SUGGESTED READINGS

our writing on this theme

What could be an Iraq War Memorial?

March 20, 2018
15 years ago began the US invasion of Iraq. What could an Iraq War Memorial be? How to represent a scale of loss and devastation beyond what individual hearts can hold, what could do (im)possible justice, what would be small, real steps of reparations? How do we learn from other countries, peoples, communities about memory as a practice of becoming more human, a practice of resistance against amnesia as a tool of Empire – with our particular United Statian default settings of tuning out war and often fragmented attention spans? What war memorial do we […]
Abduct2

Narratives of White Women Used to Uphold Racism and Patriarchy: A Partial Timeline

"White Womanhood", Gender Identity, Militarism and Imperialism, Patriarchal Violence, Privilege Systems, Reflection, Saviorism, State Violence

Narratives of White Women Used to Uphold Racism and Patriarchy: A Partial Timeline

May 11, 2011
This is a timeline we use in White Noise workshops to help make visible dominant representations of white women that have historically served to reinforce, normalize and naturalize forms of racist violence and patriarchal oppression.  How do these narratives of white female sexuality and identity (re)appear in the present? How do they continue to live in our imaginations, bodies, dreams, media, collective consciousness, politics? By no means attempting to be some kind of comprehensive history, but rather pulling out some key threads in the unweaving of structures of domination.  Here we go: Captivity narratives, stories […]

dialogue notes on this topic

Though many of the themes from the monthly dialogues are represented in our blog posts, those posts rarely include all of what was discussed.  Find the notes here from each dialogue raw and uncut. We share them (with names omitted) in an effort to be  accountable and transparent to our larger community, accessible for those who are not able to attend, and saved as archive to return to and draw from.

May 2021: On the Abolition Path

Reflection prompts: Let’s come together to deepen our shared understandings of visionary Black-led abolition movements, expand the limits of our abolitionist imaginations, and recognize the ways that race, class and gender influence our understandings of safety and punishment. What questions are we each sitting with in the wake of the Chauvin verdict and how it relates to calls for justice and accountability? How are people defining justice and accountability in relation to police indictments? How do we reckon with the system that is guilty, that is not put on trial, that was designed to secure […]

February 2016: Islamophobia and Militarism

Dialogue Description: Given the profound importance and particular challenges of entering into difficult conversations on Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, we are planning to offer a dialogue that will be combined with aspects of our recent workshop. This will include a short presentation on key dimensions of how anti-Muslim racism functions, and will be an opportunity to try out a range of surfacing, scanning, and skill-building strategies in challenging Islamophobic narratives. For reading on Islamophobia before we meet if you have the time, we suggest looking at Paul Kivel’s excellent article in his recent newsletter. Dialogue […]
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