Earlier this year some of us long time members of KM4Dev, the global community of practice knowledge management in international development, were asked to share a few thoughts on video. You can enjoy 25 of them here. I have been slowly working my way through them.
I had forgotten what I said, but when I saw my own video, I was surprised at how the things I learned through KM4Dev continue to be pillars in my post-paid-work “rewirement.” Take a peek and see what resonates!
Last summer I was reading multiple books at the same time. (Well, you know, I don’t actually read them simultaneously!) Notably, two non fiction, which is not my common summer practice. Two standouts were Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Everybody Come Alive by Marcie Alvis Walker. Serendipity in action. The writing of these two amazing women both brought, and continue to bring, me a deep, embodied sense of other ways of knowing. The ways different than the ones I use in my life, mostly without awareness. These books helped me to begin to notice the limitations of my own views and stances. And the importance of querying myself to understand where I’m coming from as a stepping stone to being open to others’.
This week another piece of writing, this time from Bayo Akomolafe came across my screen and this sense, this idea of our separateness and togetherness, of what we do or do not identify with and how we presume power over it or not jumped out again. He was asked to provide an alternative definition of nature than the Oxford English Dictionary and he wrote:
So, I offered this:
‘A theoretical, economic, political, and theological designation from the Enlightenment era that attempts to name the material world of trees, ecologies, animals, and general features and products of earth as separate from humans and human society, largely in a bid to position humans as masters over material forces, independent and capable of transforming the world for their exclusive ends.’
It’s as far as I could go without waxing poetic about nature as a colonial trope for biopolitical interventions. What felt important to say was that ‘nature’ is a performative, speculative gesture, a ritual of relations that rehearses a dissociation from the world. A subjectivizing force. A lounge in the terminal of the radioactive Human.
Now to notice how I am “performing…”
If you need something in your ears for an hour, us geezers pontificated last week. It was fun. There are a few people I quoted without attribution and I need to go find those sources of inspiration. I think Patti Digh pointed to someone who wrote about un-developing. That’s the one I want to find. I hope I was not too cynical…
Nancy White: Life Online
I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, as you can see from the time stamp on this Twitter screen grab. The issue of safety in group interactions comes up so often and I feel this little devil on one shoulder, angel on the other. I can’t claim to make a space fully safe. And we can ask ourselves to co-create “brave space.” But there is never certainty.
I would love a different take, a different language around how we convene without doing damage to each other. In these post-election days here in the US, and two days after a child was shot at a local high school here in Seattle, I wonder a lot with a bruised heart.
https://aperture.org/editorial/a-photographers-unseen-archive-of-the-hawaiian-renaissance/
I am a member of The Well and one of the conversations/conferences I follow is called Hawaii. The above article was shared a while back and I continue to be moved by this article in Aperture magazine. Photographer Franco Salmoiraghi has taken pictures in Hawaii for decades. Not all of those are shared publicly because they are sacred to Hawaiian’s and their culture. There are things that are, by protocol, sacred. Images that are ONLY for native Hawaiians.
I remember working overseas many years ago and heard someone talking about my style and approach as that “casual American disregard of protocol and devaluing the role of the formal.” Guilty as charged and I often perceived that those protocols just slowed things down and did not amount to much. And from one perspective, that felt pretty accurate.
What I did not see nor school myself on was where protocol was, in fact, sacred, and when it was just a way to consolidate and preserve power. Or when it was both. Or neither. So when I read the article above, it opened up a new window through which I am now taking a longer peek. No conclusions here, just appreciation for another view.