“Dare I Say Love”: Critical Connections at the Allied Media Conference 2013
The day after I returned from this year's Allied Media Conference, I wake up with a familiar weight of post-AMC feelings and ideas to process. Every year, since 2009, the morning after always feels like I have to recover from some kind of lucid dream, threatening to escape my memory.
I have not unpacked yet. I roll over, because I'm not ready to move on. But I don't want to move too much lest my body too quickly readjusts to this new moment, scattering away the Detroit dust and dreams that linger... While I lay there, my mind begins to cast a rather futile memory net...
What exactly happened over the last four days? Will that person keep in touch? Who will send the notes from the workshop? Did those conversations truly happen? Were those bittersweet moments that surfaced both pain and bliss real? What I am going to do with all of these ideas and skills learned? How can I hold on to this power? How can we make next year’s AMC better?
[photo of McGregor building at Wayne State University with a cloud with silver lining streaming beams of light onto the outdoor pond area]
Over the years I have witnessed some very important aspects of the conference emerge around collective healing, harnessing political imagination and leadership building.
I first heard about the AMC from Jenny Lee (organizer with Allied Media Projects) at a gathering in DC hosted by the community radio advocacy group Prometheus Radio Project in 2009. Hearing about the AMC while working on a specific campaign for low-power radio, I first came to understand the AMC as part of a greater movement for media justice. As Malkia Cyril, founder of the Center for Media Justice and daughter of Black Panther Janet Cyril, says:
“What do we want in the end? […] the biggest defining characteristic of media justice is that it's not about the media. It's about justice; justice comes first. That's the biggest word in 'media justice’; it’s justice. Media is a small 'm'. It's a vehicle; it's a medium for change, not the change itself.”
However, since my first AMC, the meaning of media justice has shifted for me further, from critically examining the power of media, to asking what exactly justice is. While the AMC for me has been 'about' media, it has also always been about something bigger than that. It is about shifting entire paradigms of thought, imagination, being and relating to one another. Beyond 'calling' for justice, the uniquely intimate experiences I had at the AMC have taught me about what justice does, feels like, and works in the present. It is not just a gathering that talks about transformation, but in many ways it also is transformative in and of itself. Justice in the making, in all of its pleasure and beauty and also in its messiness and difficulty. The AMC teaches us that media and communication are not just about having access to and distributing social justice-based information, but rather at a deeper level, engaging with media means creating the conditions and moments of political potentialities and life-sustaining relationships that affirm and generate worlds that we might not even be able to imagine just yet.
Complex Movement and Emergent Strategies
One of the highlights for me this year was the Science and Social Movements track. Building off of the past years’ Sci-Fi Geek-out Tracks and Octavia Butler Strategy Sessions, the track offered a paradigm for sustainable movement building.
One of the main take-aways for me was the embracing of this idea of ‘emergence’ into organizing for social justice. I have been thinking about this for a while now, but haven’t really found the right words or places to articulate and affirm them. In her speech at the opening ceremony, Adrienne Maree Brown said:
“nothing is wasted, or a failure. emergence is a system that makes use of everything in the iterative process. it’s all data. […] many of us have been socialized that constant growth, and critical mass, are the ways to create change. but emergence shows us that adaptation and evolution depend more upon critical connections. dare i say love. the quality of connection between the nodes in the patterns.”
In the workshop, Forecasting the Future of Leadership, we looked at the weather as an emergent complex system that allows life to exist on Earth. Referring to the chaordic path, we traced the zone of emergence of new awareness and new solutions somewhere in the oscillations between chaos and order. Together, we considered the questions: How do we manage this dynamic together? What are the conditions we can create? Here’s what I have from my notes:
· Engaging people to create commitment and accountability
· Convening people to shift their experience: listening, paying attention, seeing the patterns
· Supporting coherent action and self-organizing
· Weaving together the emerging story
We then did a group exercise called World Café, where we grouped into small rotating teams of 4-5 to answer the questions: How would you describe relationships that are collaborative and generative from your experience? What relationships and connections do we need to foster for social change work? How can we create more generative ways of working together?
[photo showing brainstorm post-its on a chalk board under the heading "collaborative and generative relationships"]
Reflecting on processing my experiences at the AMC conjures up a struggle that has to do with permanence; a temporal tension. It's a struggle to embrace the processes of movement building as well as to organize and strategize to enact change and justice.
Dani McClain reflected on this tension in describing the variety of feedback she has heard from AMC attendees:
“You’ll rarely hear anyone at the AMC railing against patriarchy, racism, classism, homophobia or transphobia, or verbally asserting their values from a place of defensiveness or a desire to convert. Instead, many of the attendees live at the crossroads of intersecting oppressions and come to the conference seeking a place to practice a different way of being, unburdened by the usual constraints.
For people whose politics already include a “change yourself to change the world” approach, the AMC can sound like a godsend. But to others who are more apt to think in terms of the number of good bills passed, voters mobilized or corporate misdeeds exposed, the conference can have the air of group therapy: high on self-indulgence and low on impact.”
Processing trauma and vulnerability comes with a responsibility to also prioritize material needs such as physical access and the structuring of sessions for meaningful participation across ability and comfort. Reckoning with these tensions in our personal and political relationships can be powerful, but can also be damaging if we aren't working from places of accountability and care.
There must be space/time where we can both organize on principles and values that unite us, and yet hold us committed to the work of understanding and embracing all the specificity, intricacy, and contradiction within movement building. This is why I am very grateful for the Healing Justice track and Healing Together network gathering that happen at the AMC.
In her 2012 keynote address to the 5th Annual Queer & Asian Conference at University of California Berkeley disability justice activist Mia Mingus speaks to the urgency and skills involved in building movements based on interdependence and respectful relationships:
“We must roll up our sleeves and start doing the hard work of learning how to work through conflict, pain and hurt as if our lives depended on it—because they do. We have to learn how to have hard conversations and get skilled at talking about and dealing with shame, guilt, trauma, hurt, and anger. […] Commit to not letting go of each other, even when it’s hard—especially when it’s hard. Commit to finally learn that the ends do not justify the means. How many times do we have to learn that how we do the work is just as important as the work we do? Commit to thinking about after the meeting, after the protest, after the revolution.”
However, in reflecting and engaging with media as part of creative processes of healing and as a means to social justice it is crucial to remain cognizant of the potential for notions of justice and healing to be co-opted into normativizing notions of a “cure”. As Eli Clare explains:
“Thinking about the framework of restoration, I circle back to the folks who offer disabled and chronically ill people prayers, crystals, and vitamins; believing deeply in the necessity of cure. A simple one-to-one correspondence between ecological restoration and bodily restoration reveals cure’s mandate of returning damaged bodies to some former, and non-disabled, state of being. This mandate clearly locates the problem, or damage, of disability within individual disabled/chronically ill bodies. […] We need a politics of cure: not a simple or reactive belief system, not an anti-cure stance in the face of the endless assumptions about bodily difference, but rather a broad-based politics mirroring the complexity of all our bodies/minds.”
Therefore, any thoughtful and meaningful healing work as part or in parallel to media-making must also uphold community accountable practices and self-determination.
Another highlight of my experience at this year’s AMC was the (Re)connecting to our Mother Tongues lunch caucus.
[picture of reconnecting to our mother tongues booklet description covered in digitally imposed magical floating hearts]
It was so wonderful to share space and time with so many folks while we shared a lot of difficult memories, struggles and longings. For the first time ever, I wrote about my memories from Chinese school when I was young and talked out loud about my internalized racism and intentional rejection of my heritage. The thoughts and feelings we shared were at once simple and complex, mundane and catastrophic. Talking with words, out loud, about language and loss felt particularly layered with struggle. It was so special for me that I connected with someone I didn’t previously know about my dad’s dialect. And I really appreciated the discussions I had after about grieving, loss and grappling with the im/possibility of remembering or learning our languages.
Reflecting on the way everyone was collectively paying attention to each other’s stories, despite the room acoustics and the flow of incoming attendees, reminded me of a text I read by the Crunk Feminist Collective recently about loving ourselves:
"I want to make a call for radical empathy within communities of color. Yes, coalition building and allyship are important, Lorde knows. But how we see, trust, and love ourselves should be at the core of our understanding in these times, as we are continually under surveillance, battered, and hunted down in the streets as if our lives were worth less than nothing.
This is a time for fighting, agitation, mobilization, and organizing for systemic change—yes. Absolutely. But this is also a time for reflection, reading, soft beds, self-care, and saying “no!” to time wasters and soul crushers. This is also a time for laughing, lovemaking, singing, crying, wailing, dancing, and holding on to each other tight. This is a time for potlucks, cookouts, BBQs, picnics, cocktails, karaoke, concerts, house parties, blue lights in the basement, slow jams, and dutty wines. You feel me?"
[photo of glass geometric ceiling of the McGregor building at Wayne State University taken on the last day of the AMC]
That day after the AMC, I pondered and felt and waited for the intensities to settle down somehow. Finally, I wrote this on my facebook wall:
“Sitting on the house porch with some post-AMC blues and blessings... Feeling so much gratitude... for the opportunity to grow every year in the paradigm-shifting universe-bending land of Detroit--to build and believe through emergent movements that hold/fold in our collective trauma, desire and power; for the hard raw conversations and shared moments of tension and struggle; for the summer solstice and the super moon; for the tears that make room to let sweet tenderness in; Detroit techno!!!; for beginning by listening to each other & forging the critical connections that affirm that our magic is always already real.”
Though it’s been about a month since I returned, I continue to wonder: What can we bring back home from the AMC? What do we choose to hold on to and what do we remain bound to without knowing?
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