2015 Focus “Storytelling, Sustainability, Building a Movement”
Curriculum
a) materials sent to Participants that helped our group conceptualize the major themes of the 2015 training. They were designed collaboratively by me (Krista Comer) and my feminist friend and colleague Carly Thomsen, who was then a dynamic postdoc at Rice in the Study for Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Carly brought experience in engaged activist research projects and methodologies; she has since gone on to take a assistant professor appointment at Middlebury College.
b) “skill shares” involving short presentations by Participants in a range of areas including: surfboard storage/transit, film and short video screening, art sharing, social media expertise, storytelling activist projects, sustaining non-profit focus, and so forth. For more specifics on the FABULOUS skill shares, including photos, see the 2015 Report.
c) interactive workshops.
One, by Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Unerasing the Native in Surfing and Sustainability.
Two, by Michelle Habell-Pallan, What Happens is . . . Dialogue: Activista Praxis.
Three, by Tara Ruttenberg, Sustainability as a Feminist Issue
d) co-facilitation
Mira Manickam-Shirley led us at the opening of the Institute in several events that got us all “there” — meaning got us moving (not just sit-down learning), connected, focused on our goals/principles, and doing art!! Below is one panel of our Coral Reef Mural.
Process
We asked our workshop leaders to provide short accessible readings to prepare participants for the learning we would do together. Carly Thomsen and I chose some readings too. A couple of the articles we chose were ambitious and we decided to write a “Summary” of the readings so they would be more accessible to Participants. The summary was a kind of productive “cheat sheet.” Questions at the end of each reading helped us think beforehand, and helped focus and organize our discussions.
Whether people really had time or could figure out how to prepare is a recurrent question. Institute Participants do so much just to get to the meeting, they don’t have as much “prep time” so we make the discussion include the material that was there to read.
Assigned “Homework”
–a couple of brief general readings
–a couple of ambitious recommended readings
–preparation for our 3 workshops
General Readings (helping us think about surf subculture and its challenges)
1) brief excerpt from Clifton Evers memoir, Notes to a Young Surfer Summary
2) 10-min YouTube summary of Krista’s book for “big picture” of women’s surfing/globalization/activist surfing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax04ICMHgv0 Summary
Recommended Readings (helping us think about collaboration, allies, transformative politics)
Recommended: two great but maybe difficult articles, one by Lipsitz and one by Briggs. They help us think about political allies, and about people being changed by activisms — ie transformative alliances.
Article Open Access by permission of Laura Briggs (thank you Laura!!): Briggs- Activism and Epistemologies (2008) Summary
Article by George Lipsitz. Walleye Warriors and White Identities (2007) Summary
Workshop 1: Dina, UnErasing the Native in Surfing and Sustainability Summary
Brief Lecture + Interactive Group Work
The workshop offered an in-depth exploration into how settler colonialism is infused throughout surf culture, in the process contributing often to the ongoing erasure of indigenous peoples in their own homelands. In an interactive way, participants connected the seemingly unrelated dots between Native American history, surf culture, master social narratives about “discovery” and “conquest” in surf tourism, and territorialism in surfing. What people took away was a sense of the ways surf culture simultaneously benefits from, and is complicit in, an unequal structure of power that keeps Native peoples separated from their lands.
HOMEWORK Summary
American Settler Colonialism 101
American Settler Colonialism 102
Native American boarding schools 101
Workshop 2: Michelle, What Happens is . . . Dialogue: Activista Praxis
Michelle presented her thoughts about the Women Who Rock project in Seattle to share with us a model for collaborative participant-driven activisms: in their case, between musicians, artists, performers, media-makers, and University of Washington (Seattle) professors. The collaboration produces an annual “UnConference,” an archive of oral histories, and a community of women across generations who come together to explore role of women and popular music in the making of cultural scenes and justice movements throughout the Americas.
Michelle puts into action the Women Who Rock philosophy. She attended the Institute as a scholar participant, brought her family, showed up to surf days (in spite of a knee injury she was out there!!), and stayed for the duration of the Institute after she had done her official work and well past the time most scholars would have headed home.
As communal principles, the Institute embraces the Women Who Rock ideal that “being together” is itself an accomplishment — “co-vivencia” and our dialogues, large and small, are not easy to bring about. They are where things happen, where WE happen. Spaces of shared thinking and connection and surf matter to building the worlds we envision. That world needs thoughtful balances between community leaders and scholars, women of color, indigenous, and white women, and people of different class, educational, and national/geographical backgrounds.
HOMEWORK Summary
YouTube Interview (14 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCGFsq_CmUg
WORKSHOP 3: Sustainability as a Feminist Issue, Facilitated by Tara Ruttenberg
This workshop was designed to deepen our thinking about sustainability to include ourselves and our movements in how we consider questions about what is sustainable. We took up “environment” as a popular idea and worked with it to think beyond green development or pro-recyclying kinds of environmental philosophies.
We discussed the Institute itself, going forward, and how to keep it going.
Homework Summary
Escobar, Sustainability: Design for the Pluriverse (2011)
This short reading brings “big ideas” in pretty accessible language. Escobar is an anthropologist who has worked in social justice thought and environment in Latin America. He brings the basic idea that “sustainable development” on capitalist development models has never been sustainable (it’s just less unsustainable), so this isn’t a focus or advocacy of proposals of “green development,” “green industries.” Instead, through the concept of “transitional development” (TDs), he’s trying to help us think toward a bigger notion of “sustainability” which involves thinking toward a whole different world, social order, relation between humans and non-humans, new ways of being.