Reflective Workshop on Hoping, Coping, and Resisting

Reflective Workshop on Hoping, Coping, and Resisting in Nijmegen

Date: Wednesday, 8 April 202

Time: 15:20 -17:30

Register Via This Form

About the workshop:

As socially engaged scholars and activists, we have supported the students' movement for Palestine, and play different roles in antiracist work. We help create supportive and inclusive spaces for racialized colleagues and students, support the inclusion of racialized and marginalized voices in research and teaching, and work to change university institutional culture to recognize and support diversity beyond just including white women. We serve as our own learning tools: we open our senses, minds, and hearts to observe, analyze, and position ourselves to help create change on social issues in the world.

Yet antiracist social change is usually a slow and bumpy process. It requires patience that often stands in stark contrast with the sense of urgency that we feel about the need for change. As a consequence, feelings of hopelessness, despair, guilt, anger, inaction, insecurity, and pain for the world (Macy), feelings of disconnectedness (Brown), as well as activism burnout (Proctor) are real things in our field.

Therefore, if socially engaged scholarship and activism are about engaging with the real world and doing what we can, given the state of the world, we also need to create space to stay sane in the process. Taking care of our own mental wellbeing is part and parcel of socially engaged scholarship and activism, as it helps us to maintain healthy relationships with our partners in the field and with ourselves.

This workshop is about the work in progress of hoping, coping, and resisting: how to continuously and strategically position yourself in relation to issues of inequality, racism, (post-)colonialism, climate disasters, and injustices in your work, research, and in life in general, while staying sane in the process.

If you see yourself as doing antiracism work in trying to create more space for racialised scholars and students, support research and curriculum change to include racialised voices and histories, and transform our university’s institutional culture to include racialised people and voices, then this workshop is for you. Please register here or email [email protected].

If you do not see yourself in these roles but feel you are playing a role in antiracist work and need, please contact me at [email protected].

Based on our favourite inspirational key readings, we will discuss concrete tools for and practice with things like:

• Maintaining active hope amid the chaos (Joanna Macy)
• Emergent strategies to create a compelling future through relatively simple interactions (adrienne maree brown)
• How to deal with burnout in the face of despair (Hanna Proctor)
• How rest is resistance (Tricia Hersey)

The set-up of this reflective workshop will be co-creative, interactive, light and kind, so low on lecturing, high on easy, inspirational, and embodied activities and sharing. You don’t need to prepare. If you have it, we ask you to bring one book or text that inspires you and offers concrete tools for the practice of hoping, coping, and resisting.

Marieke van Houte will help us to facilitate this reflective workshop.