Cards On The Table

Cards On The Table - critical literacy game

This is a great game initiative from our friends Sophie Hope and Henry Mulhall and their team. Here is an intro from their ‘About’ page:

Here is how it all started… in 2016 five cultural workers were frustrated by collaborative working. We wanted a tool to openly and critically talk about process.
So, we made COTT.

Since then many other cultural workers have lent us their expertise and support to enable us to take the project further. We are now ready to share this tool with you.

https://www.cardsonthetable.org/

Ghassan Hage

Ghassan Hage is a Lebanese-Australian academic serving as Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

We worked with Ghassan on our first documentary, Holiday Camp (2002), about the Woomera detention centre jail break, racism and whiteness. He has been an inspiration aver since, especially his thoughts around ‘the sensitivity of thieves’ in context of Australia’s refugee policies and colonial guilt.

Straight from his Wikipedia entry:

Ghassan Hage works on the comparative anthropology of racism, nationalism and multiculturalism, particularly in Australia and the Middle East. He has written and conducted fieldwork on the Lebanese transnational diaspora in Australia, the US, Europe, Canada and Venezuela. He also researches and writes in social theory, particularly the work of Pierre Bourdieu.

He has been a high-profile contributor to debates on multiculturalism in Australia and has published widely on the topic. His most influential work is White Nation, which draws on theory from Whiteness studies, Jacques Lacan and Pierre Bourdieu to interpret ethnographic work undertaken in Australia. The book has been widely debated in Australia, with many of its themes picked up by anti-racism activists in other countries. The follow-up Against Paranoid Nationalism is an analysis of certain themes in Australian politics that became prominent under the government of John Howard.

He has also written on the political dimensions of critical anthropology (His work in this area appears in the volume Alter-Politics: Critical Thought and the Radical Imagination (Melbourne University Press 2015)). His most recent writing, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, is concerned with the intersection between racism and the ecological crisis.

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde was an American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist. She was a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” who dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and homophobia. As a poet, she is best known for technical mastery and emotional expression, as well as her poems that express anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. Her poems and prose largely deal with issues related to civil rights, feminism, lesbianism, illness and disability, and the exploration of black female identity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audre_Lorde

bell hooks

bell hooks is an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist.

The focus of hooks' writing has been the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published more than 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. She has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_hooks

Cornel West

Cornel West is an African American philosopher, political activist, social critic, author, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness." A radical democrat and socialist, West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the black church, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism.[13][14][15][16] Among his most influential books are Race Matters (1994) and Democracy Matters (2004).

West is an outspoken voice in left-wing politics in the United States, and as such has been critical of members of the Democratic Party, including former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.[17][18][19] He has held professorships and fellowships at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Princeton University, Yale University, Pepperdine University, Union Theological Seminary, and the University of Paris during his career. He is also a frequent commentator on politics and social issues in many media outlets.

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, and visiting Princeton University lecturer. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction; Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009); Death of the Liberal Class (2010); Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), written with cartoonist Joe Sacco, which was a New York Times best-seller; Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt (2015); and his most recent America: The Farewell Tour (2018).

We read most of his work but highly recommend to get hold of The Empire of Illusion - find link to buy his e-book here.

George Monbiot

George Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000), Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (2013) and Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in the Age of Crisis (2017).[3] He is the founder of The Land is Ours, a campaign for the right of access to the countryside and its resources in the United Kingdom.

Find a recent article about the rise of a new kind of fascism here.

Centre for Political Beauty

The Center for Political Beauty is an assault team that establishes moral beauty, political poetry and human greatness while aiming to preserve humanitarianism. The group’s basic understanding is that the legacy of the Holocaust is rendered void by political apathy, the rejection of refugees and cowardice. It believes that Germany should not only learn from its History but also take action.

www.politicalbeauty.com

Carol Cadwalladr

Carole Jane Cadwalladr is a British author, investigative journalist and features writer. She is a features writer for The Observer and formerly worked at The Daily Telegraph. Cadwalladr rose to international prominence in 2018 when she exposed the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

Find her articles for the Guardian here.

Cadwalladr was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, alongside The New York Times reporters, for her coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Here is her recent article about facebook, from July 6th 2020.

pvi collective

pvi collective believe in the potential for art to create systemic change. they critically investigate contentious issues, play hard and creatively intervene. We love their work and salute their playfulness.

This Changes Everything

Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything is a great introduction to all things climate justice.

Read the book, watch the film, but also check out the tools and networks Naomi and her team are bringing together.

David Graeber

David Graeber's Debt - the first 5000 Years is a bestselling and fun anthropological study of the history money, values and debt and one of the most inspiring works we have come across in our research for this project.

Find a free copy of his book here - or click on the image above. We recommend to check out his other books as well, see wiki link below for full list.

From his Wikipedia entry:

David Graeber is a London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, perhaps best known for his 2011 volume Debt: The First 5000 Years. He is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.

As an assistant professor and associate professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007, he specialised in theories of value and social theory. The university's decision not to rehire him when he would otherwise have become eligible for tenure sparked an academic controversy, and a petition with more than 4,500 signatures. He went on to become, from 2007–13, Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

His activism includes protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan, "We are the 99 percent".

White Privilege Knapsack

“I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group”

By Peggy McIntosh

Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women's statues, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

Read full text here.

Strategic Questioning

Fran Peavey's Strategic Questioning is a way of talking with people with whom you have differences without abandoning your own beliefs and yet looking for common ground which may enable both parties to co-create a new path from the present situation. In every heart there is ambiguity; in every ideology there are parts that don’t fit.

A Strategic Question [excerpts below from CruxCatalyst]:

• creates motion – enables the structure of the conversation to move from the static to the dynamic

• creates options – looks for alternatives (while avoiding questions which suggest a specific alternative eg. ‘have you considered…?’), instead asking what else is possible

• avoids ‘why’? questions – such questions ask people to defend or justify their position, or talk about the present in terms of the past

• avoids ‘yes/no’ answers – ask questions which defuse dualistic, binary thinking (which sees things in terms of black/white, either/or, right/wrong) by getting people to do some ‘thinking work’, and moving them from a passive into a creative state

• is empowering – allowing someone to take what is already in their head and develop it further, rather than putting ideas into their head

• asks the ‘unaskable’ – there is tremendous power in asking ‘taboo’ questions, as such questions are usually unaskable because they challenge the values and assumptions on which something is based

• is a simple, not compound question – addresses one thing at a time, and minimises the need for analysis

Blue Eyes Brown Eyes

A wake up call for all ages, this best-selling program teaches about prejudices using a dramatic framework. It provides an examination of the realities of discrimination as experienced by actual students in the classroom of third grade teacher, Jane Elliott, whose demonstration shows how quickly children can succumb to discriminatory behavior.

Jane Elliott, internationally known teacher, lecturer, diversity trainer, and recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education, exposes prejudice and bigotry for what it is, an irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors. And if you think this does not apply to you. . . you are in for a rude awakening.

Find out more here.