Complaint Making: Setting Up Conflict-Positive Spaces for Community Building Praxis

Complaint Making: Setting Up Conflict-Positive Spaces for Community Building Praxis by Vishnu Vardhani Rajan

Vishnu would like to share feminist governance tools (FGT) focused on three of many tiers in community building praxis. FGT is based on the values of equity with an emphasis on creating psychologically safe environments, drawing on the use of consent. Decision-making processes, setting up conflict-positive spaces, and complaint-making as diversity work will form the body of this three-day training. Rooted in Vishnu’s autho-ethnographic practice, this work will explore the power dynamics that impact decision-making processes.

The training will be shaped with the following set of questions, and thoughts

Can complaint making be a recording device? Feminism is a word a lot of us use, answer to, and try to define, but how do we do feminism? Can we think of feminist futurism with ease? What can a complaint expose other than inequities and ill-treatments of people? Can a complaint render us capable of necessary conflicts and necessary caring? Can we explore the limits of the language, both spoken and written and how we grapple with that in our work? When do we need to focus on becoming ungovernable vs when we do become a community with dynamic, effective tools for self-governance?

The training session draws from dynamic self-governance, graceful power by Sofia Bustamante, Platform for Feminist Leadership by UrbanApa, Complaint! (2021) by Sara Ahmed, and many Feminists thinkers who enabled me to conceive of a landscape for new visions, (re-)empowerment, building community, and gathering energy for activism.

Wednesday–Friday

10–12 May 2023

12:00–18:00 hrs

Hospitality

This training begins with a collective vegan lunch from 12:00–13:00 hrs. Cost is included in the enrollment fee. The menu’s abundance depends on the luck of the b.ASIC a.CTIVIST k.ITCHEN’s weekly dumpster dive adventure.

Notes