<p>Welcome back! Rounding out this series on hope, we’re going to be diving into the liberatory practice of joy. We’ve talked a lot about leaning into mourning, of letting ourselves wound so we can witness, and not turning away from discomfort. And while I think that’s crucial to continually resist what I call “cop out privilege” - aka the kind of privilege that lets you opt-out of difficult conversations because it doesn’t directly impact you, the kind of privilege that let’s you opt-out of difficult learning, of really looking at the impact of how you're living in a critical manner, and opting-out of the pain of redefining what you think you know by claiming neutrality - Liberatory practice is also all about joy.</p><p>Because the point isn’t to suppress our experience of joy or peace when it shows up. Joy, peace, and happiness are actually really important aspects of liberatory practice, hope and dreaming. And it’s important for us to know that joy and mourning are not mutually exclusive; we can hold all of this at a tension with each other, as integrated with one another.</p><p>So let’s chat a bit about how we can resist cop-out privilege while still allowing ourselves our full capacity for joy.</p><p>Let’s first start off with questioning our understanding of happiness and the ideas we’ve been brought up to believe about happiness. I’m going to read an excerpt of Sara Ahmed’s critique on the definition of happiness in her book, Feminist Killjoy:</p><p><p>“[As Feminist Killjoys] we might do something different with our happiness. Like refuse to let it be our end. The English word happiness comes from the word hap. meaning chance. The word happiness shares its hap with the word happenchance and haphazard. But happiness seems to have lost its hap. Becoming not what happens to you, but what you have to earn. We put the hap back into happiness, taking a chance on it. We could be happy to be queer without turning happiness into a project of becoming worthy or deserving of it.”</p><p>“We might need to claim the freedom to be unhappy, in a world that assumes happiness as evidence of being good, or at least the freedom to remain profoundly ambivalent and unsure. Life is complex and fragile and messy, and so are we.”</p><p>“We need to shatter the illusion that happiness is inclusion…We don’t tone it down, straighten ourselves out, try to be more like you so that we can get through to you. We spill over onto the streets, fierce and fabulous, our protests, parties. We spill over, we spill out.”</p></p><p>So if happiness isn’t something we have to earn, if it isn’t something that tells us whether or not we’re good or moral, if it isn’t something that we have to hold on to at all costs, if it’s something that we can let happen to us, if we free ourselves from the idea that happiness is liberation or that happiness is earned and something we have to prioritize proactively getting, what does that open up for us? What does that open up for our liberatory practices?</p><p>As therapists, we know that we can’t just selectively numb one side of the emotional spectrum. And that it is in letting ourselves feel the uncomfortable, the painful, the gut-wrenching, that we also let ourselves feel the joy, the connection, and the healing beyond what capitalism tries to sell to us. So why would that be different when it comes to liberatory practice?</p><p>Not to mention the whole capitalism thing? It’s exploitative, it’s a scam, and it doesn't work anyways; the most wealthy people often have such an innate spiritual pain of being the epitome of an unwell society. After all, what is well in a world that is so unwell? What is healing in a world that glorifies the harm we work so hard to attain, only to have to recover from it?</p><p>If we can let go of our obsession to be happy, if we can let go of our narrow ideations of what it means to be happy within this colonial, capitalist paradigm, then perhaps happiness will happen upon us.</p><p>One of my favorite quotes from Audre Lorde is <strong><em>“I feel, therefore I can be free”</em></strong>. </p><p>At first I didn’t get it, I couldn’t wrap my head around how feeling could be liberation. But now I think what it speaks to is the <em>process</em> of living and existing under oppression. Because at the end of the day, if you are having a response to the system, the atrocity, the cruelty, then that means you are not consumed by it, and you haven’t been overtaken by it. It brings into consideration that feeling deeply and without the restraints of having to earn happiness, and without conforming to the societal norms of happiness that works to invalidate our humanity, that we are resisting the very systems that tries to disconnect us from our divinity, our humanity, and our interconnectedness.</p><p>If we think about happiness in this way, if we forgo the idea that happiness is the peace we must consistently try to attain, but instead think of liberation as peace, we might see that believing happiness to be peace is all but a process of numbing. A numbing that requires us to turn away, a numbing that believes that in order for us to feel at peace in our lives we need to remove all that has us feeling anything but happy.</p><p>If we let ourselves connect, instead, to the paradigm of liberation as peace, we might start to let the hap back into our happiness, to experience how liberation as peace includes happiness and joy as a pause for breath, a pause for hope.</p><p>Because joy, too is an act of resistance. And while happiness is not hope, there is an inherent hope when we choose to opt in, rather than to opt out, and sometimes happiness, joy, and peace, not only allows us an emotional latitude to opt in but also becomes a treasured function of our opting in.</p><p>In the pursuit of collective liberation, the happiness that happens upon me when I choose to opt in, often comes in the form of connection and knowing that I am not alone in this work. Whether that is through encountering thought-provoking ponderings that reads like poetry or being able to engage with a group of people who are all envisioning and working towards the same future, liberatory practice <em>becomes</em> joy. Liberatory practice is the antidote to apathy. It becomes agency and meaning, and connection, and purpose. Liberatory practice releases you from the narrow ideations of what it means to be good under a colonial, capitalist, racist, cisheteronormative, anti-fat, classist, and ableist paradigm and instead allows you to rest into the connectiveness of solidarity.</p><p>This work was never really a sacrifice. It’s a healing practice that allows us to come back to ourselves and each other. To look at a world constantly telling us we are not good enough and not worthy and go “this is a distraction”. This is a distraction meant to keep us profitable rather than imaginatory, to keep us exploitable rather than in connection with each other, to keep us apathetic and hopeless rather than resisting and dreaming up the world that could be.</p><p>This work is a healing practice that bids us to lavish in the joy of the little minute moments because we know the lineages of resistance that made them possible. This work helps us let happiness happen upon us as we connect with the communities that makes living worthwhile…</p><p><strong><em>Because your hope will never be enough if the hope is just yours.</em></strong></p><p>You feel powerless up against these systems, because the systems have a lot of power. It’s by design! But we are not powerless when we’re together.</p><p>And if mourning is what forges solidarity, then hope is being part of something bigger.</p><p>Vikki Reynolds talks about vicarious resistance as opposed to vicarious trauma. (The TLDR of the idea is that vicarious trauma assumes the folx we work with and their pain is what harms us. The folx we work with do not harm us. It’s the fact that they are suffering and we have no means, in our limited, individualistic, therapeutic profession to comprehensively address the root of the pain with the urgency that would honour its magnitude - <em>that’s</em> what harms us. I’ll link Vikki’s article in the email that accompanies this audio. If you’re not already on the list, head to <a target="_blank" href="http://www.reflectingonjustice.com/hope">www.reflectingonjustice.com/hope</a> to get a copy)</p><p>In contrast to vicarious trauma is vicarious resistance - the recognition that the folx we work with brings about a resistance that we are also transformed by. That it is in the presence of such resistance that we build our foundations for hope. That it is in our being transformed that we expand our beliefs of what is possible.</p><p>As Angela Davis says in her book Freedom is a Constant Struggle: </p><p>“[Communities] are the people whom we have to thank for imagining a different universe and making it possible for us to inhabit this present. There was Claudette Colvin, too, who has a wonderful book, Twice Toward Justice. All of you should read it because Claudette Colvin refused to move to the back of the bus before Rosa Parks’ action. Claudette Colvin was also arrested before. You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history. That is why we like to focus on Dr. Martin Luther King, who was a great man, but in my opinion his greatness resided precisely in the fact that he learned from a collective movement. He transformed in his relationship with that movement. He did not see himself as a single individual who was going to bring freedom to the oppressed masses.”</p><p>Community is essential to hope. Hope is someone believing in you when you don’t believe in you; hope is collectively carried, not a thing you have to conjure up in you in the midst of despair (because let’s face it, sometimes you can’t)</p><p>Hope is sharing what you do and seeing other people shift and transform in minute ways. It is having infuriating conversation after infuriating conversation and still managing to find away back to each other to witness a loved one coming closer to justice.</p><p>These conversations don’t shift the system, but it also kind of does.</p><p>Lydia X. Z. Brown, Disability Justice activist and lawyer says, <strong><em>“you can’t legislate morality”</em></strong>. You can’t just put big sweeping legislation and expect that people will just follow it without backlash. You can’t expect a big sweeping legislation will be put in place, without radically changing the world that we live in, the culture we believe as truth.</p><p>So how do we radically change the world we live in? Robyn Maynard talks about <strong><em>“changing the air”</em></strong> in the beautiful book that is Rehearsals for Living, building on the idea of Leanne’s work on constellations of co-resistance. I’ll read an excerpt here:</p><p><p>Robyn Maynard on Rehearsals for Living: “Changing the air is vital. It is a precondition to the possibility of systemic transformation; it’s integral to struggle; it helps us, as Toni Cade Bambara describes it, to “make revolution irresistible.” Audre Lorde says, “social protest is to say that we do not have to live this way.” It is a rejection of “the inconsistencies, the horror, of the lives we are living.” And this generative rejection, this demand for another way of living, is louder and more vibrant and more wide-spanning than I thought I would live to see, especially in these times.“ </p></p><p>Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on constellations of co-resistance: “I’m actually not interested in justice. I’m interested in Indigenous resurgence, nation building, addressing gender violence, movement building, linking up and creating constellations of co-resistance with other movements. I’m interested in making sure the movement around Indigenous resurgence is not replicating gender violence by placing bodies at our center. I’m interested in making sure we are not replicating heteropatriarchy or antiblackness by learning how to engage in constellations of co- resistance. I’m interested in freedom and creating a social, economic, political, artistic, spiritual, and physical space for futures of Anishinaabe people to be Anishinaabe on our land, unharassed and undeterred. I’m in the process of writing a new book on resurgent mobilization and I’ve been thinking a lot about constellations within Nishnaabeg thought. What happens when we make a constellation out of, say, Audra Simpson’s work on the politics of refusal, Glen Coulthard’s work on recognition, and Jarrett Martineau’s work on constellated relationships in the context of my own work on Nishnaabeg resurgence? I’m trying to figure that out. To me, in terms of organizing, this idea resonates both within Nishnaabeg thought but also in the aftermath of Idle No More. It is clear to me that we need to think about what resurgent mobilizing looks like. What does solidarity look like within grounded normativity? How do we use Indigenous place-based internationalism to build constellations of co-resistance with non-Indigenous communities who are fighting different aspects of the same system? This idea that you can bring particular theories or concepts together fits so well with Nishnaabeg star mapping and story. I’d like to apply this on the ground in terms of organizing—individuals or small collectives (stars) organizing within grounded normativity and connected to other individuals or collectives (stars) through Indigenous internationalism makes a lot of sense in terms of creating doorways out of settler colonialism.”</p><p>Building on this and Mariame Kaba’s naming of “one million experiments”, I think perhaps hope is built from one million little experiments that we enact and experience and be transformed by. One million little experiments that build upon each other, not only opening doors we couldn’t foresee, but creating doors we couldn’t even have imagined.</p><p>And in referencing Disability Justice wisdom and adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, perhaps hope is forging communal unlearning that moves at the speed of trust, to build relationships that have collective buy-in to our radical, liberatory politics, and recognize that the rigidity and dominance of the status quo is not just what sometimes steals our hope and joy, but is also what forges the tenacity of those who will facilitate its change.</p><p><strong><em>And perhaps, at the end of the day, hope doesn’t matter.</em></strong> We can hold all of these things at once and recognize that hope is a luxury that veils more poignant questions of liberation</p><p>Questions like what do I need to unlearn and how will I go about doing so? Questions like how can I stay implicated in this work in a world that would much rather have me turn away? Questions like what kind of world is possible and just outside our realm of imagination? Questions like where can I fit into a social change ecosystem that makes use of my revolutionary power, that connects me to something bigger?</p><p>Thank you so much for being part of this hope, this dreaming, this witnessing, this resisting. To close out I’ll also link Deepa Iyer’s social change ecosystem reflection, which is an excellent next step to support you in this deep work.</p><p>This is the end of the series, An Expose on Hope: A Reflection Guide for When Liberatory Practice Feels Hopeless. If you have any feedback or thoughts that have come up as you engaged in this series, please connect! I’d love to chat about what has been showing up for you. And also, please stay tuned for the bonus reflection guide, Mapping Ourselves to Collective Liberation where we dive deep into navigating the most common traps when we do this work. It was built from the grief, joy, and deep learning based on real life conversations and experiences, so it’s going to be a juicy one! I am just piecing together the framework for that now and am so looking forward to sharing it with you.</p><p>An Expose on Hope: a reflection guide for when liberatory practice feels hopeless is offered by donation, with 100% of the proceeds donated to supporting Palestinian, Congolese, and Sudanese resistance. This is my messy, imperfect attempt to have the examination of my complicities as a person occupying stolen lands in the global north, as a person who’s lineage was also directly impacted by the colonial violence that allows me to occupy this space, to be useful to the active resistance in one way or another. If you have any feedback, critiques, or suggestions please email me at <a target="_blank" href="mailto:hello@reflectingonjustice.com">hello@reflectingonjustice.com</a>; let’s co-create our resistances together.</p><p>In each audio we referencing and examining the work of liberatory thinkers and on the ground activists at the forefront of our work, so make sure you’re on our email list if you aren’t already so that you can get the transcripts and links to materials referenced. Head to <a target="_blank" href="http://reflectingonjustice.com/hope">reflectingonjustice.com/hope</a> to get on the list.</p><p>If you haven’t met me yet, I am Abby, a cis-queer, first-gen settler, from Hong Kong, occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples, in my work I am a clinical supervisor, adjunct faculty member, and practicing therapist and in my life, I spend most of my time building and learning all things justice-oriented and liberatory practice, living my best life trying to be a human database for this important work. I also have a thing for live shows, cute cats, good food and building mechanical keyboards, so hit me up with all your favorite artists, cat reels, recipes, and recommendations for tactile switches.</p><p>And this is Reflecting on Justice, your resistance besties, your community to unlearn with, and your co-conspirators for liberatory practices in therapy. Till next time, in unlearning and solidarity as always, take so much care, and I’ll talk to you soon!</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to reflecting on justice at <a href="https://reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe</a>
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Sign In![<description><p>Welcome back! Rounding out this series on hope, we’re going to be diving into the liberatory practice of joy. We’ve talked a lot about leaning into mourning, of letting ourselves wound so we can witness, and not turning away from discomfort. And while I think that’s crucial to continually resist what I call “cop out privilege” - aka the kind of privilege that lets you opt-out of difficult conversations because it doesn’t directly impact you, the kind of privilege that let’s you opt-out of difficult learning, of really looking at the impact of how you're living in a critical manner, and opting-out of the pain of redefining what you think you know by claiming neutrality - Liberatory practice is also all about joy.</p><p>Because the point isn’t to suppress our experience of joy or peace when it shows up. Joy, peace, and happiness are actually really important aspects of liberatory practice, hope and dreaming. And it’s important for us to know that joy and mourning are not mutually exclusive; we can hold all of this at a tension with each other, as integrated with one another.</p><p>So let’s chat a bit about how we can resist cop-out privilege while still allowing ourselves our full capacity for joy.</p><p>Let’s first start off with questioning our understanding of happiness and the ideas we’ve been brought up to believe about happiness. I’m going to read an excerpt of Sara Ahmed’s critique on the definition of happiness in her book, Feminist Killjoy:</p><p><p>“[As Feminist Killjoys] we might do something different with our happiness. Like refuse to let it be our end. The English word happiness comes from the word hap. meaning chance. The word happiness shares its hap with the word happenchance and haphazard. But happiness seems to have lost its hap. Becoming not what happens to you, but what you have to earn. We put the hap back into happiness, taking a chance on it. We could be happy to be queer without turning happiness into a project of becoming worthy or deserving of it.”</p><p>“We might need to claim the freedom to be unhappy, in a world that assumes happiness as evidence of being good, or at least the freedom to remain profoundly ambivalent and unsure. Life is complex and fragile and messy, and so are we.”</p><p>“We need to shatter the illusion that happiness is inclusion…We don’t tone it down, straighten ourselves out, try to be more like you so that we can get through to you. We spill over onto the streets, fierce and fabulous, our protests, parties. We spill over, we spill out.”</p></p><p>So if happiness isn’t something we have to earn, if it isn’t something that tells us whether or not we’re good or moral, if it isn’t something that we have to hold on to at all costs, if it’s something that we can let happen to us, if we free ourselves from the idea that happiness is liberation or that happiness is earned and something we have to prioritize proactively getting, what does that open up for us? What does that open up for our liberatory practices?</p><p>As therapists, we know that we can’t just selectively numb one side of the emotional spectrum. And that it is in letting ourselves feel the uncomfortable, the painful, the gut-wrenching, that we also let ourselves feel the joy, the connection, and the healing beyond what capitalism tries to sell to us. So why would that be different when it comes to liberatory practice?</p><p>Not to mention the whole capitalism thing? It’s exploitative, it’s a scam, and it doesn't work anyways; the most wealthy people often have such an innate spiritual pain of being the epitome of an unwell society. After all, what is well in a world that is so unwell? What is healing in a world that glorifies the harm we work so hard to attain, only to have to recover from it?</p><p>If we can let go of our obsession to be happy, if we can let go of our narrow ideations of what it means to be happy within this colonial, capitalist paradigm, then perhaps happiness will happen upon us.</p><p>One of my favorite quotes from Audre Lorde is <strong><em>“I feel, therefore I can be free”</em></strong>. </p><p>At first I didn’t get it, I couldn’t wrap my head around how feeling could be liberation. But now I think what it speaks to is the <em>process</em> of living and existing under oppression. Because at the end of the day, if you are having a response to the system, the atrocity, the cruelty, then that means you are not consumed by it, and you haven’t been overtaken by it. It brings into consideration that feeling deeply and without the restraints of having to earn happiness, and without conforming to the societal norms of happiness that works to invalidate our humanity, that we are resisting the very systems that tries to disconnect us from our divinity, our humanity, and our interconnectedness.</p><p>If we think about happiness in this way, if we forgo the idea that happiness is the peace we must consistently try to attain, but instead think of liberation as peace, we might see that believing happiness to be peace is all but a process of numbing. A numbing that requires us to turn away, a numbing that believes that in order for us to feel at peace in our lives we need to remove all that has us feeling anything but happy.</p><p>If we let ourselves connect, instead, to the paradigm of liberation as peace, we might start to let the hap back into our happiness, to experience how liberation as peace includes happiness and joy as a pause for breath, a pause for hope.</p><p>Because joy, too is an act of resistance. And while happiness is not hope, there is an inherent hope when we choose to opt in, rather than to opt out, and sometimes happiness, joy, and peace, not only allows us an emotional latitude to opt in but also becomes a treasured function of our opting in.</p><p>In the pursuit of collective liberation, the happiness that happens upon me when I choose to opt in, often comes in the form of connection and knowing that I am not alone in this work. Whether that is through encountering thought-provoking ponderings that reads like poetry or being able to engage with a group of people who are all envisioning and working towards the same future, liberatory practice <em>becomes</em> joy. Liberatory practice is the antidote to apathy. It becomes agency and meaning, and connection, and purpose. Liberatory practice releases you from the narrow ideations of what it means to be good under a colonial, capitalist, racist, cisheteronormative, anti-fat, classist, and ableist paradigm and instead allows you to rest into the connectiveness of solidarity.</p><p>This work was never really a sacrifice. It’s a healing practice that allows us to come back to ourselves and each other. To look at a world constantly telling us we are not good enough and not worthy and go “this is a distraction”. This is a distraction meant to keep us profitable rather than imaginatory, to keep us exploitable rather than in connection with each other, to keep us apathetic and hopeless rather than resisting and dreaming up the world that could be.</p><p>This work is a healing practice that bids us to lavish in the joy of the little minute moments because we know the lineages of resistance that made them possible. This work helps us let happiness happen upon us as we connect with the communities that makes living worthwhile…</p><p><strong><em>Because your hope will never be enough if the hope is just yours.</em></strong></p><p>You feel powerless up against these systems, because the systems have a lot of power. It’s by design! But we are not powerless when we’re together.</p><p>And if mourning is what forges solidarity, then hope is being part of something bigger.</p><p>Vikki Reynolds talks about vicarious resistance as opposed to vicarious trauma. (The TLDR of the idea is that vicarious trauma assumes the folx we work with and their pain is what harms us. The folx we work with do not harm us. It’s the fact that they are suffering and we have no means, in our limited, individualistic, therapeutic profession to comprehensively address the root of the pain with the urgency that would honour its magnitude - <em>that’s</em> what harms us. I’ll link Vikki’s article in the email that accompanies this audio. If you’re not already on the list, head to <a target="_blank" href="http://www.reflectingonjustice.com/hope">www.reflectingonjustice.com/hope</a> to get a copy)</p><p>In contrast to vicarious trauma is vicarious resistance - the recognition that the folx we work with brings about a resistance that we are also transformed by. That it is in the presence of such resistance that we build our foundations for hope. That it is in our being transformed that we expand our beliefs of what is possible.</p><p>As Angela Davis says in her book Freedom is a Constant Struggle: </p><p>“[Communities] are the people whom we have to thank for imagining a different universe and making it possible for us to inhabit this present. There was Claudette Colvin, too, who has a wonderful book, Twice Toward Justice. All of you should read it because Claudette Colvin refused to move to the back of the bus before Rosa Parks’ action. Claudette Colvin was also arrested before. You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history. That is why we like to focus on Dr. Martin Luther King, who was a great man, but in my opinion his greatness resided precisely in the fact that he learned from a collective movement. He transformed in his relationship with that movement. He did not see himself as a single individual who was going to bring freedom to the oppressed masses.”</p><p>Community is essential to hope. Hope is someone believing in you when you don’t believe in you; hope is collectively carried, not a thing you have to conjure up in you in the midst of despair (because let’s face it, sometimes you can’t)</p><p>Hope is sharing what you do and seeing other people shift and transform in minute ways. It is having infuriating conversation after infuriating conversation and still managing to find away back to each other to witness a loved one coming closer to justice.</p><p>These conversations don’t shift the system, but it also kind of does.</p><p>Lydia X. Z. Brown, Disability Justice activist and lawyer says, <strong><em>“you can’t legislate morality”</em></strong>. You can’t just put big sweeping legislation and expect that people will just follow it without backlash. You can’t expect a big sweeping legislation will be put in place, without radically changing the world that we live in, the culture we believe as truth.</p><p>So how do we radically change the world we live in? Robyn Maynard talks about <strong><em>“changing the air”</em></strong> in the beautiful book that is Rehearsals for Living, building on the idea of Leanne’s work on constellations of co-resistance. I’ll read an excerpt here:</p><p><p>Robyn Maynard on Rehearsals for Living: “Changing the air is vital. It is a precondition to the possibility of systemic transformation; it’s integral to struggle; it helps us, as Toni Cade Bambara describes it, to “make revolution irresistible.” Audre Lorde says, “social protest is to say that we do not have to live this way.” It is a rejection of “the inconsistencies, the horror, of the lives we are living.” And this generative rejection, this demand for another way of living, is louder and more vibrant and more wide-spanning than I thought I would live to see, especially in these times.“ </p></p><p>Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on constellations of co-resistance: “I’m actually not interested in justice. I’m interested in Indigenous resurgence, nation building, addressing gender violence, movement building, linking up and creating constellations of co-resistance with other movements. I’m interested in making sure the movement around Indigenous resurgence is not replicating gender violence by placing bodies at our center. I’m interested in making sure we are not replicating heteropatriarchy or antiblackness by learning how to engage in constellations of co- resistance. I’m interested in freedom and creating a social, economic, political, artistic, spiritual, and physical space for futures of Anishinaabe people to be Anishinaabe on our land, unharassed and undeterred. I’m in the process of writing a new book on resurgent mobilization and I’ve been thinking a lot about constellations within Nishnaabeg thought. What happens when we make a constellation out of, say, Audra Simpson’s work on the politics of refusal, Glen Coulthard’s work on recognition, and Jarrett Martineau’s work on constellated relationships in the context of my own work on Nishnaabeg resurgence? I’m trying to figure that out. To me, in terms of organizing, this idea resonates both within Nishnaabeg thought but also in the aftermath of Idle No More. It is clear to me that we need to think about what resurgent mobilizing looks like. What does solidarity look like within grounded normativity? How do we use Indigenous place-based internationalism to build constellations of co-resistance with non-Indigenous communities who are fighting different aspects of the same system? This idea that you can bring particular theories or concepts together fits so well with Nishnaabeg star mapping and story. I’d like to apply this on the ground in terms of organizing—individuals or small collectives (stars) organizing within grounded normativity and connected to other individuals or collectives (stars) through Indigenous internationalism makes a lot of sense in terms of creating doorways out of settler colonialism.”</p><p>Building on this and Mariame Kaba’s naming of “one million experiments”, I think perhaps hope is built from one million little experiments that we enact and experience and be transformed by. One million little experiments that build upon each other, not only opening doors we couldn’t foresee, but creating doors we couldn’t even have imagined.</p><p>And in referencing Disability Justice wisdom and adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, perhaps hope is forging communal unlearning that moves at the speed of trust, to build relationships that have collective buy-in to our radical, liberatory politics, and recognize that the rigidity and dominance of the status quo is not just what sometimes steals our hope and joy, but is also what forges the tenacity of those who will facilitate its change.</p><p><strong><em>And perhaps, at the end of the day, hope doesn’t matter.</em></strong> We can hold all of these things at once and recognize that hope is a luxury that veils more poignant questions of liberation</p><p>Questions like what do I need to unlearn and how will I go about doing so? Questions like how can I stay implicated in this work in a world that would much rather have me turn away? Questions like what kind of world is possible and just outside our realm of imagination? Questions like where can I fit into a social change ecosystem that makes use of my revolutionary power, that connects me to something bigger?</p><p>Thank you so much for being part of this hope, this dreaming, this witnessing, this resisting. To close out I’ll also link Deepa Iyer’s social change ecosystem reflection, which is an excellent next step to support you in this deep work.</p><p>This is the end of the series, An Expose on Hope: A Reflection Guide for When Liberatory Practice Feels Hopeless. If you have any feedback or thoughts that have come up as you engaged in this series, please connect! I’d love to chat about what has been showing up for you. And also, please stay tuned for the bonus reflection guide, Mapping Ourselves to Collective Liberation where we dive deep into navigating the most common traps when we do this work. It was built from the grief, joy, and deep learning based on real life conversations and experiences, so it’s going to be a juicy one! I am just piecing together the framework for that now and am so looking forward to sharing it with you.</p><p>An Expose on Hope: a reflection guide for when liberatory practice feels hopeless is offered by donation, with 100% of the proceeds donated to supporting Palestinian, Congolese, and Sudanese resistance. This is my messy, imperfect attempt to have the examination of my complicities as a person occupying stolen lands in the global north, as a person who’s lineage was also directly impacted by the colonial violence that allows me to occupy this space, to be useful to the active resistance in one way or another. If you have any feedback, critiques, or suggestions please email me at <a target="_blank" href="mailto:hello@reflectingonjustice.com">hello@reflectingonjustice.com</a>; let’s co-create our resistances together.</p><p>In each audio we referencing and examining the work of liberatory thinkers and on the ground activists at the forefront of our work, so make sure you’re on our email list if you aren’t already so that you can get the transcripts and links to materials referenced. Head to <a target="_blank" href="http://reflectingonjustice.com/hope">reflectingonjustice.com/hope</a> to get on the list.</p><p>If you haven’t met me yet, I am Abby, a cis-queer, first-gen settler, from Hong Kong, occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples, in my work I am a clinical supervisor, adjunct faculty member, and practicing therapist and in my life, I spend most of my time building and learning all things justice-oriented and liberatory practice, living my best life trying to be a human database for this important work. I also have a thing for live shows, cute cats, good food and building mechanical keyboards, so hit me up with all your favorite artists, cat reels, recipes, and recommendations for tactile switches.</p><p>And this is Reflecting on Justice, your resistance besties, your community to unlearn with, and your co-conspirators for liberatory practices in therapy. Till next time, in unlearning and solidarity as always, take so much care, and I’ll talk to you soon!</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to reflecting on justice at <a href="https://reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_4">reflectingonjustice.substack.com/subscribe</a></description>](https://us-central1-podcastguru-217d6.cloudfunctions.net/gcf_get_image?image_url=https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Podcasts112/v4/94/ad/ac/94adac98-3608-8e63-11ea-a6f62c826553/mza_9650449513858701990.jpg/600x600bb.jpg&width=300&height=300&api_key=xqFmUFX5BHLBTA)
