Reading: Revolutionary Mothering. Love on the Frontlines

Thursday, 29th of june, 20h

Reading from the anthology with co-publisher Mai’a Williams.
Followed by a conversation with Iris Rajanayagam and Mai Zeidani Yufanyi (mothers and activists)

The event will be held in English. Donations warmly welcome.

None of us are here unless we are mothered. We are mothered by our movements, our families of origin and chosen family configurations and we all still struggle to mother ourselves and each other. Turning to visionary mothers from the 1970s to today as guideposts, Revolutionary Mothering activates mothering as the answer to the key questions for our species: (How) will we continue to exist? How do we imagine a future beyond ourselves? How do we relate to resources and time in a life-giving, life-renewing way, for real?
The challenges we face as movements working for racial, economic, reproductive, gender and food justice, anti-violence, anti-imperialist and queer liberation are the same challenges that marginalized mothers face every day. Oppressed mothers create a generous space for life in the face of life-threatening limits; activate a powerful vision of the future while navigating tangible concerns in the present; move beyond individual narratives of choice towards collective solutions; live for more than ourselves; and remain accountable to a future that we cannot always see.
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines asks queer, of color, poor, marginalized, excluded, oppressed, criminalized mothers to offer answers to these questions based in their own transformative lived experiences. This is a place where the voices of insurgent mother-activists are center stage. Maybe it will help you imagine how our movements would feel if mothering were in the center lighting an intergenerational fire under all of us. Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines offers the collective insight of mothering activists across generations with lessons that we believe will benefit everyone in our movements.

Mai’a Williams is a writer and poet and lives in the U.S. with her daughter, Theresa. It was her living and working with Palestinian,  Congolese, and Central American indigenous mothers in resistance communities, that initially inspired her to become a mother and continues to guide her as she practices this life-giving work, called radical mothering.
She is author of two books of poetry, No God but Ghosts and Monsters and Other Silent Creatures. She is the instigator of the Outlaw Midwives movement, zines, and blog which shifts the discourse around birth, life, death and healing by offering a vision of radical empowerment and accountability. In 2008, she published the Revolutionary Motherhood anthology zine and the corresponding group blog, a collection of writing and visual art about mothering on the margins, which became the inspiration for Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines.

The books webpage: https://thisbridgecalledmybaby.wordpress.com/
The event on facebook (share!:) https://www.facebook.com/events/192045294649565/

Merken

Merken

Doing life! – A live blog with Ngubia Kessé

Sharing stories and experiences – empowering Black and PoC scholars.

Life is not easy – that’s for real. But to us, everyone else might seem to be gliding through life unruffled. From my life’s perspective, it seemed like other (especially white scholars) scholars had/have it all together, and I kept wondering whether it was I that wasn’t getting things right. I felt that my ideas and ways of thinking as a Black scholar were just ‘off’ the mark – maybe they were too simple or not right? At other times it just bothered me that I wanted different things. Sometimes I have feared that my differences in approach would be interpreted as academic unfitness in a white world. We all have our own hidden fear and struggles that we want to mask by overexerting ourselves. Maybe our strategy is hiding, disconnecting and running, complying, and so on… Everyone has their specific struggles and coping stratergy. As a Black woman from a working-class family, I had to learn how to ‘be’ in an academic world dominated by people privileged by whiteness. Part of what has been a really great help in coping and developing my own survival strategies has been mentorship – the opportunity to see other Scholars (BPoC and white) do life. It has for example empowered me to learn that (some) people I greatly admire also face(d) similar struggles and sometimes felt afraid, that they did not always know the solutions to problems… Instead of “writing” a blog I will run a live Blog.

The aim of this live blog will be to empower Black and PoC scholars by sharing the challenges I have lived through as a Black woman in academia and how I have dealt with them. In the second half of our meeting there will be the opportunity for you too to reflect on and share your experiences-stories (if you want to).

No registration is required. Donations are welcome. It is possible to participate in single individual events.

Time: Once a month from 5:30-8pm

Dates: 17.3., 21.4., (this session is cancelled) 19.5., 16.6.

Languages: English/German

Topic 1: How did I get here? – Self acceptance
Topic 2: What do I do-like? – Self discovery (cancelled – but come to the other sessions!)
Topic 3: What am I afraid of? – Exploring fear
Topic 4: Fear of discovery – Being Black in a white academy