Let This Radicalize You Teaching Notes: Chapters 1 & 2

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Chapter 1: Beyond Alarm, Towards Action

Key Quotes + Resources

• “When a fact or set of facts prompts people to change course, it’s usually because someone or something has interrupted the narrative they knew and told a story that feels more true – on worth making changes over” (21)

  • The chapter shares an example of Ruth Wilson Gilmore sharing about how she would connect and build trust with students. Here's Wilson Gilmore on the On Being podcast sharing about abolition and the precious-ness of life

• “The state sees communal care as an ideological threat” (31)

  • How do we move past fear of each other? Read and engage with the questions of Ross Gay's Some Thoughts on Mercy

• How do we anchor to our moral commitments? By “charting and experiencing reality together and sharing our joy and grief over the wonders and tragedies of our times” (36)

  • Activity:

    • Make a map of an anchoring space, such as your campus community. Do not include everything around you or duplicate an institutionally-created map. Rather, include only the spaces that are important to you, even making some spaces bigger than others. Collage or make a digital map!

• Organizers “welcome people into the practice of envisioning and enacting change...rehearsing for that world” (40)

  • Consider investigating elements of story and transformative power of story, through a resource like Story-Based Strategy

    • Build media literacy and reframing stories with their Story Detours tool

Themes

• Dismantling individualism and manufactured fear of one another

• Identifying assumptions folks have about movement work and key issues

• Accessing emotions beyond fear

• Anchoring to community, building trust

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Chapter 2: Refusing to Abandon

Key Quotes + Resources

• "Relationship building [is] a skill that needs to be sharpened and maintained" (47).

• "The act of showing up for each other can be as simple as checking in on a friend who is sick or grieving to se what they need, or it can be as dramatic as saving someone's life" (52).

  • Mia Birdsong's How We Show Up is a book that is centered on what community support looks like in practice.

    • Book Talk on How We Show Up with the Aspen Institute

  • Oumou Sylla expands on traditional mental health support and building our care skills with their framework of Radical Mental Health First Aid. Find resources on their site and accessible prompts on their instagram page.

• "Our goal should be interdependence: to be part of a community where rescue is viewed not as exceptional but as something we owe each other" (52).

  • From the Care Collective, The Care Manifesto.

    • Preview the introduction here, as posted by the University Health Network

Key Themes:

• Choosing to care; how do we develop capacity and skills around caring for our communities

• No heroes, no saviors -- we all need care to survive

• Building belief in our capacity to transform

• Defining care as a refusal to abandon