Leaving New York today. It has been an incredible four days here working with my good friends Kelly McGowan and Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Lex Schroeder, Aniestla Rugama, Alissa Schwartz, and Aswad Foster. We were running a workshop called the Art of Social Justice in which we were investigating the intersection of participatory process and social justice work. Over three days we explored a framework that Tuesday has developed and investigated with Kelly for the past year. The framework includes and transcends the gifts and drawbacks of traditional social justice frameworks and of what we know about participatory process. Tuesday is …
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Really interesting article here from a couple of perspectives. First, it is a reminder that slavery is present in the world and it isn’t a far off problem. Much of what we take for granted is made by slaves, Furthermore, the article points to an interesting app that will help you to see the connection between your life and the life of exploited, enslaved workers elsewhere in the world. The app doesn’t just give you the bad news, it takes a complexity approach to the problem, and it holds promise. And third, and this is a kind of strange take …
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A great insight from Johnnie Moore on learning facilitation: I’ve done quite a bit of facilitation training this year, loads of it with Viv. We’ve pushed to get the sponsors to accept less emphasis on learning lots of techniques and tips in favour of lots of activities where participants try stuff out. One area where we play around a lot is the “difficult people” situation. We resist offering standard tricks for this. So we don’t offer formulaic models for managing difficult people, however comprehensively researched. Instead, we ask people to recall or imagine their encounters with the inevitable impossible participant …
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A great quote from a post by Mark Simon: The more power you have, the more people will lis ten respectfully to your story. Consequently, listening to some one’s story is a way of empowering them, of validat ing their intrinsic worth as a human being. ~ Kay Pra nis A very important principle for design work.
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We have had a strange summer on the coast. People have complained that it hasn’t really felt like summer at all weather wise, and while it has been cooler, it has not been overly unpleasant. Mostly what is striking has been the quality of the air, which has never seemed to get warm enough to hold heat in the evenings. As we sleep outside in the summer time, this is not at all a problem, and the sleeping weather has been divine. But it has been a strange summer for me on other scores as well. I have been working …