video about accompaniment

Made by the folks at the New Tactics for Human Rights with the fabulous Michele and Nils from the CPT Colombia team. Great work by all!

anti-ops policies for brief gatherings

as a follow-up to my previous post on this subject, here's an example from the recent US climate convergence:

Anti-Oppression Policy:

The organizers of the Convergence for Climate Action believe that anti-oppression work is vital to community organizing and to building a movement to eliminate the exploitation of people and the planet. The Convergence for Climate Action will have anti-oppression workshops and participants will be strongly encouraged to participate.

In order to create a safe and productive environment for activism and community, we will not be tolerating behavior that demeans, marginalizes, or threatens people. Examples are offensive remarks about person’s gender, age, sexual orientation, race, mental health, culture, general appearances, income status, being a parent or a child, employed or unemployed, level of experience in activism, etc….

Any type of sexual, verbal, or physical assault will be taken especially seriously by the convergence organizers. On account of the short nature of the event and limited resources, convergence participants may be asked to immediately leave the event should they be accused of oppressive behavior.

We thank everyone for helping to make the convergence a safe, comfortable, productive and super fun environment!

the price of indifference

Youtube is such a fantastic organizing tool. This video was put together by the Canada Colombia project. Not all that hard - you probably have pictures of your sister church, that delegation trip you took, etc.. You too could be using photos and music to build solidarity!

Easier yet than a video, you can put your pics up on picasa or something similar. To give you an example, my pics of a recent FOR delegation I took to the San Jose peace community in Colombia are here. I like picasa because it's so easy to add and read comments, which help tell the story.

I think photos are a powerful tool for building connection across distance and difference, but of course colonial patterns do sneak into photography. It's not my main focus, but I am interested in how that happens, and how we can decolonize our phototaking. Any suggested resources?

where there is no doctor

I was recently reminded by a compa of the dangers of the Doctors Without Borders model of solidarity. Yes, sometimes after disasters, wars, etc emergency hand outs are needed - but instead of coming for two months, these folks stay for two years, during which time existing health systems are wiped out, so when they leave, not only do they leave no one trained as a health worker, but the health workers that might have been there are out of work, doing something else. Oy. But sharing health knowledge with health workers who have less privilege and access to that knowledge is great solidarity work, and I certainly know other folks doing this in various ways - be it while living a two day canoe ride in to the jungle, or flying occassionaly to give in seminars at a University in Guatemala city.

All of this to point you to a cool resource. You've probably heard of the book, Where there is no doctor. It's a bit out of date now, but there are two processes underway to update it, so keep your eyes out. Meanwhile it's fabulous that Hesperian has made both this and their other publications available for free online, and many of them translated into Spanish. Their list of publications is below.
in English:

A Community Guide to Environmental Health
Where There Is No Doctor
Where Women Have No Doctor
Helping Health Workers Learn
HIV Health and Your Community
Where There Is No Dentist
A Book for Midwives
Helping Children Who Are Deaf
Helping Children Who Are Blind
Disabled Village Children
Sanitation and Cleanliness for a healthy environment
Water for life: community water security
Pesticides are poison

in Spanish:

Donde no hay doctor
Donde no hay doctor para mujeres
Aprendiendo a promover la salud
Donde no hay dentista
Un libro para parteras
Ayudar a los niños ciegos
El nino campesino deshabilitado
Saneamiento y limpieza para un ambiente sano
Agua para vivir
Los plaguicidas son venenos

using personal stories

I am interested in how solidarity activists use personal stories, and how we can be more careful and strategic about how we use them. One of the books that I've found most helpful in thinking about this has been Human Rights and Narrated Lives: the Ethics of Recognition. It looks at several cases of stories being used to build solidarity across difference and push for social justice: Tiananmen, South Africa, WWII Korean sex slaves, the Australian stolen generation and, astoundingly, prisoners in the US. All have different lessons for any social movement using stories, and I found it all a really compelling read - but then, I'm a geek. You could get a lot of it by just reading the first 50 pages (the overall picture) and the 12 page conclusion. Well worth it.

Making our spaces more liberatory

One of the ways that we can better walk our talk in our movements and improve our internal power dynamics is by working to make sure our own spaces are safe for all (and eventually, ideally, actually liberatory for all – such that the process of working together for justice in itself builds justice among us). I was reminded recently by discussions over my kitchen table that one step in this direction is having clear sexual/racial harassment/assault policies and procedures – even for when we gather temporarily, such as at the vigil to close the School of the Americas, a delegation trip, or at the World Social Forum. This was clearly not the case at the World Social Forum a few years ago, and I wrote about it, and how we might do things differently, in an article entitled A Liberatory Space? Rumors of Rapes at the 5th World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, 2005 (that link is to the pdf). Happily this one is also in an open source journal, the Journal of International Women’s Studies, and that article is in a special issue entitled Women's Bodies, Gender Analysis, and Feminist Politics at the Forum Social Mundial. This image, off indymedia, is of the women's march through the youth camp after the rape rumors.

colonial patterns in our activism and how we might rework them

I published, bilingually, an article in the open source journal acme that outlines much of my thinking about ways that we might decolonize solidarity. Abstracts and links to the pdf's are below. (art by Rini)

IMPERIALISM WITHIN:
CAN THE MASTER’S TOOLS BRING DOWN EMPIRE?

Imperialism affects “here” as well as “there”. White middle class women have historically gotten out of the home and gained more of a Self by being good helpers, classically as teachers and missionaries. In this role they consolidated empire’s power, often unintentionally. Today the good helper role is being widely used, not only by white women, to work against empire. Yet this master’s tool is toxic. It may appear to take tiles off the house, but it reinforces the systems of domination that prop up empire. Those of us who struggle against empire must also struggle against the imperialism within ourselves. This analysis of ways to decolonize solidarity work is grounded in the movement to close the School of the Americas [a U.S. army training camp] and a collaborative theorizing process with white middle class women prisoners of conscience. This work engages in alter-geopolitics, working to build another world.

download the full PDF here

Koopman S (2008) Imperialism within: Can the master’s tools bring down empire? Acme: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 7(2):283–307

Imperialismo Adentro:
¿Pueden las Herramientas del Amo Derribar el Imperio?

El imperialismo afecta tanto el ‘aquí’ como el ‘allá’. Mujeres de clase media y blancas han históricamente salido de su hogar y logrado ser más un ‘Sujeto' siendo buenas ayudantes, típicamente como maestras y misionarias.

En este papel han consolidado el poder del imperio, a veces sin intención. Hoy en día el papel de buen ayudante se usa ampliamente, no solamente por mujeres blancas, para trabajar en contra del imperio. Pero estas herramientas del amo son tóxicas. Puede parecer que estamos quitando tejas de la casa del amo, pero en realidad reforzamos así los sistemas de dominación que son los pilares del imperio.

Nosotros que combatimos el imperio debemos también luchar contra el imperialismo dentro de nosotros mismos. Este análisis de maneras en que se podría descolonizar el trabajo de solidaridad tiene raíces en el movimiento para cerrar la Escuela de las Américas (un campo de entrenamiento del ejército Estadounidense) y en un proceso de teorización en colaboración con prisioneras de consciencia blancas y de clase media. Este trabajo hace ‘alter-geopolítica’, trabajando para construir otro mundo.

se puede bajar el PDF aca.

the zapatista model of solidarity

article on this in the Resist! newsletter

RJ, who wrote this, I'm pretty sure must have been one of the folks who ran a workshop looking critically at solidarity at the US Social Forum last summer? At any rate he's in the same collective, a bunch of men that do childcare for social justice groups in NYC. how fab. He publishes the great blog Zapagringo.com.