You’re Invited to ROOTS Commons: Let’s Grow Our Collective Community Consciousness
COMMONS — “where the object of exploitation becomes its own subject and models its own forms of organization, responsibility, discourse, and political and social economy. A new distribution of senses…” – Poet Fred Moten from Poetics of Political Form
This year’s ROOTS Week theme is Class and Power, in response to a conversation that opened up at ROOTS Week 2018. Because this started as a conversation, we’ll be continuing in that spirit – approaching this theme as an open, iterative dialogue among our community.
Throughout June and July Muthi Reed and Sage Crump, along with invited thought partners, will convene ROOTS Commons – community conversations designed to grow our collective class consciousness, through digital exchanges as well as three webinars.
Read on for more information. Let’s stretch together! We are our greatest resource.
Want a visual experience of the ROOTS Commons? Download this site map and click the hot links.
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ROOTS COMMONS : Growing our analysis on Class and Power
As an experiment in Beloved Community, Alternate ROOTS as a community is comprised of artists, administrators, organizers, and cultural workers from all walks of life and backgrounds. Every person comes into the organization with personal and political history that impacts exchanges with each other and with ROOTS as a formal entity.
This set of online discussions is designed to grow our collective competence for meaningful organizing in our relationships with Class and Power. While the conversation topics are about economic in/justice, we know White Supremacist culture is the primary confounding factor in systemic oppressions. We work at decolonizing. Conversations will include a racial analysis. Each session will build on the next providing us pathways to collective analysis that will support nuanced conversation.
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Week 1 – Nomenclature: Building a class analysis
Wednesday June 19, 5-6:30pm EST
During this session, we will talk about the basics of a class analysis. We will look at the concepts of class, economy and labor through the lens of cultural workers.
Week 2 – Vision Building: Growing our sense of possibility
Wednesday July 10, 5-6:30pm EST
Racialized capitalism is not the only economic system that exists or has existed. Together we will learn about components of just economies in order to think about our personal, political, and institutional practices and relationships.
Week 3 – All about ROOTS: Setting a direction
Wednesday July 24, 5-6:30pm EST
This is where we take a look at Alternate ROOTS and the economic systems at work inside the organization. We will discuss ROOTS’ current actions and lay the foundation for what values and practices we want to hold as we move towards economic justice.
To join the online conversations, please RSVP here.
We strongly recommended people attend all three conversations but it is not required.
Week 4 – Activation: What are we going to do?
ROOTS Week, August 6-11, at Lutheridge, Arden, NC
These earlier conversations lead into our in-person gathering. ROOTS UpROOTing Oppressions discussion are designed to be intersectional. Interrogating white supremacy, capitalism, heterosexism, ableism and patriarchy as cultural workers is an important aspect of our time together.
Digital Salon
We know that when our online conversations end, it doesn’t mean we’ve stopped thinking about what we have heard and how it connects to our lives, work, and the world around us. The Digital Salon is a place to go where you can add your thoughts, links to articles and continue our exchange. It will also be populated with additional content to keep us all active in the conversation between online conversation sessions.
Join the digital salon Facebook group HERE.
Questions about ROOTS Commons? Contact nicole@alternateroots.org.