conversations that keeps coming up around us is how do we engage when talking across political divisions. This is particularly important today, when political divides are both very prevalent and often fraught with danger. There's a lot of different perspectives on it - and a lot of it has to do with what is the desired outcome of the conversation.
Dr Tania Israel, a queer Asian psychologist, has thought a lot about these questions in her book, Beyond Your Bubble. Here's her podcast - and it is clear that some of the current politics are hard for her, too.
From Marketplace, the podcast, Make Me Smart, had an episode where they specifically talked about this, around the news item of Gov Newsom's new podcast.
Also from NPR, this is a moving episode by an NPR producer who was able to build a strong relationship with his father after he realized, to his own shock, that he had become part of MAGA. The trick? A series of bets.
Here's a research study on: what motivates bridge building across pernicious group divides? Here's a shorter brief on the longer article
And, because fascism is directly linked to physical and emotional violence, cults, and religion, you might be interested in this recent Conspirituality podcast, Antifascist Woodshed 2
Participatory Action Research Info Webinar
Info Webinar: March 25, 1 pm to 2 pm ET
Via zoom