One of the reasons I post on this blog ao infreqently is that my standards for my own writing are so restrictive as to be paralyzing. So many would-be posts bubble up, only to fail to fully materialize, or the window of their relevance closes before they can. If I could give myself permission to just write without worrying about how tightly composed it is, this might actually become a blog rather than an archive of occasional articles.
So I’m trying something new starting today. A new kind of post (for me) where I’ll basically just vomit up whatever’s really pressing against my consciousness: crazy observations, responses to political garbage, philosophical meanderings, down whatever trail the Hunter leads…
Liz Cheney, Trump, and Liberal Alarmism
This is one of those things I’m talking about after the moment has passed, especially post-election, but I gotta get it out. Democrats and liberal media were up in arms over Trump’s supposedly violent statements toward Liz Cheney, in which he said her usual warhawk orientation would be different if the guns (presumably those of enemy soldiers) were pointed at her.
She is a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.
The context was Cheney’s penchant for supporting U.S. wars abroad, like her father before her. And context aside, these words in themselves do not constitute a threat. The guns in question are not held by Trump himself or any of his proxies. There is no plan here, no order, nothing. It is hypothetical because of course Liz Cheney would never see a battlefield, hyperbolic, and in total disregard for the establishment’s rules of decorum, as is Trump’s well-worn style.
Listen. I’m old enough to remember — it was only 16 years ago! — when George W. Bush and his ilk were public enemies for the liberal establishment. That he’s somehow managed to launder that image and retire as some more reasonable elder statesman who paints mediocre pictures in his spare time does not change the fact he — and main man Dick — are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths from a war waged under false pretenses. Or their responsibility for the economic crash of 2008 and the annihilation of generations of Black wealth. It was popular back then to cast Bush as a moron, and so the thinking was that it was Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rove and whoever else pulling his strings.
As far as Liz goes, the apple doesn’t fall far, and somehow, we’re supposed to forget her family’s war profiteering legacy because she stands guard at the Right Gate to defend the establishment, which apparently has grown so big (coalition is the word they use) that Bernie Sanders guards the Left Gate? And pundits are still confused as to why an antiestablishment firestarter like Trump resonated with so many?
About Those Slavery Texts
When I first read the story about these racist mass texts telling Black people all over the country to report to the nearest plantation…can I be real with y’all for a minute?
I cracked up laughing. I’m laughing now.
There were a few reasons for this. First was that this was so obviously a trolling of epic proportions that no serious person could actually think… Well, more on that in a minute.
Second, I’m sure whatever clever little roach thought this up is sitting somewhere all smug and self-satisfied at the outrage. He or they won the minute this became a national story. And I’m not gonna give him the satisfaction.
Third, it was so asinine that it triggered some juvenile funny bone, and I just couldn’t help myself.
Also funny, but in the sobering sense that black and white people functionally live on separate planets, is this bit from a CNN article:
Attorneys general in Washington, DC, Virginia, New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland have condemned the messages and urged those who feel under threat to contact law enforcement.
Bruh. What? Do otherwise (presumably) intelligent people shit their brains out when it comes to the police? Absent a recent protest about another execution of a Black person by a cop, or forgetting the mass mobilizations of 4 years ago, or forgetting or perhaps somehow never knowing what even the National Law Enforcement Museum admits on their website, that the origin of the modern US police is in the practice of slave catching? In what bizarro world would a Black person in the United States of America, fearing being forced into slavery, turn to the very institution which enforced it and has since presided over a regime of Black oppression and murder for generations? What the fuck are these people even saying?
But here’s the thing that all the coverage of this story seems to miss, which is far more ominous and far more important. This person or people, with presumably far fewer resources than the Trump campaign (if we take them at their word they they weren’t involved), were able to send targeted communications to a large number of people, knowing their names and racial identities.
The real story here is about data. Who has access to it and what they can do with it. I suspect this was an exploitation of the same infrastructure that brought us all the election campaign texts. At some point I gave the wrong person or entity my name and phone number, and that, paired with my recent history of holding my nose while voting for Democrats, opened me up to the most aggressive, relentless, spammy text assault I’ve ever experienced. Just how many people have my information? And whose job is to identify and protect my data from bad actors?
I can imagine a scenario in which some unsuspecting Black voters, participating in some phone survey or exit poll, had their name, race, and contact info logged in some database somewhere, for political spam purposes, and then that database — likely with less security than the many large companies experiencing data breaches of late — was somehow compromised and the Clever Roach found their opportunity to troll a bunch of Black people, the FBI, the media, the NAACP, and everyone else up in arms about this dumb shit. The timing is likely not a coincidence.
And the Kids Are Not Alright
That all said, the most damage done — as much by those continuing to give the story air as the original troll — seems to have been to young people, who through a combination of social media virality (and the related capitalization on outrage and fear) their own lack of digital literacy, and what seems to be a deep sense of fatalism and powerlessness, came to believe that the reinstitution of slavery — without a country-collapsing war — is even a possibility.
What it also signifies is a failure of public education, our mass media, and popular culture, at least insofar as it applies to adequate representations of history. From To Kill a Mockingbird, to 12 Years a Slave, many of us, and perhaps young people especially, have internalized this false narrative in which millions of Black people were brutally enslaved and mostly accepted their plight without resistance. Disarmed with this version of history, one might reasonably assume that were it not for the infinite good will and impeccable morality of the white people in the northern states, that we would’ve been enslaved for another fifty years. That we, today, by a shift in our good fortunes, a depletion of that good white will, or the rise of a fascist president, might be enslaved again. Without resistance.
In this version of history there were a few outliers — hell, maybe only one by the name of Harriet Tubman — but the rest of us by and large accepted our fate. They probably haven’t heard the names of Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey, or understand that resistance was actually not the exclusive province of a handful of radicals, but a deeply embedded praxis that took any number of forms. Forms that echo into the present: the resistance inherent to carving out dignified lives under siege in the imperial core from forces social, political, and economic. Finding joy, creating art, shaping culture, making worlds. It reminds me that in their bid to render young people as fungible sites of social reproduction, schools have foreclosed on their horizons of possibility: where a return to slavery is more feasible than a thriving life.
So for all that — all that — I say to the Clever Roach: bring your white van to my block, homey, and…let’s see how you feel when the guns are trained on your face.
Now that’s a threat. It’s also a mother fucking promise.
The academy has often served as a pillar of state dominance, through the empirical validation of the imperial project. The state’s recognition of academic intellectual authority and the academy’s appeal to state political authority creates a mutually reinforcing matrix which gives structure to the formal, and dictates “which bodies can conduct research and posit theory and which bodies get to be researched and theorized”.[1]Guishard, M. (2009). The false paths, the endless labors, the turns now this way and now that: Participatory action research, mutual vulnerability, and the politics of inquiry. The Urban Review, 41, … Continue reading The imperial violence of the state, both internal and external, is mirrored by the often invasive character of academic research: an imposition of power that renders the subject as object. Some attempts to subvert this power relationship fall under the broad umbrella of “participatory methods” and include a wide range of epistemologies, which provide research subjects with some degree of agency, and redefine the terms of knowledge production, by resituating and redistributing intellectual authority.[2]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854.
In the sections that follow, I will discuss several participatory methods, their commonalities and differences, along the spectrum of “participation”, which ranges from the extraction of information from research subjects to actively contesting and reformulating dynamics of power. I am particularly interested in how participatory methods might be used as a strategy for cultivating more equitable social and political relations, and building community power and control over the means and modes of production, distribution, and consumption. To that end, I attempt to synthesize and distill various epistemologies into a framework for the co-production of both physical and social space.
What Means Participation and to What Ends?
What is meant by “participation” or “involvement” varies case by case, but generally refers to three positions: those who stand to be impacted by the decisions made about how space will be transformed and used, those who can offer knowledge to inform the changes, and those who ultimately have the power to decide what changes and how it changes. The term “participatory methods” actually refers to epistemologies or orientations[3]Guishard, M. (2009). The false paths, the endless labors, the turns now this way and now that: Participatory action research, mutual vulnerability, and the politics of inquiry. The Urban Review, 41, … Continue reading, wherein the researcher and the subjects collaborate horizontally, or with the subjects themselves being the researchers. The methods within this broader orientation are many, including but not limited to surveys, mapping, focus groups, story circles, and interviews. The use of these methods alone, however, does not make a process participatory, and in fact, they are often used in ways that reinforce existing power relations.
Sherry Arnstein conceptualized this dynamic as a “ladder of participation” (Figure 1), wherein the bottom rungs represented various degrees of “nonparticipation” — those impacted by development decisions manipulated by the process.[4]Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of planners, 35(4), 216-224. The middle rungs represent “tokenism”, the sourcing of information from those impacted, and telegraphing that feedback as an indication of power-sharing, when it is “really little more than consultation.[5]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854. FInally, the top rungs represent good faith attempts to transfer decision-making authority, or even to shift the locus of power.
Figure 1: The Ladder of Participation, adapted from Arnstein (1969), illustrates the spectrum of power held by residents in planning processes.
Participatory methods can be difficult to deploy, due in part to a well-established pattern by state and academic actors of extracting data from participants for their own objectives, or to invoke a democratic process, even though the actual decisions are still being made from the top down. Even where data is collected toward empowering ends, the ideal of collaboration often stalls at analysis and representation[6]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854. — that is, the stage at which the interpretation of the data translates into meaningful transformation of lived conditions or power dynamics. Accordingly, would-be participants are less inclined to commit their time and energy to a process in which their input has no actual influence[7]Brown, G., & Kyttä, M. (2014). Key issues and research priorities for public participation GIS (PPGIS): A synthesis based on empirical research. Applied geography, 46, 122-136. or worse, where the mere fact of their participation is used to validate a predetermined decision or plan made by people in power.
Such processes are extractive and exploitative by intent and design, flattening people into “mere datasets, risk calculations, and variables in financial algorithms[8]Renzi, A. (2017) “Entangled Data: Modelling and Resistance in the Megacity,” Open! Platform for Arts, Culture and the Public Domain. T/A/S Issue.,” and tempering anticipated resistance by involving subalternated people on a superficial and ephemeral level [9]Cochrane, L., & Corbett, J. (2020). Participatory mapping. Handbook of communication for development and social change, 705-713.[10]Guishard, M. (2009). The false paths, the endless labors, the turns now this way and now that: Participatory action research, mutual vulnerability, and the politics of inquiry. The Urban Review, 41, … Continue reading. Research that may have once given voice to the subalternated now often silences them, by speaking on their behalf, rather than making space or creating a platform for their own self-expression.[11]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854. Those truly invested in using participatory methods as a means of empowering the marginalized, disenfranchised, or oppressed (hereafter “subalternated”) must be committed to working from the bottom up, involving the public in every aspect of research, planning, and/or decision-making.[12]Mukherjee, F. (2015). Public participatory GIS. Geography Compass, 9(7), 384-394.
Other barriers to implementation include fear of participation, institutional distrust, lack of experience in participatory methods amongst those in power, regulatory obstacles, and lack of support from various stakeholders.[13]Mukherjee, F. (2015). Public participatory GIS. Geography Compass, 9(7), 384-394. There is also the matter of accessibility, especially where research methods employ technologies or tools which require specialized training or are expensive (e.g. GIS), creating a drain on people’s time and financial resources). The technologies themselves can distract from the goal of meaningful engagement[14]Brown, G., & Kyttä, M. (2014). Key issues and research priorities for public participation GIS (PPGIS): A synthesis based on empirical research. Applied geography, 46, 122-136., which requires a commitment to the more social side of the process: the building of trusting relationships.[15]Renzi, A. (2020). Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy. U of Minnesota Press.
The relationships between participants — especially where the initiative comes from outside the subject community — are essential in determining the power dynamics within the process. The false pretexts of objectivity and externality are discarded in favor of recognition of how all participants are situated with respect to each other and their collective work, “a multi-layered reflexivity: self, interpersonal and collective”[16]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854., which creates “a space in which the subjectivity of the co-researchers and the researched can express themselves.”[17]Sacchetto, D., Emanuela, A., & Steve, W. (2013). Coresearch and counter-research: Romano Alquati’s itinerary within and beyond Italian radical political thought. Viewpoint Magazine, (3), 1-8. Participants must also remain in a state of critical reflection, “critique and problematization”[18]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85., enabling the construction of ever new and accumulative theory and praxis, in all possible directions[19]Colectivo Situaciones. (2003). On the researcher-militant. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. and in a “spiral becoming”.[20]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85.
In order for participatory processes to unsettle existing power relations, they must challenge dominant worldviews[21]Cochrane, L., & Corbett, J. (2020). Participatory mapping. Handbook of communication for development and social change, 705-713., oppose hegemonic narratives[22]Renzi, A. (2020). Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy. U of Minnesota Press., and create alternative models which grant the subalternated the agency to advance their own vision.[23]Renzi, A. (2017) “Entangled Data: Modelling and Resistance in the Megacity,” Open! Platform for Arts, Culture and the Public Domain. T/A/S Issue. It requires the “deconstruction of the dominant forms of perception[24]Colectivo Situaciones. (2003). On the researcher-militant. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies.,” and the abandonment of a certain cynicism, wherein “expertise” is only situated at the “top” — the credentialed, the elected, the wealthy — and rejecting the idea that “knowledge emanating from marginalized standpoints is unworthy and deficient.”[25]Guishard, M. (2009). The false paths, the endless labors, the turns now this way and now that: Participatory action research, mutual vulnerability, and the politics of inquiry. The Urban Review, 41, … Continue reading
Instead, a truly participatory process recognizes that valuable knowledge can be actively produced by everyone[26]Brown, G., & Kyttä, M. (2014). Key issues and research priorities for public participation GIS (PPGIS): A synthesis based on empirical research. Applied geography, 46, 122-136., especially the subalternated. This challenge to both dominant power and knowledge systems must be made explicit at every stage of the participatory process, from the collection of data, including the creation of the tools and the formulation of the questions [27]Renzi, A. (2021). Data Acquisition, Data Analytics, and Data Articulations: DIY Accountability Tools and Resistance in Indonesia—An Interview with Irendra Radjawali of Drone Academy, Indonesia. In … Continue reading, to the analysis and application.
The use of participatory methods to actually shift power or control of resources “would represent a radical departure from current top-down land use planning methods used by most public agencies and municipal governments[28]Brown, G., & Kyttä, M. (2014). Key issues and research priorities for public participation GIS (PPGIS): A synthesis based on empirical research. Applied geography, 46, 122-136..” Ownership and control of the data itself, which usually lies with those who sponsor the process, such as government agencies, NGOs, or paid consultants[29]Cochrane, L., & Corbett, J. (2020). Participatory mapping. Handbook of communication for development and social change, 705-713., must instead be granted to the people and communities that produce it — call this “data sovereignty”[30]Renzi, A. (2021). Data Acquisition, Data Analytics, and Data Articulations: DIY Accountability Tools and Resistance in Indonesia—An Interview with Irendra Radjawali of Drone Academy, Indonesia. In … Continue reading — as a means of securing power.
Participatory Mapping
Participatory mapping — broadly defined as sourcing geographic information from people and communities within the area of interest — is itself a wide umbrella, including various epistemologies such as participatory geographic information systems (PGIS), public participatory geographic information systems (PPGIS), and volunteered geographic information (VGI). The differences between the three are subtle, but generally, they aim to both provide subalternated populations with access to geographic information technologies, and to incorporate their knowledge in research conclusions and any policy or development decisions that follow.
The different forms of mapping are the products of “social, institutional, and political context [31]Mukherjee, F. (2015). Public participatory GIS. Geography Compass, 9(7), 384-394.,” and therefore are not passive or benign activities. What’s mapped, such as “landscape values, development preferences, place qualities, and participant experiences or behaviors within space [32]Brown, G., & Kyttä, M. (2014). Key issues and research priorities for public participation GIS (PPGIS): A synthesis based on empirical research. Applied geography, 46, 122-136.,” what’s included or excluded, who does the mapping, why the mapping is being done, where and when it’s done all carry implications of power [33]Cochrane, L., & Corbett, J. (2020). Participatory mapping. Handbook of communication for development and social change, 705-713.[34]Brown, G., & Kyttä, M. (2014). Key issues and research priorities for public participation GIS (PPGIS): A synthesis based on empirical research. Applied geography, 46, 122-136.. As Harley says, “cartography…is never merely the drawing of maps: it is the making of worlds”.[35]Harley, J. B. (1990). Cartography, ethics and social theory. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 27(2), 1-23.
In all cases participatory mapping invokes the individual and collective memory of people around their physical and social experiences within a space, their sense of how space is currently being used and their projections of how land use may change in the future [36]Brown, G., & Kyttä, M. (2014). Key issues and research priorities for public participation GIS (PPGIS): A synthesis based on empirical research. Applied geography, 46, 122-136.. Tracing Arnstein’s ladder of participation, participatory mapping also varies in the ends to which it is deployed, from data extraction and manipulation, to empowerment.
The tools and methods used within participatory mapping vary widely as well: including but not limited to collaborative sketching, 3D modeling (physical and digital), GPS and satellite photos, drones, remote sensing, and the geospatial web, and can either ameliorate or exacerbate the power differential inherent to mapping itself. According to Mukherjee, while the methods have evolved, the dynamics of “participation” have not kept pace.[37]Mukherjee, F. (2015). Public participatory GIS. Geography Compass, 9(7), 384-394.
Geographic information systems (GIS), which mediated the production and exchange of knowledge through specialized tools, equipment, and training, have been mostly inaccessible to subalternated populations [38]Mukherjee, F. (2015). Public participatory GIS. Geography Compass, 9(7), 384-394.. The emergence of computerized GIS also corresponded to the prioritization of quantitative data, and the devaluation of the qualitative. This was not just a matter of access to useful tools and data, but informed the power dynamics between those making decisions over the use of space, and those who lived and worked in it. GIS became indispensable in technical, academic, and policymaking circles, as a way to quantify various aspects of space, from the value of extractable assets and potential land uses to the lived conditions of people in those spaces, the former often coming at the expense of the latter.
PGIS and PPGIS emerged into and in response to this growing gap, with the word “participatory” referring to the direct involvement of subalternated populations in mapping physical and social space — that is, the material characteristics of both the natural and built environment, as well as the ways that people move within and use the space. The difference between PGIS and PPGIS is less methodological and more a matter of where each tended to be practiced, with the PGIS taken up mostly in the Global South, and PPGIS in the north. Both source voluntary geographic information (VGI) from resident populations, and how it is used differs more between practitioners and their agendas than between the two methods.
PGIS and PPGIS are both concerned with the management of natural resources, and changes in urban land use toward ends of “revitalization” and “development”, and “involving” people in decision-making. The degree to which mapping is participatory — that is, how power over decision-making is distributed — tends to correspond to what kind of organization is doing the mapping. This is not only a matter of power or equity, but also data quality, which is affected by the meaningful participation of those impacted by land use decisions.[39]Brown, G., & Kyttä, M. (2014). Key issues and research priorities for public participation GIS (PPGIS): A synthesis based on empirical research. Applied geography, 46, 122-136. The state, which holds ultimate power over land-use, is often under no legal or political obligation to involve residents in decision-making. The academy tends to hover around the middle, eager to collect data from subalternated populations, but not necessarily committed to using their research to support people’s needs or demands. Community-based organizations, especially those formed within and from the communities where the research and decision-making is taking place, tend toward true participation, mapping as a means of vesting citizens with the power to control their own land.
Renzi discusses practices of counter-mapping and counter-modelling in Indonesia, through the collection and analysis of various data, from “census information, personal and local histories, socio-economic networks maps and planning records” to maps of indigenous territory and informal settlements, and the location and condition of natural assets.[40]Renzi, A. (2017) “Entangled Data: Modelling and Resistance in the Megacity,” Open! Platform for Arts, Culture and the Public Domain. T/A/S Issue.[41]Renzi, A. (2020). Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy. U of Minnesota Press. These data in turn inform movements for claiming or reclaiming space, opposing land corporate or state land grabs, settle territorial disputes between communities without involving the courts, improve local agriculture, make the informal visible as a means of (re)claiming space, create more viable flood models to build resilience in the face of climate change, and “generate connections among people” and foster the “transformative potential of collaborative knowledge production to sustain communities in struggle.”[42]Renzi, A. (2021). Data Acquisition, Data Analytics, and Data Articulations: DIY Accountability Tools and Resistance in Indonesia—An Interview with Irendra Radjawali of Drone Academy, Indonesia. In … Continue reading
Counter-modelling engages communities in the “prototyping of the infrastructure through a process of visioning and research facilitated by expert volunteers.”[43]Renzi, A. (2017) “Entangled Data: Modelling and Resistance in the Megacity,” Open! Platform for Arts, Culture and the Public Domain. T/A/S Issue. These alternative data deployments are constituted in opposition to the extractive uses of data by state and corporate actors, which attempt to impose order on the informal as a means of legibility, and through that, control and the accumulation of capital. [44]Renzi, A. (2017) “Entangled Data: Modelling and Resistance in the Megacity,” Open! Platform for Arts, Culture and the Public Domain. T/A/S Issue. The potential for data extraction is subverted through “data sovereignty”, which requires not only that communities secure and retain control of their own data, but that its acquisition, analysis, and articulation be collectivized, so that “new forms of knowledge and practices of resistance can emerge.[45]Renzi, A. (2021). Data Acquisition, Data Analytics, and Data Articulations: DIY Accountability Tools and Resistance in Indonesia—An Interview with Irendra Radjawali of Drone Academy, Indonesia. In … Continue reading
Participatory Action Research
Participatory Action Research (PAR) is another epistemology with contested origins, but generally associated with major thinkers such as Paulo Freire, Orlando Fals-Borda, and Walter Rodney — though the latter is better associated with the term “groundings”, which captures the same spirit of research as a means of counterpower. PAR is generally defined as research that recognizes people as the experts of their own experience, a concept otherwise known as “standpoint epistemology”, and that they are best suited to conduct inquiries into their own issues and concerns. PAR, as an epistemology, commonly uses multiple methods, such as focus groups, interviews, asset mapping, observation, and photovoice. What distinguishes PAR from traditional academic research is that these methods are conducted by the members of the subject community themselves, rather than by an outside researcher. The role of the “researcher”, if not a member of the community, should only be advisory, or to train participants in the methods. It is not for any outside researcher to dictate or impose their own objectives.
PAR is most commonly used amongst people in a subordinate position within a given power dynamic: the residents of a gentrifying community, the workers at an exploitative company, indigenous people fighting against ongoing displacement. As with any such practice, the potential for co-option is ever-present, and regardless of the essence of PAR, its implementation still varies with respect to levels of participation as conceptualized by Arnstein’s ladder. For example, the key pivot of PAR — the situating of the subject as researcher — could easily be exploited to extract labor from participants as well as data. How the data is used, and to what ends, how it is analyzed, and how has access to it, are all variables influencing how “participatory” the research truly is.
One might argue, however, that the most important part of PAR is not the “participation”, but the “action”. If there is no move to positively transform the conditions of the subject community, then the research may not qualify as PAR at all. A related term, community-based participatory research (CBPR), removes the critical “A” for action, and accordingly is a term more commonly used by the state and other institutional actors. In these cases, where “the action component is first to be jettisoned when confronting the practicalities of community research”[46]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854., participation is seen as enough in its own right, independent of whether or not the research has any significant impact on the lived realities of the subject community.
Another pitfall within the practice of PAR has been co-option through the politics of representation, or “elite capture”, meaning that institutions of power cloak themselves in the language of equity, or even justice, as a symbolic gesture, or “virtue signaling”, while not meaningfully engaging with the populations whose identities they invoke. There are tensions between so-called standpoint epistemology, and politics of representation (often mischaracterized as “identity politics”), for the fact that there is not a 1-to-1 correspondence between identity and lived experience.
Put another way, if the research is intended to effect action on behalf of an oppressed identity group, a member of that group who is not oppressed in that particular way, is not automatically an expert on experience they actually do not have. It is easy enough, and common practice, for institutions to elevate an individual member of an identity group as a token signaling their commitment to the broader community. Where standpoint epistemology is steeped in a shallow politics of representation, it is a failure in tactics, serving only to reinforce the “cultural and political hegemony of the Western bourgeoisie.”[47]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85.
What’s also true is that even where one’s membership in an identity group confers useful expertise, said expertise can be enhanced by outside perspectives. Indigenous knowledge systems, such as Nishnaabewin[48]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. U of Minnesota Press. and Red Pedagogy[49]Grande, S. (2016). Red pedagogy: Indigenizing inquiry or, the un-methodology. In Ethical futures in qualitative research (pp. 133-143). Routledge. recognize the value of drawing upon diverse bodies of theory and praxis as vital for navigating the “larger systems, forces and relationships” in which they’re situated[50]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854., but only where this exchange of knowledge and practice is done in the “absence of coercion and hierarchy and in the presence of compassion.”[51]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. U of Minnesota Press.
What makes PAR effective in transforming power dynamics is not merely situating the subject as expert, but empowering community members to be project leaders, which in turn enables them to navigate the cultural norms and rules so as to create relatively safe spaces for community members to engage in the “co-production of pedagogical safe-places that enable intersubjective contemplation and growth in consciousness about social processes and options for resistance.”[52]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854.
One of the strengths of PAR is that it does not have to involve the academy at all. The practice of research deeply rooted in community, designed to investigate, challenge, and ultimately transform social and political relations is not unique to PAR itself, but is essential to doing it well and for the right reasons.
Conricerca and Militant Research
Conricerca, or “co-research” is a practice and orientation arising from workers movements in both Europe and Latin America, to contest the power relations inherent to labor. It therefore differs from other participatory methods in that it is unambiguously political and oriented toward resistance[53]Renzi, A. (2020). Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy. U of Minnesota Press., seeking to “understand which forces are fighting for what kind of transformation with what kind of organization.”[54]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85. The critical turn of co-research is to make explicit what PAR often only implies: the “subjectivation” of the participants[55]Colectivo Situaciones. (2003). On the researcher-militant. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies., that is, the situating of participants as subjects rather than objects of the research, who can play an “active part in envisioning and realizing social change.”[56]Sacchetto, D., Emanuela, A., & Steve, W. (2013). Coresearch and counter-research: Romano Alquati’s itinerary within and beyond Italian radical political thought. Viewpoint Magazine, (3), 1-8. In stronger terms, co-research is the “decolonization of subjectivity of the construction of counter-subjectivity.”[57]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85.
These two processes — the cultivation of subjectivity and organizing for resistance against dominant power — are taken up simultaneously by co-researchers[58]Renzi, A. (2020). Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy. U of Minnesota Press.[59]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85.. Unlike most academic research, conricerca is not purely epistemological, but also ontological, its goals ultimately attending to the transformation of the subject and its conditions[60]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85., which inevitably requires contesting relations of domination and exploitation. This focus on subjectivity, however, implies nothing about the rigors of co-research, which formulates hypotheses, “tests them, modifies and implements them, and then constructs more advanced levels of knowledge and strength”.[61]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85.
Militant research, while embodying the same emphases on subjectivity and resistance, modifies co-research in one critical way: the voiding of any assumptions about what the subjects already know or should come to know, or what the goals of the process should be. The militant researcher takes on the role of Ranciere’s ignorant schoolmaster in “not knowing”, to avoid projecting anything — “meanings, values, interests, filiations, causes, influences, rationalities, intentions, and unconscious motives to their object”[62]Colectivo Situaciones. (2003). On the researcher-militant. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. — whether as part of a political agenda or an academic objective.
Such projection is analogous to the observer effect in physics, changing the subject through the interaction, rather than experiencing it in its most authentic incarnation. In rejecting the imperial orientations of the academy, the state, the NGO, philanthropist, and even the expectations of “the party” for what “should be” based on a ideological canon[63]Sacchetto, D., Emanuela, A., & Steve, W. (2013). Coresearch and counter-research: Romano Alquati’s itinerary within and beyond Italian radical political thought. Viewpoint Magazine, (3), 1-8., militant research takes on a certain ambivalence, making space for a multitude of counterpower formations, including hidden knowledges[64]Colectivo Situaciones. (2003). On the researcher-militant. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. and latent practices[65]Renzi, A. (2020). Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy. U of Minnesota Press. which may not be immediately or at all recognizable as political.
Embracing the Plenitude
All participatory methods, even, or perhaps especially if they are deployed for political purposes, have the potential to depress or obscure a community’s own desires or motivations, under the pretext of empowerment. Where participant engagement ebbs and flows, or where “researchers assume a functional, singular ‘community’ that is waiting to participate,”[66]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854. the work might even start to resemble coercion.[67]Guishard, M. (2009). The false paths, the endless labors, the turns now this way and now that: Participatory action research, mutual vulnerability, and the politics of inquiry. The Urban Review, 41, … Continue reading Well-meaning researchers and/or activists, committed to taking up the “cause” of the subalternated, with a specific agenda or outcome in mind, may in turn fail to recognize, or otherwise disregard or diminish the “social needs, the traditions of struggle, as well as the practices of dissent that are already latent or present in hidden forms”.[68]Renzi, A. (2020). Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy. U of Minnesota Press. Militant research embraces this plurality — what Colectivo Situaciones calls the “plenitude”, understanding that not all resistance involves explicit confrontation with the state.
Similarly, conricerca attempts to recognize that the mission to create new worlds requires “a great new collective narration, one that is not univocal but rather is made up of many irreducible singular narrations[69]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85., and an “openness to ontological pluralism and multinatures[70]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854.,” It attempts to reveal and potentially scale up more subtle and emergent methods of resistance. These may include what Asef Bayat calls quiet encroachment: atomized, unstructured, non-ideological acts of everyday resistance, as a means of securing material needs — through illegal seizure and redistribution — rather than a concentrated political movement.[71]Bayat, A. (1997). Street politics: poor people’s movements in Iran. Columbia University Press. This absence of defined, concentrated, structured resistance may seem powerless or even apolitical — indeed, even participants themselves hesitate to classify or reject its classification as political[72]Kinder, K. (2016). DIY Detroit: Making do in a city without services. U of Minnesota Press. — due to a lack of policy change[73]Hayes-Conroy, A., Saenz Montoya, A., Croog, R., & Munoz, F. (2020). Not quite quiet, not quite encroachment: Interrogating the political nature of urban subaltern community engagement in … Continue reading.
Hayes-Conroy and her colleagues discuss how the activities of the people in Medellin, Colombia are also geared toward the improvement of living conditions, both material and affective. The primary difference is that the activities are not quiet, but loud and performative (e.g. dance, theater, fire blowing, music). The youth and community actors in Medellin reject the characterization of their activities as “resistance”, because they’re not actively challenging the state or the gangs and haven’t resulted in any structural change. Instead these activities are creating “affective, spatial, and convocational gains”, which have a real impact on the people’s quality of life that policy change may not.[74]Hayes-Conroy, A., Saenz Montoya, A., Croog, R., & Munoz, F. (2020). Not quite quiet, not quite encroachment: Interrogating the political nature of urban subaltern community engagement in … Continue reading
The affective dimension of these activities is significant for how they inspire people and expand the horizon of possibility, and also how they enable people to gain social and political capital on a local level, as well as a sense of belonging that may have otherwise come from membership in gangs. The spatial and convocational gains come through these groups’ ability to informally “mobilize” large groups of people — audiences not activists — in public spaces which would ordinarily be prohibited, but are ignored or allowed by authorities, who see the activities as “both helpful (to the community) and non-threatening (to prevailing interests)”.[75]Hayes-Conroy, A., Saenz Montoya, A., Croog, R., & Munoz, F. (2020). Not quite quiet, not quite encroachment: Interrogating the political nature of urban subaltern community engagement in … Continue reading
Although these “not quite quiet” activities do not directly contest or resist existing power dynamics in Medellin, they do serve as a means of “lay[ing] the foundations for a hypothetical mobilization of the urban subaltern,”[76]Hayes-Conroy, A., Saenz Montoya, A., Croog, R., & Munoz, F. (2020). Not quite quiet, not quite encroachment: Interrogating the political nature of urban subaltern community engagement in … Continue reading what Bayat refers to as “passive networks”[77]Bayat, A. (1997). Street politics: poor people’s movements in Iran. Columbia University Press., which under the right conditions can lead to a large and spontaneous resistance.
What these often overlooked or diminished forms of resistance tend to have in common is that they do not constitute “a conscious political strategy”, but instead emerge out of “the necessity to survive and live a dignified life[78]Bayat, A. (1997). Street politics: poor people’s movements in Iran. Columbia University Press.,” through improvement of both material and affective conditions.[79]Hayes-Conroy, A., Saenz Montoya, A., Croog, R., & Munoz, F. (2020). Not quite quiet, not quite encroachment: Interrogating the political nature of urban subaltern community engagement in … Continue reading These “self-provisioning” activities[80]Kinder, K. (2016). DIY Detroit: Making do in a city without services. U of Minnesota Press. attend to people’s immediate needs — redirecting and siphoning municipal water or energy supplies, building informal settlements or community gardens on private or government-owned land — and also “destabilize the affective control of authorities/elites”[81]Hayes-Conroy, A., Saenz Montoya, A., Croog, R., & Munoz, F. (2020). Not quite quiet, not quite encroachment: Interrogating the political nature of urban subaltern community engagement in … Continue reading, free people from “the discipline and controlling relations of the modern working institutions”, and “challenge modern principles of exchange value, bureaucracy, and the state.”[82]Bayat, A. (1997). Street politics: poor people’s movements in Iran. Columbia University Press.
Although these activities most often emerge in response to the failure, neglect, or contempt of the state or other institutions of power, and the absence of any “institutional mechanism through which they can collectively express their grievances and resolve their problems[83]Bayat, A. (1997). Street politics: poor people’s movements in Iran. Columbia University Press.,” they are done for their own sake, their own inherent value, without necessarily attempting to challenge political authority[84]Bayat, A. (1997). Street politics: poor people’s movements in Iran. Columbia University Press., or to undermine the capitalist status quo.[85]Kinder, K. (2016). DIY Detroit: Making do in a city without services. U of Minnesota Press. Yet in spite of lack of an overt strategy, and the declassification of such activities as resistance, the informal capture and redistribution of resources, the “illegal” use of public space, and other moves toward autonomy are not only political, but do represent a challenge to the authority of the state, in “reclaim[ing] significant political space,” and for the fact that “a fully autonomous life renders states irrelevant.”[86]Bayat, A. (1997). Street politics: poor people’s movements in Iran. Columbia University Press.
Conricerca and militant research both place a particular focus on this informal or “quiet, resistance, identifying it as “the zone of potenza (power), the space of what is possible”[87]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85., approaching it with an intentional ambivalence and openness to unforeseen and unplanned possibilities. Indeed, these more subtle forms of resistance can result in the creation of “passive networks”, which under the right conditions can generate instant collective action.[88]Bayat, A. (1997). Street politics: poor people’s movements in Iran. Columbia University Press.
Critically, by subverting “hegemonic notions of order and control”[89]Hayes-Conroy, A., Saenz Montoya, A., Croog, R., & Munoz, F. (2020). Not quite quiet, not quite encroachment: Interrogating the political nature of urban subaltern community engagement in … Continue reading and by achieving gains (affective, material, and political), people are more willing to fight to protect them, especially where the benefit is direct and concrete. It is easier, for example, to fight to defend a beloved community garden than to build abstract political power, or to defend a long continuity of culture and livelihood as indigenous people do, than to fight to “smash the state”. This is not about incrementalism, but rather about what actually motivates people. As Kinder notes, self-provisioning in Detroit tends to take place in the same locations as more concentrated organizing efforts, creating the potential for “mutually reinforcing connections between resident activism at the household scale and collective mobilization at the neighborhood and district levels.”[90]Kinder, K. (2016). DIY Detroit: Making do in a city without services. U of Minnesota Press. While the tipping point — what causes an exponential spike in revolutionary activity — eludes analysis, the conditions for spontaneous mass mobilization lie right at the surface. Where the focus — of the researcher, activist, NGO — is on the problem rather than creating or enhancing existing assets, it fails to activate the affective potential needed to drive a more organized and sustained resistance.
Synthesis: Toward a Framework for Co-Production
The success or failure of each of the participatory epistemologies discussed above might be reasonably determined by shifts in power. Yet how these shifts are measured — via policy changes, material or affective gains, enfranchisement — are highly subjective, and therefore must be gauged by the participants themselves. Ultimately, if resistance, whether organized or atomized, does not transform meanings and values, only who occupies roles of dominant vs. subalternated, then relations of domination are maintained.[91]Colectivo Situaciones. (2003). On the researcher-militant. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies.
Such a framework would always be experimental, like conricerca “a production of knowledge that is ‘other than,’ an experiment in organizational practices, and a space of resubjectification”[92]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85. — subject to constant reflection, revision, and rearticulation, in accordance with the unveiling, shifting, and evolving of participant values, motivations, and objectives. It would also necessarily engage all participants in a practice of mutual, renewable, and/or revocable consent, and one that “transforms the members of a collective within forms of cooperation and communication.”[93]Sacchetto, D., Emanuela, A., & Steve, W. (2013). Coresearch and counter-research: Romano Alquati’s itinerary within and beyond Italian radical political thought. Viewpoint Magazine, (3), 1-8. The framework would have to embrace, foreground, and uplift the “plenitude”, to start from a position of ambivalence, an openness to counterpower activities not explicitly conceived or understood as such: the “quiet encroachment” and informal practices not regarded — by participants or their antagonists — as political.
Where Arnstein’s ladder of participation is juxtaposed with the continuum between subjectivation and objectification, it reveals a parallel spectrum of power from exploitation to self-determination (Figure 2). Where so-called participatory methods only extract information, it serves as both a form of manipulation (bottom of Arnstein’s ladder), and exploitation of the research object (through a disregard of their subjectivity). Where research is done as part of an “impact agenda”, rather than emerging from the needs of participants, it reeks of paternalism, ostensibly providing information or a “service”, and further cementing a sense of dependency. When this drive to “help” communities is taken up by activists — what Colectivo Situaciones calls “solidarity humanism”, it “naturalize[s]…the victimizing objectuality that separates everyone from their subjectifying and productive possibilities.”[94]Colectivo Situaciones. (2003). On the researcher-militant. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies.
Climbing the ladder to the levels of consultation, placation, or even partnership, corresponds to attempts by the state or other institutional powers to confer “enfranchisement” — that is, to enable subalternated communities to participate on “equitable” terms within an existing structure, as opposed to challenging extractive or exploitative economies and societies themselves. Where such a move shifts the long weight of oppression, it may be seen as “justice”, but it could also be understood as merely redistributing existing values.[95]Colectivo Situaciones. (2003). On the researcher-militant. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. On the other hand, the authentic — as opposed to symbolic or rhetorical — delegation of power, or better yet, the recognition of extant and heretofore repressed power, inherent to one’s subjectivity, confers agency, and enables the activation of one’s own values and toward their own ends.
Finally, where people are empowered to become the “creator of values, of experiences, of worlds,”[96]Colectivo Situaciones. (2003). On the researcher-militant. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. to “[claim] the rights of self-definition, the right to tell their own histories, recover their own traditional knowledge,”[97]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854. it is akin to self-determination (citizen control on Arnstein’s ladder), the highest form of subjectivity, and one of the prerequisites, alongside autonomy, for liberation. To effect such a monumental shift in power is not a singular action or transaction; rather it is the wholesale transformation of relationships, “the decolonization of individual and collective subjectivity, the decommodification of connections and relations, the delabouring of human activity.[98]Borio, G., Roggero, G., & Pozzi, F. (2007). Conricerca as political action. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, 163-85.
The 5D Ecological Compass
Background & Positionality
In order to even propose a “framework for the co-production of space”, it feels important for me to build some background and establish my own positionality. I am a former K-12 science teacher turned school abolitionist, which perhaps sounds controversial until one considers how schooling, the relationship between teachers and learners, at least in the United States, is constructed much the same as the ladder of participation: a spectrum along which young people have varying degrees of subjectivity and power — practically never at the level of self-determination. My prior research analyzed schooling through the lens of enclosure, which I defined as a “physical or ideological partition that divides a larger whole, for purposes of commodification and/or control”, manifest across land, space, and time, and moving steadily “inward” to the community, the individual body, to the mind, to labor, learning, and the very experience of living. Abolition, in turn, is defined as “the dissolution of enclosures so as to liberate the movement of bodies, cultures, knowledges, resources, and/or energy, across space and time, along collectively self-determined pathways.” — which recognizes the “dual nature of abolition, as both a destructive and creative force, logic, and praxis.”[99]O, K. (Forthcoming). From the Schoolhouse to the Field: A Case for Abolition and Notes Toward an Education for Liberation. https://kermito.com/from-the-schoolhouse-to-the-field/
Toward the end of my tenure as a school teacher, I embarked on a participatory action research project with students, for the purpose of studying the local impacts of climate change, and their connections to the more immediate issues young people in my own classroom were facing. At the time, PAR was like a breath of fresh air, but because of the power dynamics of the school, codified in our respective positions as “teacher” and “students”, there was an inherent coercion to the whole process. Since that time I have continued to embrace and advocate for PAR in various professional contexts. At the same time, I’ve contemplated, written, and labored extensively to understand and to hold the contradictions within “participation”, while seeking to create “a framework for education and organizing — living, learning, resisting, dreaming, creating — to resist the physical and ideological enclosures”[100]O, K. (Forthcoming). From the Schoolhouse to the Field: A Case for Abolition and Notes Toward an Education for Liberation. https://kermito.com/from-the-schoolhouse-to-the-field/ The proposed framework is a continuation of that endeavor.
Overview
The Five Dimensional (5D) Ecological Compass emerges in response to what I call “spatiotemporal alienation”: the “collapsing of being — body, mind, and activity — into discrete units of space-time”[101]O, K. (Forthcoming). From the Schoolhouse to the Field: A Case for Abolition and Notes Toward an Education for Liberation. https://kermito.com/from-the-schoolhouse-to-the-field/, attempting to invite communities into a collective inquiry process, situating themselves or other matters of interest/concern at the center — i.e. in relationship to time, space, and community (Figure 3). The compass is as much a tool as a framework, one that aims to invert power relations by situating the locus of control squarely with the community as subject.
The dimensions in question are the three spatial dimensions, plus one dimension for time, and a fifth for the social. Fundamentally, the compass is meant to stimulate conversation about the relationships between people in space, and across time. The right side of the horizontal axis examines social space, such as the relationship between an individual subject and their community, while the left side would be concerned with the individual’s relationship to their physical space. The vertical axis prompts inquiry into the individual’s past, present, and/or future identities.
Figure 3: The 5D Ecological Compass. Questions generated can produce knowledge, drive action, and/or interrogate existing social, material, and political relations between people and their environment.
The ordinal directions represent inquiry along trajectories of both space (social or physical) and time. Inquiry into the future of the community, corresponds to collective dreaming, while a rigorous exploration of the community’s past might encourage intergenerational dialogue between young people and elders to build collective memory. The past condition or composition of the environment — the embedded history of the land itself — might provide important context for current development considerations, or expose repeating trends that demand intervention. Inquiry into the future of the land is part of a process of worldmaking — which itself may either follow or disrupt a trajectory started in the past. The potential questions are practically infinite, and besides encouraging a process of co-production, the process carries the potential to build community relationships, enhance existing relationships, and ground people with respect to how they connect or have been disconnected from their physical environment.
From participatory mapping, it borrows the practice of sourcing local stories of land, whether oral or written, collective community planning, and informal design. From PAR it borrows the practices of situating the researcher as an equal participant, collective knowledge production, and the assumption that the work it produces will lead to transformative action. From conricerca and militant research it borrows the practice of ambivalence and openness to the plenitude. The compass circumvents the need for any training in common methodologies such as interview, survey, focus group, because users generate and answer questions organically and collectively. The compass is meant to critique and intervene against those same methods, to the extent that its purpose is never to enfranchise marginalized populations, or to “include” them in existing state projects or political activism; nor to provide any “answers” to research questions. Rather it is intended to stimulate inquiry about the social and physical production of space toward the ends that participants themselves decide.
The interventions the compass proposes for all three epistemologies is an explicit grappling with the temporal, the affective, the material, and the dynamics of power. It rejects enfranchisement, is both ontological and technological, as well as epistemological, and can occupy a space outside of Arnstein’s ladder of participation, because it does not require the involvement of state or academic actors. In fact, it could even be used to project the will of the people onto/into and against those institutions.
While the subject at the center of the compass acts as the fulcrum of the inquiry, if the subject is a social, cultural, or environmental phenomenon, like gun violence or air quality, it could also serve as a mediatingfactor in the relationship between the vertices of the compass itself. One might consider, for example, how gun violence mediates or informs the ways the community engages with the physical space of the neighborhood, or how the community’s experience in air quality past to present alters their horizon of possibility for how the space could be transformed in the future. The relationship between ordinal points can be explored as well, such as the collective memory of the environment, or projections of how people may relate to the environment in the future.
Epistemology + Technology + Ontology
The framework is not just about asking questions / collecting data (epistemology), but about actively making changes to physical and social worlds (technology) and empowering people to contemplate, reflect upon, and dream/prefigure/change their lived realities (ontology). Using the compass, some epistemological questions might be: What do we know, what knowledge has been lost, what do we want to know / what knowledge do we want to restore? Technological questions might include: What are we doing / making / producing, what past productive capacities have we ceded to the state or capitalist enterprise, what do we want to build for the future? While the ontological might be concerned with: Who are we / What is this place? Who came before us? / What did this place used to be? Who do we want to become? What could this place become?
Complications, Mediations, and Scale
The transformative potential of participatory methods is stymied where they do not “accede to the affective and emotional conditions of their relationships.”[102]Coombes, B., Johnson, J. T., & Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: Methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 38(6), 845-854. Accordingly, the compass invites participants to consider three mediating factors: materiality, affect, and power (Figure 4), which further complicate the questions generated, and within a process of co-production mediate what is mapped, how, and by whom. The experiences of participants within both physical and social space are almost entirely affective, but can also depend on material interactions, or how power shapes their ability and to what degree to interact with a space and to have their intended experience. For example, the possibilities for young people and other community members of Medellin, Colombia, to secure affective gains from the dominance of authorities and elites, were determined by flexibilities in pre-existing rules about how certain public spaces could be used, these enforced through fear and violence [103]Hayes-Conroy, A., Saenz Montoya, A., Croog, R., & Munoz, F. (2020). Not quite quiet, not quite encroachment: Interrogating the political nature of urban subaltern community engagement in … Continue reading.
A “5D ecological” lens, further refined by considerations of the material, affective, and political, might illuminate and articulate the relationships between seemingly benign cultural activities and the logics of subversion embedded in their practice, especially where situated both spatially and temporally, with respect to the tumultuous political climate of Colombia over the past several decades.
Preferences for development are also highly affective, but considered through a political lens might reveal how power forecloses the possibility of implementation. The materiality of the space has a significant influence on what’s possible in either/any case. Landscape values, similarly, are affective, but also shaped by the material features of the space, while power informs the lens through which landscape values are formed, such as whether the relationship with the land is extractive, transactional, or regenerative.
Figure 4: The 5D Ecological Compass, as mediated by materiality, affect, and power
None of the three mediating factors can be considered in isolation, as they are not only mutually constitutive, but additive. Power + Materiality invokes physical barriers or facilitators within the relationship between subject and a given space-time, while Power + Affect is psychological, with past or existing power dynamics influencing perceptions of what happened or what is possible. Materiality + Affect filters the emotional experience of the physical space. All three together represent a totality of experience and relationship dynamics.
For the residents of the Indonesian kampungs (informal settlements) discussed by Renzi[104]Renzi, A. (2017) “Entangled Data: Modelling and Resistance in the Megacity,” Open! Platform for Arts, Culture and the Public Domain. T/A/S Issue. … Continue reading, the individual subjective experience of the city model invokes at once the physical/material relationship between the settlements and the city which would displace them, the residents’ affective relationship to both the landscape and the experience of displacement, and the power dynamics which govern the entire process. The practice of counter-modelling might be enhanced through an inquiry which situates the subjectivity of the kampung in relation to the broader landscape, present, past, and future, and with explicit consideration for material, affective, and political dimensions.
Another layer of the inquiry comes with respect to scale: with “near” and “distant” referring to size of the spatial, temporal, or social context within which the inquiry is conducted (Figure 5). For example, when considering what a given space “used to be”, the “near” would be bound temporally by the living memory of the community — such as Colombians collective memory of political repression — and spatially within the local neighborhood, while the “distant” might look at change over seven generations, as recorded by centuries of oral tradition, or even over the course of geological time, and across a much wider area, such as a watershed or bioregion. The smallest scale is the self: a participant situating themselves as the subject on the compass can consider their relationship to their own body, past, present, what they want or imagine for the future, and how that’s mediated by power, affect, and materiality.
Figure 5: The 5D Ecological Compass, with considerations for spatial and temporal scale
Taken together, considerations of the relationships between subjectivities, space, time, and community, as mediated by power, affect, and materiality, across different scales, creates the scaffolding for rich and ongoing community inquiry. All of these questions can be filtered by materiality, affect, and power, across multiple spatial and temporal scales (Figure 6), recognizing that the “political” has various interpretations through active and passive resistance; the small scale, hyperlocal, and individual material gains of quiet encroachment versus the affective and “convocational” gains of the youth in Medellin. In Indonesia, where drones are used to settle spatial conflicts, leading to material and affective gains, the exchanges between parties are still subject to the whims of the state. This differs from “state politics”, as such, which take place on a much larger scale, while simultaneously effecting little material change in people’s lives, and as a result failing to penetrate the affective layer, which in turn can manifest in political disillusionment, disengagement, or apathy.
Figure 6: The 5D Ecological Compass, with all trajectories, complications, and mediations across different lines of inquiry, at different spatiotemporal scales. The blue and red polygons represent the plotting of different points of inquiry in both social and environmental space.
Where researchers engage in a participatory process with presumptions about what participants know, and/or what purpose their knowledge will serve[105]Brown, G., & Kyttä, M. (2014). Key issues and research priorities for public participation GIS (PPGIS): A synthesis based on empirical research. Applied geography, 46, 122-136., it forms the basis for an extractive relationship and forecloses upon what Collectivo Situaciones refers to as the plenitude. The 5D ecological compass does not presume anything about the kinds of information it will produce, and does not have a fixed agenda, for the very fact that it is designed to generate participants’ own questions. People have near infinite capacity to engage with a process prompted by their own inquiry, rather than that of some outsider researcher or even activist. The compass, then, is a tool — one with an embedded logic for certain — but one that does not exclude any possibility for how it might be used. Ultimately the goal of the compass is to get at how space might be co-produced in such a way as to address the problems and enhance the assets revealed through the collective thought process.
Conclusion
Research has been implicated in, and constitutive of the imperial-colonial project, transforming people, environments, and living systems into objects — targets or recipients of the research action — rather than agents with their own subjectivity. Participatory methods, from participatory mapping and participatory action research to conricerca and militant research, have contested this relationship, even if they are not always successful in overturning it. With respect to planning, and with wider applications besides — such as academic research, schooling, and activism — Arnstein’s ladder of participation offers a framework for understanding the spectrum of research activities between manipulation and citizen control, and in parallel, it reveals a spectrum of community agency, from exploitation (no agency) to self-determination (maximum agency).
The objective of this essay has been to explicate various participatory epistemologies, and their merits and pitfalls with respect to activating the subjectivity of would-be research objects. Challenges abound, from the perspective and positionality of external actors, to technical and financial barriers to accessing methods and tools, to an underlying sense of cynicism toward people, their capabilities, and the value of actions they take on their own behalf. This cynicism forecloses upon the innumerable possibilities of the plenitude — the many ways people exercise their own agency and assert their own autonomy, from quiet encroachment to subversive expression to active organization. It is this cynicism, perhaps above all, that taints the possibilities of participatory research. Autonomy and self-determination are etymologically linked and share a common basis in radical subjectivity. Research that denies this subjectivity can only ever uphold embedded relations of domination, regardless of the best intentions of the researcher (or activist).
The role of the external researcher committed to a truly participatory process — to effect a shift in power relations — is one of providing access to methods, tools, technologies, resources, and availing themselves and their expertise to projects emerging from the interests, concerns, needs of a community. This is a matter of reconciling standpoint epistemology with the expertise of the external researcher, who for the inherent value of diverse perspectives always has something to contribute to the community project. It requires both an acknowledgment of the researcher’s positionality, and an ongoing process of self-reflection and transparency with respect to their own motivations and how they align — or don’t — with the desires of the community.
My intention in creating the 5D Ecological Compass, as both a framework and a tool, is to help make visible and legible the relationships between people and with their environment, as mediated by power, affect, and materiality, and at different spatial and temporal scales: individuals and communities, neighborhoods and cities, past, present, and in the future. It is these relationships which, in turn, inform the research or activist project. The external researcher can then leverage their expertise and access to tools and resources in ways the community deems meaningful and relevant. Where both the means and the ends are determined by the community itself, the project is resistant to external impositions.
Independent of my own political trajectory and momentum, toward the ideals of autonomy, self-determination — and through these, liberation — how, whether or not, and to what extent the compass is used by anyone is up to them. I offer it up in hopes that it can effect a transformation of power relations and enable a true co-production of physical and social space.
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Hayes-Conroy, A., Saenz Montoya, A., Croog, R., & Munoz, F. (2020). Not quite quiet, not quite encroachment: Interrogating the political nature of urban subaltern community engagement in Medellin, Colombia. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2399654419899411.
Philadelphia has become known as the “poorest big city” in the nation, a leader in gun violence, a city contending simultaneously with food apartheid [1]Gripper, A. B., Nethery, R., Cowger, T. L., White, M., Kawachi, I., & Adamkiewicz, G. (2022). Community solutions to food apartheid: a spatial analysis of community food-growing spaces and … Continue reading and widespread housing insecurity, at the same time as real estate development is in a pitched battle against the city’s long history of urban agriculture [2]Stanko, H., & Naylor, L. (2018). Facilitating (?) urban agriculture in Philadelphia: sustainability narratives in the inequitable city. Local Environment, 23(4), 468-484 as a means of community self-determination [3]Gripper, A. B. (2023). Practices of Care and Relationship-Building: A Qualitative Analysis of Urban Agriculture’s Impacts on Black People’s Agency and Wellbeing in Philadelphia. International … Continue reading. Above all, Philadelphia is a city straddling massive divides of income inequality and disparate qualities of life, across lines of race, class, and citizenship.
As the climate crisis continues to make the city hotter and wetter [4]Malter, S., Rockwell, J., & Maimone, M. (2017). Climate change and precipitation: Applying global climate model projections to local precipitation time series data in Philadelphia. In World … Continue reading[5]Weber, S., Sadoff, N., Zell, E., & de Sherbinin, A. (2015). Policy-relevant indicators for mapping the vulnerability of urban populations to extreme heat events: A case study of Philadelphia. … Continue reading, straining both its aging infrastructure [6]Kessler, R. (2011). Stormwater strategies: cities prepare aging infrastructure for climate change. Environmental Health Perspectives and residents’ bottom line due to increased rent, utility, and maintenance costs [7]Kenner, A., Skula, A., Mankikar, D., Zimmermann, I., Nobles, E., Menzo, J., … & Zerbo, R. (2020). The Climate-Ready Home: Teaching Climate Change in the Context of Asthma Management. … Continue reading, persisting struggles will only be exacerbated. To say Philadelphia is in crisis understates the point, because the very word crisis implies a moment, a turning or tipping point, rather than the long continuity of disinvestment, racist policy and practices that undergird the city’s seemingly intractable woes [8]Hoffman, J. S., Shandas, V., & Pendleton, N. (2020). The effects of historical housing policies on resident exposure to intra-urban heat: a study of 108 US urban areas. Climate, 8(1), 12.; [9]Schinasi, L. H., Kanungo, C., Christman, Z., Barber, S., Tabb, L., & Headen, I. (2022). Associations between historical redlining and present-day heat vulnerability housing and land cover … Continue reading; [10]Jackson, K. L. (2022). Urban Agriculture and Critical Environmental Justice: A Case Study of Gardens and Growers in Philadelphia and Camden (Doctoral dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of … Continue reading. Yet it is also an overstatement, because it is not “Philadelphia” as a whole that suffers — indeed, some quarters are doing quite well — but rather the same neighborhoods time and again which bear the brunt of social, economic, and ecological degradation. There is a clear correlation and continuity between historic disinvestment via redlining and a wide variety of disparities in health and quality of life [11]Wilson, B. (2020). Urban heat management and the legacy of redlining. Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(4), 443-457., from the condition and availability of housing in Eastwick, and the higher risk of flooding [12]Cahn, A. L. (2014). On retiring blight as policy and making Eastwick whole. Harv. CR-CLL Rev., 49, 449., to higher rates of asthma or heat stroke hospitalization in North Philadelphia, to the extremes of the heat island effect (Figure 1), with temperature differentials between neighborhoods as high as 22 degrees [13]Shokry, G. (2021). Competing riskscapes of climate change, gentrification and adaptation in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park neighborhood. In The Green City and Social Injustice (pp. 225-238). … Continue reading.
All of that is the bad news. The good news is that there are many strategies coursing through the ideosphere which offer Philadelphia a real chance to get its head above water — literally and figuratively speaking. Any serious strategy would have to take a holistic approach, addressing both the immediate social and material needs of overburdened communities, as well as provide a pathway to long term economic and ecological sustainability: building the collective capacity to thrive into the indeterminate future. One such strategy is the Resilience Hub, a singular facility situated at the nexus of climate mitigation, adaptation, and equity to enhance and improve community sustainability [14]Baja, K. (2018). Resilience hubs: Shifting power to communities and increasing community capacity. Urban Sustainability Directors Network, which has the capacity to channel “existing community action and resources towards building resolve and strength in the face of climate injustice” [15]Muir, M., George, A., Oesterle, M., & Pew, J. (2022). Detroit Resilience Hub Framework: Best Practices for the Implementation of Resilience Hubs in Detroit, Michigan.
Figure 1: Side by Side Comparison of the 1937 Home Ownership Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining map (left) and an index of heat vulnerability in the city today (right). The red areas on the HOLC map are those the corporation deemed “hazardous” investments, while heat vulnerability increases from light to dark red.
Resilience Hubs as Philadelphia-Specific Strategy
Resilience Hubs are trusted and well-used infrastructure, such as community centers, churches, recreation centers, parks, which build and enhance their capacities to meet community needs on a daily basis, and in preparation for significant disruptions and recovery from long-term crises [16]Baja, K., McKinstry-Wu, S., Oxnam, G., & Fitzgerald, G. (2019). Guide to Developing Resilience Hubs. Urban Sustainability Directors Network.. The specific offerings of resilience hubs are contextual, geographically specific, and when done well, designed at the direction of the community itself. Yet there are certain features which are broadly consistent across diverse implementations of the model throughout the country:
Programs and Services — providing culture, community, and connection for residents; these are usually in place before the site’s evolution into a hub, and what makes them a trusted resource; optimal hub planning enhances and expands these features.
Energy — the ability to provide heating, cooling, electricity year-round, often utilizing a “Hybrid Resilience System (HyRS)”, or solar plus a storage system that can provide energy for at least a few days during grid failures.
Water — On site water collection, sourcing, and storage, from the municipal system, local catchment, and/or advance purchase.
Food — Local production, preparation, distribution, and storage, in the form of community gardens, dry storage, community kitchens, and/or food box pickup and delivery
Communications — Free Wi-Fi, telephone service, ham radio, and/or walkie talkies, as a means of receiving and distributing valuable information to and between members of the community, directing them toward resources or sharing safety measures and protocols.
Philadelphia’s enduring problems — stressors impacting people’s everyday ability to thrive — only stand to get worse in the face of looming shocks, “major disruptions…that can disrupt a variety of critical systems.”[17]Baja, K. (2018). Resilience hubs: Shifting power to communities and increasing community capacity. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. The COVID-19 pandemic offered Philadelphia a preview of how shocks and stressors can be mutually reinforcing, casting racial and economic disparities in sharp relief, and exposing historical and structural continuities, driven by the primacy of capital accumulation, and the doctrine of “economic growth”. The lackluster and inconsistent government response to the pandemic also revealed a critical inflection point, the approach of a “choose your own adventure” scenario as the burgeoning climate crisis presents a mandate for building resilience.
When Philadelphia’s public schools closed to reduce COVID-19 transmission rates, unquestionably saving many lives in the process, it also had a devastating cascading effect, for the fact that schools operate at the nexus of multiple community needs. For Black, Brown, and low-income families, who make up the vast majority of the public school population, school closings meant a loss of free “childcare”, and reasonably safe places for young people to be while parents were working, a loss of access to social services, and potentially the loss of two daily meals, with most schools offering students both breakfast and lunch.
Families struggling with unemployment, underemployment, or loss of employment due to the pandemic, for whom the free meals were a necessity, suddenly had to scramble to fill the gaps created by school closures [18]Kinsey, E. W., Hecht, A. A., Dunn, C. G., Levi, R., Read, M. A., Smith, C., … & Hager, E. R. (2020). School closures during COVID-19: opportunities for innovation in meal service. American … Continue reading. Parents who were able to continue working, whether because their jobs were deemed “essential”, or because they were able to transition to working from home, also endured unanticipated financial hardships, both around childcare and daily sustenance. As the city and various nonprofit partners worked to set up meal sites to provide young people with the meals they were no longer able to receive at school, the communications and logistics were haphazard at best, and left many families in the lurch for about two weeks. The social and emotional impacts of these cascading impacts are easy to surmise, and remain the subject of ongoing research [19]Bhamani, S., Makhdoom, A. Z., Bharuchi, V., Ali, N., Kaleem, S., & Ahmed, D. (2020). Home learning in times of COVID: Experiences of parents. Journal of education and educational development, … Continue reading[20]Uzun, H., Karaca, N. H., & Metin, Ş. (2021). Assessment of parent-child relationship in Covid-19 pandemic. Children and Youth Services Review, 120, 105748..
While the pandemic itself did not discriminate, existing structural inequalities concentrated its impacts in the neighborhoods and communities already overburdened by intersecting and overlapping social, ecological, and health struggles [21]Anaele, B. I., Doran, C., & McIntire, R. (2021). Visualizing COVID-19 mortality rates and African-American populations in the USA and Pennsylvania. Journal of racial and ethnic health … Continue reading[22]Poteat, T., Millett, G. A., Nelson, L. E., & Beyrer, C. (2020). Understanding COVID-19 Risks and Vulnerabilities Among Black Communities in America: The Lethal Force of Syndemics. Annals of … Continue reading. These are communities which need not just relief, but a clear pathway to a thriving future now, in the face of surging violence, displacement, high morbidity for chronic illness, piling trash and epidemic dumping, drug addiction, food and housing insecurity. These are the same communities, by every metric and in every projection, that will be most devastated and resource-starved by the climate crisis. While resilience hubs cannot solve all of these problems in one fell swoop, the model embodies the required logic for building holistic community resilience, rather than relying on isolated one-off solutions.
Lessons from Detroit
Case studies in Detroit offer particular insight into the value of resilience hubs for Philadelphia, due to the marked commonalities between the three cities in terms of demographics, topographies, histories of divestment, racist policies, and the projected impacts of climate change. Detroit, like Philadelphia, has already seen more frequent flooding, “major precipitation changes, unseasonal temperature variation, extreme heat, and extreme cold”. It has also seen more days with temperatures above 90 degrees, which intensifies the heat island effect, and can “contribute to heat-related illness and death, exacerbate asthma, and increase the total number of people with asthma and other respiratory illnesses stemming from air quality.”[23]Muir, M., George, A., Oesterle, M., & Pew, J. (2022). Detroit Resilience Hub Framework: Best Practices for the Implementation of Resilience Hubs in Detroit, Michigan
In yet another similarity, Detroit uses a combined sewer system, which during flood events causes sewage and industrial waste to empty into the river, the same river from which much of the city sources its drinking water, occurrences known as combined sewer overflows (CSO). The recent chemical spill into the Delaware caused widespread alarm [24]Sharber, C., & Lamb, A. (2023, March 26). Officials warn of possible advisory Tuesday, encourage residents to begin storing tap water. WHYY., and yet the regular occurrence of waste water entering the river — made more frequent by climate change — barely registers in the public consciousness. This is due in part to the fact that the CSO is a known quantity, with the city confident in its ability to clean the water before it is distributed to homes and businesses, and for that not making a point of sending out emergency alerts and holding press conferences.
Then there’s the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood of Detroit, which “experienced severe flooding in 2014, 2016, and 2021 and 96% of properties in the neighborhood are at an extreme risk of flooding in the future”, which evokes the troubles of the Eastwick neighborhood in Southwest Philadelphia, in which over 70% of homes and business are at major risk of flooding. For the people of Detroit, who also have a high level of distrust in their government, and are therefore uninterested in utilizing existing community shelters in the event of an emergency, resilience hubs have enabled them an alternative resource, one “deliberately designed to overcome this mistrust, [by] placing control in the hands of community leaders.”[25]Muir, M., George, A., Oesterle, M., & Pew, J. (2022). Detroit Resilience Hub Framework: Best Practices for the Implementation of Resilience Hubs in Detroit, Michigan
In one example, a church was set up stormwater catchment to support a tree nursery and vegetable garden, as well as solar + battery storage to provide clean energy everyday and boost resilience during power outages. In addition to local resilience, such hubs reduce the strain on city emergency response services, as hubs are ideally designed for “self-governance, agency, and autonomy”[26]Muir, M., George, A., Oesterle, M., & Pew, J. (2022). Detroit Resilience Hub Framework: Best Practices for the Implementation of Resilience Hubs in Detroit, Michigan.
A Hypothetical Happy Hollow Hub
Happy Hollow Recreation Center in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, is the city’s oldest recreation center, first opened in 1911. It has a playground, two basketball courts, two tennis courts in disrepair, and 2 acres of open land. As a community fixture, Happy Hollow offers a wide variety of community services, including sports, gardening, cooking, and computer classes. It has also gained some repute over the years for producing a series of NBA-caliber basketball players through its coaching programs.[27]Dent, M. (2017, July 7). From Happy Hollow to the NBA: Philly’s oldest rec center is a basketball hotbed. Billy Penn at WHYY. In spite of this history, it has experienced turns of repair and neglect. Most recently it has been slated for renovations as a Parks and Recreation capital project, and was allotted funding through the city’s Rebuild program to finalize those updates. The city website is vague on the details of the renovation, and the project is in the “Pending” phase — a designation which is equally unclear.
Figure 2: Progress of Rebuild Projects as of July 2022
As a beloved community center, Happy Hollow is a prime candidate for transformation into a resilience hub. For improving residents’ everyday quality of life, the rooftop real estate is enough to host some solar + storage infrastructure, the installation of which offers both employment and educational opportunities for the community. The surrounding land could be allocated to any number of fundamental community needs, such as an urban farm and/or food forest, complete with beehives and chickens — to provide fresh, local food, and to further enhance existing gardening classes. Programs could be expanded to include training to help residents build resilience, such as counseling on how to access state and federal funding such as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) or Whole Home Repairs Act (WHRA) to renovate and retrofit their homes. Taking cues from nearby Mt. Airy Learning Tree, community members could participate in regular skillshares, in those faculties which enhance quality of life today and help people prepare for future stressors and shocks.
Stormwater management infrastructure — permeable pavers, rain gardens, etc — in addition to a rain catchment, purification, and storage system, could encourage residents to implement similar solutions in their own homes through the city’s woefully under-utilized Rain Check program. As residents come to understand the value of local air monitoring, additional sensors might proliferate throughout the city, and encourage officials to be more granular in their approach to air quality — addressing disparities in vulnerable neighborhoods.
Figure 3: Happy Hollow Recreation Center in Germantown
These improvements to residents’ everyday quality of life, building upon the benefits Happy Hollow already offers, would have a wide impact. Increasing young people’s access to recreation is often cited as an antidote to violence, which has become a critical issue in the city. By implementing a resilience hub model, expanding the site’s green space, improving community nutrition, and simply creating more opportunities for neighbors to build relationships with each other, would have a compound effect on reducing violence.
In times of disruption, people might come to Happy Hollow for first aid, temporary shelter, or emergency food and water provisioning. Although Germantown is not one of the more vulnerable neighborhoods with respect to the heat island effect, Wayne Avenue, on which the center is located, is a commercial thoroughfare with very little tree canopy, and on a particularly hot day, Happy Hollow might offer cooling stations — of particular value for elders and young children. On poor air quality days, the center could provide some reprieve for residents with asthma or other respiratory challenges. The recent scare around the chemical spill in the Delaware also presents a perfect use-case, as a Happy Hollow resilience hub could’ve provided clean drinking water sourced from rain catchment or purified through relatively low-cost on-site infrastructure such as Lifestraw technology, and forestalled the run on local stores for bottled water.
Figure 4: LLM-generated Mockup of Happy Hollow Recreation Center renovated into a Resilience Hub, with solar power and food production capacity on site
Finally, a Happy Hollow hub, where it regularly provides programs, services, and resources that improve quality of life and help residents build resilience, would also be well-positioned during recovery from a devastating or enduring shock. An on-site tool library could help residents repair damaged homes, with help from a Citizen Repair Corps, trained in carpentry or electrical at Happy Hollow through the community skillshare. And because Happy Hollow is a trusted community location, it would be well-suited to coordinate disaster response with other agencies, and to provide a gathering space during recovery planning.
Funding
Happy Hollow has been named as a site to receive renovations through the city’s Rebuild program. Instead of merely restoring the existing facilities, additional funding from Rebuild, coupled with additional resources from the federal government, such as the IRA, could go a long way toward reimagining the recreation center as a resilience hub. More funding still might be secured from the William Penn Foundation, which has placed sustainability initiatives at the top of its list of targeted projects [28]William Penn Foundation (2023). What We Fund., or from long overdue PILOTs — payments in lieu of taxes [29]Leland, P. (2005). Payments-in-lieu-of-taxes: A revenue-generating strategy for central cities. Revitalizing the city, 201-225. — extracted from universities and corporations.
Community Engagement
Philadelphia has a poor reputation for community engagement, for while the city ostensibly asks for resident feedback in many fora — testimony at City Council, public comment at various commission meetings, and various community design processes — less transparent, or even evident, is how this feedback gets incorporated into the implementation of the city’s plans [30]Hargrave, L. (2022, August 29). The process of Washington Avenue’s redesign falls short of democracy and fairness. Grid Magazine.. One of the seven stages of development in the Rebuild program is “Public Engagement and Design”, aligning with the process of creating a resilience hub, which must be driven by community input in order for it to be effective.[31]Baja, K. (2018). Resilience hubs: Shifting power to communities and increasing community capacity. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. People don’t use services they don’t need or want, and so it would be crucial to “rebuild” Happy Hollow at the community’s direction.
There is even precedent in the city for a participatory budgeting process [32]Murphy, D. (2020, December 3). How would you spend $1M in city cash? Philly wants residents to shape next budget. WHYY., which allowed residents to weigh in on how to allocate funding for community facilities and public infrastructure. Missing from this process, however, were regular cycles of feedback and reflection and a clear articulation of how community input translated into how money was ultimately spent.
A truly participatory process would recognize that valuable knowledge can be actively produced by the community. This recognition would need to be made explicit at every stage of the process, from the collection of data, to the analysis and application. A more authentic and robust engagement process could increase the existing social capital of Happy Hollow, and strengthen its stature within the community as a trusted resource.
Conclusion and Additional Policy Implications
The creation of resilience hubs in Philadelphia would not only do a great deal in meeting the city’s sustainability targets, it would foster short and long-term quality of life enhancements for local residents, and prepare us for inevitable stressors and shocks during the long march through the climate crisis.
Finally, through the resilience hub co-development process, the city could set a new standard for community engagement, and where the process translates into direct, material, quality of life enhancements for residents, it could do much to reverse long histories of justified distrust toward city officials [38]Atherton, T. L. (2017). Mitigating distrust: Trauma and redevelopment in Eastwick, Philadelphia. University of Delaware..
Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson’s latest incarnation makes eighteen “Batmen” to appear on the big screen, continuing the character’s 80+ year legacy, which began in Detective Comics in 1939. Over that span of time, the Batman canon has featured many stories, some of them interesting, but none of them ever straying too far from it’s god-awful foundation. While I’m sure most people are quite familiar with the character, it’s worth laying out the premise, just to see its folly in print.
Bruce Wayne, the son of a wealthy family, is traumatized as a child when his parents, Martha and Thomas Wayne, are killed by a random burglar. The specific circumstances have been revised a little throughout the years, with different writers trying to make it about revenge (as with Nicholson’s Joker), or part of a larger conspiracy (as in TV’s Gotham). However, in all cases, it is this formative event which sets Batman on his vigilante trajectory, expressing his vengeance not just against his parents’ murderer, but against any and all instances of crime.
Young Bruce Wayne mourning the death of his parents in the TV show Gotham.
This premise is absurd on its face, for a number of reasons. First is that the Waynes were a wealthy family, and so the likelihood is vanishingly small that they would’ve ever walked through a dark alley after a night at the theater, when they could’ve just as easily summoned a private car. Where was Alfred? The Waynes’ butler, often reimagined as a former intelligence or military officer, would’ve been on call at the first sign of trouble.
In the mythology of Batman, Gotham City seems to be a place of perpetual darkness and nearly ubiquitous violence, such that only the theater itself, Wayne manor, Wayne Enterprises corporate headquarters, and a few other locations are even safe to occupy. Even though Gotham is based on New York City, the inspiration is practically unrecognizable, except through the lens of white supremacy and elitism. New York is a huge city — five boroughs and hundreds of neighborhoods — with various levels and frequencies of crime, these corresponding directly to yawning disparities in health and wealth, precipitated by long histories of disinvestment, deeply racist city planning, and the geographic concentration of trauma.
The caricature doesn’t grapple with the underlying reasons for its condition, and even more importantly, it reduces the real neighborhoods of New York to pathology, instead of recognizing the immense social and cultural richness and complexity that flourishes in resistance to these conditions. Gotham is devoid of culture, and there are only three classes — the wealthy, the poor, and the buffer class occupied by the police and other officers of the criminal punishment system.
Where Gotham is presumably situated within the United States, it shares that country’s original sins of dispossession, genocide, and slavery and so its conditions necessarily sprout from that rotten foundation. As in the real world, the dynamics of power and concentrated wealth are mediated by capital. Inherent to the logic of capitalism is that billionaires like the Waynes are created by conditions of labor exploitation and environmental extraction, leaving people and the natural world as the wreckage, or waste product, of their ascent.
To be more clear, the only way for billionaires exist, is through parasitic relationships — harm to one for the benefit of another. What this means is that people like the Waynes are complicit in the conditions that ultimately lead to their demise. It need not be so contrived as the Waynes causing direct harm to someone, and then that person getting revenge, because where wealth is concentrated, the human and environmental harms and consequences of capitalism are widely, if still disproportionately, distributed. There is no shortage of victims who might consciously or randomly rise up in retribution against the Waynes.
Unlike the countless victims of Capital, Bruce Wayne is able to take it upon himself, by virtue of his inherited wealth — and through that access to near infinite resources — to get his own perverse form of justice. The comics, TV shows, and films seldom discuss what Bruce gets up to in the daytime, or what sort of industries comprise Wayne Enterprises, but one can reasonably assume that he carries on his family’s legacy of exploitation and extraction. Is Wayne enterprises directly complicit in the suffering of Gotham’s majorities, through the dumping of toxic wastes in poor communities, busting unions to prevent workers from achieving a reasonable standard of living, or divesting people of their homes through predatory lending and aggressive development?
Wayne Enterprises
Perhaps Thomas or Martha Wayne themselves are the missing analog to New York’s Robert Moses. Or perhaps they’re only indirectly complicit, through the funding the police that surveil, abuse, and murder average citizens, investments in fossil fuels or military weaponry, or the gross speculation of finance capitalism — ultimately leading to the same egregious conditions that make Gotham a terrible place to live.
Professional asshole Jeff Bezos may be Bruce Wayne’s real-world analogue, in spite of his physical resemblance to Superman’s Lex Luthor. Perhaps like Bezos, Bruce Wayne’s extraordinary wealth is begotten from the exploitation of his workforce, and extraction of the natural world to produce and sell an endless supply of cheap junk. While, to my knowledge, Bezos does not go out at night dressed up in tights, cape, and a silly mask, to beat up people, he does provide the carceral state with the digital infrastructure and technology (e.g. Amazon Web Services, Ring cameras, Rekognition software) it needs for mass surveillance, under the false pretext that such things are necessary to protect us from crime. And like Batman, Bezos is prone to spectacle, whether it be built around leaked images of his penis, or the conceit of flying a penis-shaped rocket into outer space.
Dickman, as it were.
Jeff Bezos stars as Dickman. In theaters July 2023.
Is it because corporate proxies allow Bruce Wayne some degree of deniability, that he is able to be simultaneously complicit in Gotham’s misery on the back end, and compound that suffering through the deployment of military grade munitions against the people who erupt from such conditions? Or is he simply the worst person in the world, fully aware of the harm his enterprises cause, and under the false pretext of vengeance, uses the power of the State and his own wealth to punish, dominate, incarcerate and kill the people of Gotham?
Only at the peak of white supremacist capitalist mythology, and a deep ignorance of history and social dynamics, can a person like Bruce Wayne — as Batman — be conceived as a hero. So perhaps instead of constantly reimagining Batman for the page and the screen for each new — and ever shorter — generation, DC should cast this villain back into the abyss of the imagination.
Half the work of abolition is dismantling existing structures and systems — slavery, prisons, schools, the state itself — while the other half is about building something to replace them. As a school abolitionist, I find common ground with all sorts of ideologues, from unschoolers to community educators to the keepers and preservers of indigenous knowledge.
Because I recognize the purpose of schools as engines of reproduction, my focus is less on institutions themselves than on a reorganization of society which prioritizes the needs of people over the accumulation of capital, which works with rather than extracting from the natural world, and which enables us to be in right relationship to each other.
This represents a critical divergence point between school abolition and the countless flavors of education reform, even those claiming a liberatory intent. One of these is “self-directed education“, which in spite of its recognition of the predations of schooling, offers little substance to replace the school models we agree should be abandoned. For the purposes of this essay, I will use “self-directed education” when discussing the practice, and “SDE” to refer to the so-called “movement” emerging from it.
I agree that young people should have choice and agency within their educational experience, but there is a simple truth that humans often take for granted, particularly those in Western societies in their preoccupation with individualism and “personal liberty”. Which is that we are meme machines, predisposed to copying, remixing, adapting what we learn from others. This means “self-direction” does not happen in a vacuum, that whatever young people choose, whatever their interests, these are each informed by their social and environmental contexts, and most often by their parents.
My primary point of contention with SDE has been my understanding that without explicit intervention by people (these need not always be adults) with more knowledge/experience of the world (and with that possibilities outside of existing systems), self-directed young people stand to inherit the ideologies, values, practices of the wider world. It is clear to me that they will not self-direct themselves to alternatives to capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, because they have no frames of reference. Nor, for that matter, do most adults in our society.
An additional issue has to do with the creation of the child as a discrete class of people, as sites of social reproduction, rather than as contributing members of the family and society. Black “emancipation” and child labor laws created an imperative amongst the ruling elite for everyone else’s children to be “schooled”, interpellated into a subordinate position in relationship to capital — that is the owners’ capital accumulation.
In our “free” society, schooling became a replacement for the development of material and social skills young people once learned in community, through apprenticeship, through experience with the natural world. In order to maintain schooling as an institution, these young people’s needs are provided for by parents, by the state, other external agents, and further mediated by the mechanisms of production (i.e. the supply chain). This allows young people, especially the racially and/or economically privileged young people overrepresented in SDE spaces, to exist in a bubble wherein they can choose — or “self-direct” into — activities far removed from what’s essential to their survival.
When I contemplate the ideal of children with agency, as equal members of families, communities, society, I recall the story of Binoojiinh, a Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg child, as told by Leanne Simpson in her book As We Have Always Done.
In the story, Binoojiinh is tasked with collecting firewood for the family. Along the way, their natural curiosity leads them to discover the technique for tapping maple syrup, not by “self-direction”, but by learning from an expert — in this case, a squirrel, who they recognize as a member of their family. When they struggle to reproduce the technique, it is the belief and support of their family which encourages them to persist. At no time during Binoojiinh’s story, do they learn in isolation, or in ways external to their relationship and responsibility to family, community, and the land. The skill they ultimately acquire is not merely a passing interest, but of immediate material benefit.
I am moved and inspired by the idea of learning taking place organically, as the experience of living, in right relationship to family, land, community, and the planet. However, within a capitalist society, the mechanisms of production — also the mechanisms of extraction and exploitation — mediate a young person’s ability to learn in such ways.
Just as capitalism obscures the means and modes of production that provide for young people’s needs, so too is their impact on, their power within, and their responsibility for people and the planet, hidden from sight. When presented with the “choice” of whether to merely continue to “play”, or to build the skills and capacities for being active participants and contributors to community, they will almost always choose the former, because of how their privilege insulates them from the necessity of the latter.
That is, until such a time as those external mechanisms break down — as in the case of global pandemics, climate change, warfare, mass immigration, political turmoil enough to destabilize the state altogether. For the socially and economically privileged, these possibilities seem distant, and indeed they may be amongst the last to feel the impacts.
Meanwhile, poor, working class, Black, Brown, Indigenous — often operate purely in survival mode, because they don’t have the luxury of “self-direction”, a reality made clear to them by their proximity to collapse — due to manufactured scarcity, environmental racism, displacement, state violence. And yet these young people are no better prepared, because the precariousness of their daily lives forces them to hew closely to systems which barely and only intermittently provide for them, and because schools only prepare them to reproduce the same.
While there is value in refusing to participate in such a coercive institution as the school, there’s an old saying that you can’t be neutral on a moving train. Abolition implies both destruction and creation. While SDE offers an alternative to schooling, it presents no legitimate challenge to the broader society and the systems which schools reproduce, nor does it offer young people any of the skills, tools, or knowledges required to create something better.
SDE advocates cloak themselves in the trappings of liberation, using vague language which, like the fictional currency on which their delicate world depends, has no foundation or basis in material reality. They cherry-pick terms without fully grappling with the implications, or the enormous amount of work required. From the website for the “Alliance for Self-Directed Education”:
The landscape of Self-Directed Education encompasses parenting, living, community-building, deschooling, decolonization, disruption – as practices toward youth liberation. When we say youth liberation, we are talking about the liberation of all young people. As young people take back their original freedom of self-direction, a commitment emerges not just to the abolition of coercive educational practices, but of all systems and ways of being that seek to demean, diminish, and oppress people.
Decolonization? Abolition? Liberation? These words are merely co-opted as symbolic gestures — made in the abstract — toward the overlapping crises these same people will be last to experience. At the same time, its proponents invoke the identities of those most impacted, in a rhetorical nod to solidarity backed by none of the actual labor. SDE advocates claim to be a “movement”, yet offer young people and their families none of the actual tools or resources required for movement work. This makes SDE, as a “movement”, little more than a vanity project, and a dangerous one at that, for how it leaves room for the reproduction of the existing order under the pretense of liberatory practice.
In reality, SDE is not so much a movement as an idle position occupied mostly by people contemplating and re-evaluating their relationship to school, while doing nothing to push back against the existing order — white supremacist, individualist, extractivist, exploitative, capitalist, imperialist — five hundred years of sociopolitical inertia reinforced by a continuum of state violence. It is a fantasy, one that only certain people have the luxury of entertaining, and even then only temporarily, in the face of emergent and cascading crises.
It was in April of 2020 that I first heard about the North Philly Peace Park. The name came and went in a snatch of text conversation, but a convergence of life-changing circumstances would steer me back. The first was that the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to rage in Philly, calling into question mine and everyone’s relationship to work. The second was that over the previous few months, I had started dipping my toes into the Philly sustainability scene, feeling a calling to the work on a local level. And finally, the many inklings over the years that I wasn’t “cut out” to be a school teacher were starting to coalesce into a new identity as a school abolitionist.
For context, before I left the classroom for good in 2020, I had been teaching for eight years, and involved in other forms of education for the better part of a decade before that. In spite of the intractable problems of schools, and their hardy resilience against half-baked neoliberal reforms, I genuinely believed for most of my career that there was something we — or even I — could do as a teacher to improve the lived realities of my students. In my first semester of graduate school, I pondered the role of the teacher in an “education for liberation”.
In December 2019, I was in the midst of facilitating a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project with high school students, to investigate the local impacts of climate change, particularly with respect to community health. Looking into how it connected to the higher asthma rates for Black and Brown communities in Philadelphia, we learned about the urban heat island effect, and how historic disparities in health were drawn in red lines.
We would later apply for a grant to transform our school courtyard into a community green space, as a means of mitigating the disparities in heat, air quality, and access to healthy food. A combination of the pandemic and the inevitable bureaucratic quagmire brought the project to a standstill — though perhaps only temporarily as conversations have recently started to pick up again.
This was the start of my transition from school teacher to community educator and organizer, a journey that has allowed me to connect with so many incredible people and organizations throughout Philadelphia, in the orbit of land, food, and climate justice. Most significant of them all has been North Philly Peace Park.
If you aren’t familiar with the Peace Park, the gist is this: community members in the Sharswood neighborhood of North Philadelphia came together to clean up and restore health to a parcel of land, and convert it to a sustainable space for growing food and building community. They did not ask for “permission” from the owners — the Philadelphia Housing Authority — because no one should need permission to thrive. This early work set in motion a nine year struggle between the Park and PHA, for the very right to self-determination.
It is a struggle that has always been rooted in control of the land, from Indigenous dispossession, through the displacement of Black farmers in the South, into the present where many battles are being waged over the question of land sovereignty. As explained by mixed media artist and scholar Li Sumpter, a member of the Peace Park design and education teams, “this idea of reclaiming space and reclaiming land, of ownership and agency have always been a part of the Peace Park strategy of community building”.
In August 2020, I was able to connect with Tommy Joshua, the founder and executive director of the Peace Park. We had a wide-ranging conversation about education, land, food, and Black self-determination. He invited me to join a newly forming education team, which would be working to formalize the more organic, ad hoc educational programming that the Peace Park had been conducting with local children for years.
On Saturday, May 15th, I joined North Philly Peace Park staff, volunteers, and Sharswood community members — generations of Black people, from infants to elders — for the groundbreaking of the Sala Keturah STEM Pavilion: a stunning fusion of Afrofuturist aesthetic and sustainable design, which will serve as the centerpiece for a full-block ecocampus.
Design mockup for the Sala Keturah STEM Pavilion
The pavilion is part of a larger project to model Black self-determination in Philadelphia through agriculture, design, education, wellness, and cooperative economics. Maya Thomas, lead planner in the building of the pavilion, sees the Peace Park as a case study, providing a pathway for Black communities like Sharswood to push back against gentrification. She says that where people feel helpless in the face of relentless redevelopment, the Peace Park offers a “competing ideal”, an alternative that genuinely meets the needs of the community.
From the electric enthusiasm of the young people as they drilled their shovels into the earth, to Thomas’s tears of joy, it was clear that the event also represented the breaking of a tide, the crossing of a threshold from dreams to realization. The event was filled with joy and camaraderie, the Park vibrating with the creative energy and the will to see the dream fulfilled.
The theme of the groundbreaking ceremony was tracing the continuity of Black struggle, resistance, and resilience. Community elder Mama Gail guided the attendees in calling Black ancestors into the space, while also inviting us to dream the future into being. In the words of lead architect Nyasha Felder, the pavilion will “function as a time capsule, by retaining the cultural significance of place making through the lens of Black radical space.”
Groundbreaking of the Sala Keturah Pavilion at North Philly Peace Park
Fifty years ago, community activist, educator, and scholar John Elliott Churchville started the Freedom School on Ridge Avenue, a mere three blocks from North Philly Peace Park. His mission, from 1964 to 1978, was Black self-determination, which he recognized as incompatible with education provided by the State. Churchville honed his vision through the lens of revolutionary nationalism, an ideological current that finds one of its most coherent manifestations today in North Philly Peace Park.
Philly school teacher and Peace Park education team member Nzinga Hill wants to cultivate “intellectually sound, spiritually grounded, culturally knowledgeable liberators”, that these young people need to be “uncompromising”, steeped in Black thought, Black struggle, and Black scholarship. It is a vision I share, having struggled myself with navigating predominantly white spaces, trying to glean some hint of what Black liberation might look like. Faced with an utter void in Western and white scholarship, I turned to the wisdom inherent in years of Black resistance, Indigenous struggle, each grounded in a care and respect for the Earth — working to synthesize what I’m calling a Red, Black, and Green ecology of learning. The Civil Rights and Black Power movements are always discussed in the past tense, but they should rather be understood as part of a continuum. Emblematic of that continuity, Dr. John Churchville himself was among the guests for the groundbreaking of the Sala Keturah Pavilion.
Philly is a “city of neighborhoods”, really a city of blocks, such that we often aren’t aware of the greatness taking place right under our noses. There have been a few times out at the Park when I’ve been approached by local residents asking me what it’s all about. It was striking to me that even people who lived within walking distance were unaware of this vital space where they were free to harvest food directly from the land, or from the numerous food giveaways. This resourceful space where Black people were creating natural balms and tinctures, art, crafts, and other products, during monthly Green Wall Street gatherings. This magical space, where Black people were coming together for conversations about strategies, logistics, and the very contours of self-determination. This space which has become a convergence point for the ingenuity and creativity of so many people, from educators and activists to artists and architects, to beautiful Black children seeking a place to be their essential selves, wild and free.
Also. Y’all. Did I mention that there’s bee hives and a solar smart cube?
All the things that North Philly Peace Park is, and will become, are part of a continuum of collective dreaming, striving, and will toward self-determination: the heart of all Black struggle. The life of Black people in this country has always been defined by the tension between our demand for sovereignty, and the violent refusal by the State at every juncture to entertain the mere idea. From the murder of Octavius Catto, situated at the center of a relentless campaign of anti-Black violence against our attempts to vote, to the institutionalized violence of the police, carceral system and the courts, any whiff of Black mobility or agency is met with full-throttled resistance by the State and its proxies.
Reemerging into the public consciousness, due to revelations of the egregious violence toward Black people even after death, is the history of the MOVE organization, and the military-style campaign launched against them on May 13, 1985. It is the only example in U.S. history of a city government dropping a bomb on its own citizens. It is a story of police intervening against the fire department to facilitate the destruction of an entire city block, and shooting at people who tried to escape the flames. It is a story of grotesque violence, profane cruelty, and an utter contempt for Black life.
Pertinent here is what the MOVE organization was before this redefining incident, and what they have continued to be in the aftermath: a collective of Black people who chose to divest from white supremacist, patriarchal, ecologically devastating, capitalist system. Black people who chose to educate and care for their own children, rather than remanding them to state control. Black people who chose to eat and sustain themselves through their own labor, rather than the mediated exchange of the money economy. Black people who embodied self-determination.
And how did the state respond? With a bomb, and ten thousand bullets. Because the viability of our political and economic system depends on Black subordination.
North Philly Peace Park occupies the same continuum as MOVE, in the ongoing struggle for Black self-determination. The Park was also the victim of state violence, when the police raided the buildings they were renovating, under the false pretext of drug activity. While what happened at the Park was incommensurate in scale, historical impact, and the deep, reverberating trauma experienced by MOVE, it was a reminder of how any attempts by Black people to be self-determined will be met with fierce resistance by the state.
It was the strength and support of the Sharswood community which saw the Peace Park emerge on the other side in an even better position. The Park has since been given control over the land and buildings at the site, and the necessary permissions to move ahead with the construction of the pavilion — itself a representation of continuity, being inspired by the Oshun temples of Nigeria and the shotgun houses of the Black South.
Felder says that even though there is much to learn from the past, “when it comes to responding to our current needs, we have to innovate, we have to create something for the now, and for the future.” The pavilion, adds Sumpter, will create a space for Black people “to design, to dream, as we see fit for our futures.”
As I reflect on my own tumultuous journey from teacher to organizer, I realize it could’ve easily been derailed, and sent crashing into any number of dead ends, had it not passed through North Philly Peace Park. What I’m hoping to contribute to an already brilliant and dynamic project of Black self-determination is a framework emerging from my graduate research into the history of education, enclosure, and Black, Brown, and Indigenous resistance to state violence. In line with the values of the Park, which ground our work in land sovereignty, I imagine young people, elders, and everyone in between, learning, growing, and building together.
North Philly Peace Park represents a radical vision for Black self-determination, one that we hope can be replicated throughout the city. In line with the very meaning of the word “radical”, our work starts at the roots — both literal and historical — tracing the continuity of Black struggle and Black resilience, to branch out toward countless possibilities for peaceful, thriving, self-determined Black futures.
You will find very little about ADHD on my blog, and this is for two reasons. The first is that I was diagnosed only two years ago, so while it has exerted psychic pressure on everything, it was an unknown quantity for most of my life. The second reason is that in spite of its penetrating influence, I’m not interested in having ADHD define my public persona. I do not want to be another ADHD blogger or podcaster, because frankly, I have “bigger” things to talk about. I do not say this to malign others who have chosen that path, or to minimize the impact of ADHD. I just have different priorities, and mostly regard neurodivergence as my own private struggle. However, I do need to talk about ADHD in this post, as I’m coming to understand how it reverberates through all of my work, and my relationships to people, especially in movement spaces.
First, a disclaimer. While I have done a good deal of research on ADHD, my story here is based mostly on my lived experience. It is specific to me, my own context and positionality, and I don’t claim to speak for anyone else. For that, I am also going to take out the “H” for this discussion, because I am not the hyperactive subtype.
Attention Overload
There are four key “symptoms” — or perhaps “features” — of ADD that are pertinent. Let me start by saying that “ADD” itself is a misnomer. The first “D”, for deficit, is just plain wrong on its face. I do not lack any ability to pay attention or to sustain it. On the contrary, my ADD functions like an antenna, picking up on every little bit of sensory and semantic data from my surroundings, or bubbling up from my unconscious at any given moment. Most human beings naturally filter out all of this “excess” information, in order to focus on a particular task, and so as not to be overwhelmed. ADD makes this filtering difficult for me, and in fact, I pay too much attention.
This explains why, as a teacher, in spite of my vehement moral and ideological opposition to standardized testing, those days were always the most peaceful for me. Under the pretext of “talking means an automatic zero”, I was able to occupy the classroom without all of the usual “static” — the whispering, chattering, screaming, tapping pencils, knees hitting the undersides of desks, stomping — all the natural sounds of youthful humanity pushing back against enclosure.
Attention Overload Disorder (AOD) might be a more accurate name, except that I also reject the premise that there is anything wrong with me. Attention Overload Syndrome (AOS)? Better, but it is still missing something. A former therapist, in passing, shared with me some of the thinking about ADD, through the more equitable lens of “neurodiversity”. She said something about ADD being an evolutionary adaptation, that it would’ve been an asset for earlier humans, particularly the hunters among us.
The hyper-attunement to her surroundings would’ve made the hunter great at tracking, due to the ability to notice and make meaning of small signs in the environment, to recognize and respond quickly to danger.
So, maybe instead of “ADD” or “AOS”, we could call it “Hunter’s Mind”. From this perspective, what I described earlier as the “intense psychic pressure” ADD exerts, is not quite right, either. What I experience is better understood as a tension between the “Hunter’s Mind” and life in an industrial capitalist society. The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture to the industrial mode privileged those who were better at filtering. Furthermore, the cascading lattice of enclosure that structures capitalism forces and reinforces the need to “focus” and specialize for the benefit of production, and in the name of “efficiency”.
Memory Leakage and Revelation
The second important feature of ADD/Hunter’s Mind is “porous memory”, meaning that things often come and go from consciousness quite rapidly, presenting all manner of challenges with respect to organizing my life and priorities. But the things that enter my memory, even briefly, are not so much lost as temporarily inaccessible. With the right stimulus, whatever snatch of dialogue, forgotten obligation, or very important task, comes rushing back.
This “inaccessible” information also tends to influence my thinking in more subtle ways. Without fully permeating the conscious/unconscious boundary, it takes on an almost a priori quality. There is a synthesis that takes place just beneath the threshold of consciousness, such that complex thoughts seem to irrupt whole from the ether. It calls to mind the story of Athena emerging fully-formed from the forehead of Zeus. If you’ll forgive the hubris of that comparison, you might imagine how the antenna and porous memory work in concert to spectacular — if often bewildering — effect. I sometimes find myself privy to knowledge or understanding, of things in which I have no expertise or even background. I think the antenna is picking up on bits of information, or I am actually learning from the dizzying array of things I consume on any given day, only to “forget” them shortly thereafter. Through the synthesis process, which remains somewhat opaque, I am able to make meaningful connections.
The hunter would’ve needed to synthesize and make meaning of many different clues in the environment in order to track down his prey. This almost preternatural intuition — itself a function of memory — allowed him to just “know things”.
There was a time before I was diagnosed, when I attributed my inexplicable knowledge or understanding of things I couldn’t remember learning or experiencing to something mystical. It strikes me as mystical still, in spite of having a more scientific explanation.
Hyperfocus and Tuning Out
The third significant feature of Hunter’s Mind is hyperfocus, the tendency to take an intense and concentrated interest in a particular thing, often for a extended time. Once my mind flags something as important, as mediated by my interests and values, the only way I can fully interact or engage with it is to turn off the “antenna”. Unlike a “neurotypical” person, who I imagine can focus, shift focus, or unfocus at will, turning off the antenna for me is the difference between a spotlight at night, and a laser in absolute darkness. Pretty much everything except for the object of my focus — including my own body — might as well no longer exist.
For the hunter, it may take long periods of intense focus to track their prey through the forest to the cavern, and more time still laying in wait for the right moment to strike.
I love to watch films in the theater, but there is always a bit of disorientation after the credits roll, and a heaviness as I am wrenched from the immaterial mind-media interface back down into my body. What I experience in hyperfocus is comparable to Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow”, except that it creates all sorts of challenges with respect to my other priorities and obligations (not to mention vital needs). It also creates tension between me and others in my life, especially when they “break the laser beam” in soliciting my attention. The sudden reactivation of the antenna feels so disruptive and intrusive that it often inspires anger — perhaps like the “hunter” reacting to a perceived threat.
Impulsivity, Impatience, and Intensity
The final relevant feature of Hunter’s Mind is actually made up of two inexorable characteristics: impulsivity and impatience. And even these words don’t capture the essence of it. My sense is that it relates to porous memory. Not only is memory the literal (physical/chemical) content of identity, it determines how we respond to the world around us. Past information necessarily informs predictions of future outcomes, even if only on a subconscious level. And so where memory is not immediately accessible, a person with Hunter’s Mind — say, me — might find themselves continuously doing things that they should’ve “known better” not to do. Like pushing for institutional change in one beleaguered school after the next, in spite of repeated retribution from hostile leadership. The layered mnemonic accumulation of stimulus-responses that we call “learning from our mistakes”, and which can also inspire a sense of fatalism, is more or less thrown out the window in favor of the endless pursuit of novelty.
The “caution” or “pragmatism” which anchors us to the status quo is bolstered by all the evidence (stored in memory) that at least the “way things are” allows us to survive. Due to the fragility and precariousness of life under capitalism, embedded in our collective memory, many people fear change, even so much as plucking the thread to which we cling. On the other hand, without a cohesive narrative of all the things that could go wrong, I am quick to embrace radical change. I can, on a whim, make significant life changes, and I am eager to try all the things that offer another possibility. Not tomorrow, or in six months, but now. Others tend to read this as “impatience” or “impulsivity”, but for me it feels obvious, and I have difficulty understanding why they can’t “see what I see”.
When the moment came for the hunter to make her move, hesitation was the difference between securing food for the band, or returning home empty-handed.
When my antenna picks up positive frequencies: theories, practices, strategies, stories, methodologies, people, events, opportunities for creating a better world, I feel an intense urgency to act on them, before they disappear. Perhaps because of the way things enter, leave, get displaced or buried within my memory, these opportunities seem ephemeral, difficult to pin down like the position or momentum of particles. But even things that flit in and out of awareness tend to root themselves somewhere in my memory. Complex ideas are synthesized, even as their practical structures elude me. And where these ideas are of particular interest or importance, I concentrate a lot of energy into exploring further or acting on them, which can come across as “intensity”.
Organizing Principles of a Hunter’s Mind
Perhaps with all this context, it will be easier for me to explain the frustrations and challenges I encounter on a regular basis. Since leaving the classroom, most of my work has been in the orbit of land, food, and climate justice. I have been extensively networking (by which I mean forming meaningful partnerships) with people from many different organizations — in Philadelphia and beyond — whose work is either in those three areas, or adjacent.
Many of these organizations operate within silos, not only with respect to how their particular work area overlaps with others, but also within a given area. Which is to say that there are many organizations doing similar, if not the same work, sometimes even in the same part of the city, and yet somehow without knowing about each other. Part of this is specific to Philadelphia, being a “city of neighborhoods”, hyper-segregated with enormous disparities in wealth, health, and quality of life, geographic concentrations of deprivation, poverty, and violence. This matrix of domination breeds distrust, animus, and fear, and with that, a firm commitment by many to the status quo, in spite of all the reasons to demand something better.
Hunter’s Mind allows me to glimpse both the underlying systems that reinforce domination, and the ley lines along which alternative lifeways might be built. The utter soup that is my mind under capitalism requires serious organizational structure in order to even function. And so my thoughts naturally gravitate toward and coalesce around any possibilities for breaking down silos, traversing boundaries of animus and distrust, fostering communication, and synthesizing many different kinds of work into a more cohesive vision. Which is what I would call “organizing”.
In my work with the Food Policy Advisory Council, I’ve been thinking about the food system as a series of nodes which either facilitate or obstruct the movement of plants and animals from land or sea. At each node, more energy is required (transportation, processing, storage), which means more emissions and more waste. Both of these contribute to a warming climate, or the degradation of the surrounding environment. I am also aware of how the underlying logics of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy create and reinforce the barriers between people and their fundamental needs.
In planning an intervention to help mitigate the urban heat island effect, I thought about how green spaces could do double duty by feeding people in the community. When I think about development in Philadelphia, I’m concerned not only about how gentrification exacerbates the housing crisis, but the fact that buildings are the primary contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and how some of the land might be better used to produce food and localize the supply chain.
I am not writing any of this to exalt myself as some special or unique thinker, and certainly not as a particularly effective organizer, but to explain how I tend to enter movement spaces. What to others seems like impulsivity, intensity, and moonshot ambition, is how my brain attempts to reconcile the gravity and scale of the problems we face with an internal imperative toward justice. Hunter’s Mind tunes me into many possible solutions, constantly attempts to synthesize, seeks to combine all of the resources and bring in all the necessary people — immediately — and work with relentless focus until we’ve at least made significant progress. And then do it again the next day.
Where things feel too slow or intermittent, or not comprehensive enough, the energy of Hunter’s Mind accumulates in the form of restlessness and frustration.
The hunter’s reputation or very identity may have depended upon his ability to bring home food to the band, after all.
While I do my best not to project these feelings, the pent up energy inevitably finds release in other ways, such as in the way I speak: rapidly, forcefully, and with liberal use of hyperbole. For people who don’t know me very well, and know even less about all the underlying processes at work, I can sometimes be “a bit much”.
Hunter’s Mind — or ADD, if you must — can be a challenge, but given grace, empathy, and space, I believe it can be an asset in movement work. While I am writing this essay, in part, as an appeal for understanding to all of the people with whom I have worked or will work in the future, I have no illusions or expectations around how many will actually read it. But I have also found it cathartic to articulate and express what I’ve felt or understood intuitively for years, as the tension within myself, and between me and others. As I continue my work, I strive to reconcile these tensions through personal transparency, mutual struggle, and a shared sense of responsibility for people and planet.
The biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that they divert attention away from the actual conspiracies playing out in plain sight, albeit obscured by the labyrinthine mechanisms of capital. While people are worrying about pedophilic sex cults, tracking chips hidden in vaccines, or musicians using human sacrifice to accumulate fame, there are less arcane and far worse things taking place.
There is also an interesting dynamic wherein certain figures are situated at one of two extreme poles in popular discourse: as maniacal supervillains or selfless philanthropists. Usually, neither is an accurate characterization, and the truth lies somewhere along the spectrum, though seldom in the “middle”. This polarization also overlooks the ways in which these figures might sit at both poles simultaneously, to accumulate both capital and power. It is probably obvious by now, if the title didn’t already give it away, that I am talking about Bill Gates.
Bill Gates at the Munich Security Conference in 2017
What I want to propose is that the actual Gates agenda, far from facilitating the rise of the lizardmen, depopulating the world, or tracking everyone with microchips, is more…basic. Pretty much everything he does can be be viewed through the lens of accumulating profit and control, and his primary means is by situating himself as a gatekeeper.
It is easy to get carried away, finding connections between things that aren’t really correlated, all to support a narrative you already believe. So in the spirit of transparency, and to open my analysis to critique, I will admit that I have an intense animosity toward Bill Gates, and that this animosity informs the context of my interpretations. I almost reflexively assume the worst of him, and “the worst” almost always bears out, in spite of paltry evidence to the contrary. My hostility toward Gates is founded upon his status as an ultra-wealthy person, because I understand that such wealth is always based on the exploitation of people and the natural world. There is literally no wealthy person on Earth who earned their wealth through a strict conversion of their own intellectual or physical labor into material assets. At multiple (countless) junctures along the trajectory of their ascension, both temporally and spatially, someone was exploited, or something was extracted, under threat or actualization of violence.
From that foundation, I also take issue with Gates frequently injecting himself into spaces where he does not belong and where he is not welcome, both because he has no real knowledge or expertise in these areas, and because there is always some ulterior motive, again toward profit or control. Such is the case with his relentless attempts to influence education reform or alleviate poverty in Africa.
More than his generosity, what Gates’s “philanthropy” reveals is his cynicism and his arrogance. These traits are mutually reinforcing, because on the one hand, Gates does not trust in the capabilities of other people, and on the other he thinks himself to be uniquely capable. In my hometown of Philadelphia, Gates is best known — besides his status as one of the world’s wealthiest men — as a driving force behind education “reform”, physically manifest in the “School of the Future”, a public high school which was supposed to model Gates’s theory that technology could solve all problems.
School of the Future in Philadelphia, PA
Like most schools, Future is both a product and a reproducer of the broader society. The experiment, to outfit a school with enough technology to meet the vaunted goal of 1:1, hoping that would somehow reconcile deep historical and systemic inequities for the mostly-Black student population, was an epic failure. Today, the school is the same many others in Philly, doing next to nothing to change the material conditions of young people, nor much at all to alter their prospects. This in spite of the noble efforts of individual teachers, who in their relative isolation can only hope to reduce harm. “School of the Future”, in retrospect, was a rather ironic name, because rather than some gleaming exemplar of “reform”, it represents another reproduction of the relations of domination within the city and country at large.
Gates’s cynicism and arrogance, blended in equal parts with white liberal racism, create a cocktail of paternalism by which he sees himself as the savior of the “darker nations”, be they Black children in Philadelphia, Africans dying from malaria, or farmers in the two-thirds world dispossessed by a changing climate.
He is the physical embodiment and ideological convergence — an avatar — of white supremacist patriarchy. Yet due to his vast sphere of influence, namely his accomplices in mass media, he has been able to style himself as a philanthropist icon. Under the pretext of generosity he is able to deflect critique, and valid lines of inquiry get drowned out in the cacophony of conspiracy theory.
So, in case it wasn’t clear, I don’t like Bill Gates, and I am skeptical of everything he does. In spite of all that, I think the case I want to make here — inklings of a specific and rather grotesque agenda — will stand on the merits.
Earlier this year, Gates published a book about how to avoid climate disaster, the culmination of many public comments he’s made on the subject over the years. That a man who is not a scientist, environmental or otherwise, nor working in any of the sectors actively problem-solving around climate change, would publish a book claiming to know the “solutions” is sheer hubris. The arguments he makes are generic, easily cherry-picked from any number of articles published on the subject for the past ten years. Yet none of his solutions point toward what every climate scientist and activist knows is necessary: pumping the brakes on the runaway extractivism of capitalist production. By framing the discussion in terms of surface level actions, rather than root causes, Gates is able to maintain his guise as a concerned citizen and caring philanthropist. But the sleight of hand is revealed when we investigate what he gets up to when he thinks no one is looking.
Recently, it was discovered that Gates has been secretly — through proxies — buying up acres upon acres of farmland. To what end? It’s a question that many have been asking.
The principal danger of private farmland owners like Bill Gates is not their professed support of sustainable agriculture often found in philanthropic work – it’s the monopolistic role they play in determining our food systems and land use patterns.
In his new book, Gates talks about how smallholder farmers stand to bear the brunt of the devastation caused by climate change, while being those who contribute the least. We have already seen these consequences play out, driving civil conflict and desperate migrations. It was one of the lesser known variables contributing to the war in Syria, and one of the underlying reasons why Central American migrants made the perilous march north. In all his tender concern for smallholders, Gates writes:
And we need new seeds and other innovations to help the world’s poorest people— many of whom are smallholder farmers—adapt to a warmer climate.
In the mind of Gates and other technocrats, it will be innovation that saves us from all manner of crises. These “innovations”, invariably, will be developed behind proprietary firewalls, where for-profit corporations decide how and where they will be deployed based on market logic — that is, who has the means to pay. What Gates does not talk about in his book is how he has positioned himself as a gatekeeper between the smallholder farmers and the “innovations” that might protect their livelihoods, and also between people and their ability to produce food at all in a “post-climate” world.
Gates has successfully accelerated the transfer of research and seeds from scientific research institutions to commodity-based corporations, centralizing and facilitating the pirating of intellectual property and seed monopolies through intellectual property laws and seed regulations.
Monopoly capitalism is kind of Gates’s “thing”. There is a clear through-line of monopoly control extending from his war against open source to his behind-the-scenes battle to keep the COVID-19 vaccine distribution under the command of corporations.
Gates has been tacitly and explicitly defending the legitimacy of knowledge monopolies since his first Gerald Ford–era missives against open-source software hobbyists. He was on the side of these monopolies during the miserable depths of the 1990s African AIDS crisis. He’s still there today, defending the status quo and running effective interference for those profiting by the billions from their control of Covid-19 vaccines.
The depredations of Gates described so far are merely the facts. The conspiracy comes when we consider these three things — control of farmland, seeds, and vaccine distribution — altogether against the backdrop of looming climate catastrophe, pandemics, and world hunger. All three exist in a close relationship with one another, and stem from the same rotten core of capitalism and white supremacy.
The Pyramid of Capitalism System by “Nedeljkovich, Brashich, & Kuharich” (1911)
Climate change drives ecosystems change and the displacement of various animal species, which in turn increases potential contacts between these animals and humans, and the opportunity for zoonotic transfer. The destruction of the natural world through extraction, including arable farmland, and the increasing trend of privatization contributes both to global warming and hunger. People driven off of their farms — by climate change, by land theft, by “market forces” and “trade agreements” which privilege the movement of capital — migrate to survive, and end up being used as fodder in the culture wars. There are more connections still.
Gates’s public persona, the one that publishes condescending books about how to stop climate change, and wastes no opportunity to discuss his plans to “give away” his money, hides a bad actor whose cynicism and arrogance informs any number of nefarious activities. Why would Bill Gates hide the fact that he is buying up wide swaths of farmland? What follows is conjecture, but I believe it proceeds from a rational observation of the facts at hand.
Gates understands that his “wealth” is fictional, a wager placed by our economic system that he can and will continue to generate value. It consists of numbers on a network of computers, and only a relatively small percentage translates to anything material. Through this lens, his magnanimous decision to “give away” his wealth appears rather vacuous.
Given that he has been speaking publicly about climate change for years, Gates clearly understands the threat it presents, not just to people and the planet, but to the fragile economic conditions that sustain the illusion of his wealth. In a world beset by extreme weather, mass migrations, famine, war, and pandemics — all leading to widespread death in a real four-horseman scenario, the bets placed on Gates, Bezos, Musk and their ilk, will amount to scratch. What might be the sources of wealth — real, material wealth — in an apocalyptic world? Seeds to grow food. Arable farmland in which to plant them. And control over the technology to stave off rampaging viruses.
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Viktor Vasnetsov
That Gates is positioning himself and others in his class to maintain monopoly control over these vital resources would appear to be a genuine full-blown conspiracy. Even as he writes books laying out the “solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need”, his cynicism prevents him from actually believing any of it. Not only does he have no faith in people to muster the collective will to prevent climate catastrophe, he has neither faith in corporations to abandon their centuries-long commitment to extraction and exploitation, nor in his own ability to “innovate” a way out. In light of this, he would seem to be preparing for inevitable disaster, and in his arrogance, would situate himself as an arbiter of life and death.
Unlike the delusional plutocrats who believe they can wait out the catastrophe in underground bunkers with finite supplies of food, or the whimsical ones who dream of viable colonies on Mars, Gates is a shrewd pragmatist. It is my sense that while he is not the smartest man, he is smart enough to know his own limitations. And like most wealthy men, he has learned how to capitalize on the talents and labor of others. It is likely the council of these others that gives structure to his conspiracy. And it is these others who have also helped construct around him an illusion of ingenuity, coated in a patina of good will. The entire project is a rather fragile deception, which crumbles beneath any serious scrutiny.
And that is the end to which I write this post. To throw another stone from outside the glass house. To get a few more people to peer behind the curtain and see the wizard for what he truly is: a self-righteous fraud who pantomimes nobility while actively restraining our collective ability to find a way through crisis, or to build collective resilience in the dangerous new world he helped create.
*UPDATE 4/28/2021* Shortly after I wrote this piece, calling for more attention to Gates’ machinations, he gave an interview to Sky News in which he doubled-down on his monopolistic position toward COVID vaccine distribution. That interview, in turn, solicited a ton of negative media coverage. It feels almost serendipitous. While I hope this inspires more scrutiny and a few more cracks in his facade, memories are short, the news cycle turns at light speed, and there is no shortage of mainstream media outlets willing to sacrifice their integrity to fend off any enemies at the Gates.
There is no shortage of comparisons between the dual crises of COVID-19 and climate change. Many people see COVID, and the patchwork and highly inconsistent global response to it as analogous to and also predictive of how we might handle the climate crisis. Some trace their analysis, rightly, to the origin of both crises: the ravages of capitalism — the 500 year problem — which has caused systematic and persistent destruction for both people and planet. While I do not have much to contribute to the conversation by way of expertise or sophisticated analysis, recent experiences have brought to mind an interesting analogy, which may at least offer perspective on mustering the mass mobilization we know is necessary to stall, if not prevent climate catastrophe.
As the COVID-19 vaccines are being distributed at an increasing rate, there remains a significant portion of the population who are agnostic, or worse, completely refuse to be vaccinated. Putting aside the absurdity of vaccination being a political wedge issue, much like the challenge of getting people to wear masks, there is a fundamental misunderstanding among many people about the role they play in public health — that is to say, the health of other people. If you — anyone — choose not to wear a mask or to get a vaccine, because you do not feel you are at risk for COVID, you miss the point that you may in turn be a carrier for the virus and pass it onto someone who is higher risk, maybe even someone in your own family. We’ll never know how many of the 500+ thousand people who died were infected by those closest to them, but for anyone who has lost someone to the disease, it should inspire some reflection about how our own actions or inaction render us complicit in the spread.
The hope now seems to be that if we can vaccinate a significant portion of the population, that everyone will be protected through “herd immunity“, the idea being that all the vaccinated people effectively form a barrier that prevents the virus from spreading so wildly. This only works, however, if a high percentage of the population is vaccinated. The threshold varies by pathogen, and we do not have enough data on COVID yet, but it stands to reason that the vast majority of people will need to be vaccinated.
Diagram of “herd immunity” shows how high percentage of vaccinated people insulate unvaccinated people against the virus
Even in that situation, people will still catch it, and some of these will die, but the global crisis will become manageable. There is a question of how much of a loss of life is considered within the parameters of a “managed” crisis, but that’s a topic for another day.
Just as vaccination has a society wide impact on health, so will the systems-change work we need to do in order to address climate change. And just like there are people who “do not believe” in COVID, or who refuse to be vaccinated, there are and will continue to be people who deny the realities of climate, and who refuse to make any changes to our social and economic systems in order to prevent its worst impacts. Even as evidence points to the climate crisis already being underway, as with the uncharacteristic snowstorms across the country, urban heat islands in cities, or the tornadoes that somehow got lost in Georgia on their way to Oklahoma.
The vaccine refusers and climate deniers — and by these I mean the regular citizens, not the ultrawealthy with a financial stake in denial — have one crucial thing in common. While both may be susceptible to conspiracy theory, or lack adequate education on either subject, or have been encapsulated by filter bubbles generated by Youtube or Facebook algorithms, none of these are the most important. The critical commonality instead is a deep — and justifiable — distrust of institutions.
Just as there are people unable or unwilling to get vaccinated, they may also be skeptical of systems change efforts around climate, or have some other barrier to engagement. This resistance is particularly powerful for people whose immediate needs are so urgent that adopting a systems lens, or looking ahead five or ten years is outside their capacity, or beyond the vanishing point.
It is important to note here that while some people in the United States are choosing not to get the COVID vaccine when it’s available, there are many countries around the world which simply do not have access to it. This, of course, is analogous to the reality of the U.S being as the second highest volume carbon emitter, at the same time as too many of its citizens choose to ignore the global impact, which will fall disproportionately on countries contributing much less to the problem.
Also important is the fact that the overwhelming bulk of the responsibility for carbon emissions and other forms of environmental degradation lies with industry. In spite of their attempts — echoing conservative talking points for the past half a century — to convince the general public that it’s an issue of “personal responsibility”. That the environmental costs of production — particularly waste and pollution — are externalized to vulnerable communities within the United States, is a microcosm for how the United States, in turn, exports that same waste to the two-thirds world.
So I am not writing this to join the chorus of people excoriating the vaccine avoiders and climate deniers. Because, in truth, I feel the blame lies with the institutions — governments and corporations mostly — which have betrayed the public trust, and grievously failed in any stated commitment to public health or well-being. Instead I want to make the case that as we attempt the greatest mobilization in human history to address the climate crisis, we — the big, global we — need to protect everyone, even the deniers, and more importantly, those who for whatever reason remain skeptical of our efforts, or lack the means or capacity to participate.
Whatever technologies, models, and organizational structures we develop, to orient ourselves toward social and economic justice, we must also make space for the unwilling and the unable to be independent, self-determined, and safe. This means insulating them against the violent death throes of our system of capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism, as we replace it with something better. Many things better. Institutions and new relationships at the local, regional, national, and global levels that cultivate enough trust and build enough capacity for everyone to participate equitably. This could function much like “herd immunity”, while we do the more difficult work of education and rebuilding trust.
Maybe eventually we can get to a point where we are all willing — and able — to do our part, for each other, for all life, and for the planet we share.
A question I’ve always disliked when meeting people in professional or even casual spaces is: “What do you do?” Because where should I start? Like all of us, I wear many hats: I’m a graduate student, an orchard intern, an aspiring community educator, a writer, a life partner, a brother, son, and uncle, among other things. But the subtext of that question, of course, is “What do you do that has use or exchange value within our capitalist economy?”
My answer to that is: “Who cares? And why do you even wanna know?” To me, and probably to many of us, that answer is far less important to our everyday lives. Why should my economic value be separate from my value to family or community?
As a school teacher, I eventually came to the realization that what I was doing in the classroom was fundamentally disconnected from the material concerns of my students. Like many, I bought into the mythology of schooling as an investment into some undefined future, where all these “standards” and “competencies” would eventually “pay dividends”. The perennial question, “Mister, why we gotta learn this?” led to any number of contrived answers on my part, until eventually it became: “You don’t. It actually doesn’t matter at all.” This became especially clear at my last school, where students were forced to choose between coming to class or doing things that were more essential, like raising their own kids, caring for family, or working to survive.
We attempted a participatory action research (PAR) project around the local impacts of climate change, and I was very intentional about helping students make connections to their lives here and now, rather than polar bears standing on shrinking ice caps hundreds of miles away, ten years from now. We made connections between redlining and urban heat islands, between disinvestment and environmental racism, between higher temperatures and increased asthma rates. Yet still, on a good day, I saw maybe 20% of my students. Not because they didn’t care, but because the system demanded they spend their time elsewhere, for more immediate returns on their labor.
Sustainability can’t simply mean a “green” continuation of the current system — cleaner, more efficient ways to squeeze out just a bit more: labor, energy, resources, blood. It’s not enough to “reduce our carbon footprint” or get to “net zero”, some neutral zone where harm and repair cancel each other out. Our work needs to be net-positive: to be about healing, regeneration, reparations — of centuries of harm done to people, communities, and the planet — and replacing systems of oppression and extraction with collective lifeways that uplift and liberate all of us.
This has to start with those who have borne the largest share of the burden: Indigenous, Black, Brown, and immigrant communities — dispossessed of land, exploited for labor, and forcefully situated at the nexus of environmental racism, state violence, and carceral control. And let’s not forget the poor white folx: ground up by the mechanisms of production and spit back out with chronic illnesses like black lung, or endemic hatred, for the very same people with whom they should find common cause.
The moment demands a mass mobilization of people and collective will. Which means bridging gaps: in knowledge, resources, understanding, and empathy. In our conversations, and in our work around sustainability, we have to integrate those things which support and affirm our rights to healthy, dignified lives, so we even have the capacity to take on something so grandiose as “saving the planet”.
Last count, Philly has around 40,000 vacant lots. How much additional acreage controlled by universities — ever more gobbled up through gentrification and the false promise of “opportunity zones” — could be committed to projects that restore people and planet? Imagine the opportunities for real, life-affirming education, jobs, and food, at a time where access to all three have been severely crippled by the COVID-19 pandemic.
I don’t want a student to ever again ask me “Why we gotta learn this?” Because I am determined that any work we do, and whatever we’re learning together, be firmly intertwined with the experience of prosperous living. Not just for ourselves, but for our communities and the environments in which we’re all situated. Not just in the moment, or in the short term, but forever.
This, to me, is real “education for sustainability”.
