Mending Relationships for a Viable Future

Each quarter, a group of students, faculty, and staff at WWU convene an environmental justice reading group to read and discuss recent texts. This quarter (Spring 2019) the group is reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. The following entry reflects the group’s discussion last week.

 

Mending Relationships for a Viable Future

By: Hope Peterson, Nathan Cottnair, and Grace Meersman

Emergent strategy. A great idea right? But how can humans possibly achieve this goal? According to adrienne maree brown, a few pieces of the puzzle include: resilience, interdependence, and creating more possibilities. In order for the class to grasp these concepts, students engaged in a large mind mapping activity. These three themes were written on the whiteboard, and after a couple of minutes a plethora of connections were drawn from brown’s Emergent Strategy, and from life. Once the mind map was discussed, the class took the remainder of the time talking in small groups, separated by concept: resilience, interdependence, and expanding frameworks.

Among peers, a few key concepts evolved relating to resilience. The first of these themes was transformative justice. The term is centered on the idea that all cases are different and they should be treated differently too. Many students seemed to be intrigued by this ‘new’ strategy of transformative justice. Along with the general conversation of transformative justice a key question was asked; is it possible to have a multitude of voices and still achieve a shared goal? The consensus was yes, but it is difficult nonetheless.

 

The next topic surrounded liberated relationships. The students were all in agreement that this concept means that in liberated relationships two individuals come together but remain separate, rather than two individuals becoming codependent. Students also thought that in liberated relationships, partners should take one another for who they are and introduce radical honesty into the relationship. These connections may allow for individual and community growth, encouraging emergent strategy to prevail.

 

Another group discussed the idea of interdependence, as introduced by Brown. The group engaged in conversation around whether charismatic leaders are beneficial or detrimental to collective action. One person in the group claimed that they felt a sense of security and relief behind a leader of this sort, since someone else is the one who people will look to first rather than them personally, making it easier simply to do as told and hold less accountability for the decisions made in the name of the group.

Others sympathized, but countered that blending in behind one person can often provide them with too much power, power that can lead to a person feeling as though they are above the rest and in a position to take advantage of the “followers,” for lack of better terminology.

Collectively, the group ended on the thought that while some may stand apart from others within an active group, it is best for all members to share close-to-equal responsibility and power within the group as a means of continuing collective motivation and avoiding domination by any single member.

 

The final group discussed the topic of expanding frameworks and creating new possibilities. They discussed the importance of creativity and being open to new possibilities as being key to achieving a goal of expanding frameworks within the context of emergent strategy.

The example of urban planning was used to help frame the discussion. This was based off of Brown’s critique of singular strategy and how it’s needed to broaden our discussions to make sure all the voices possible are heard through collaborative ideation. The main question of discussion then became: how feasible is this process for bringing about real change? Taking a cue from the urban planning process, the more people and voices that contributed to the process, the more bogged down the process becomes, generally. The group pondered this and came to no definitive answers, as it is a very grey topic. The complicated nature of such a question was felt by the group and ultimately it came down to circumstances at a more specific, local level.

The groups had a lot to say about emergent strategy. Whether their focus was resilience, interdependence, or expanding frameworks, each engaged in meaningful conversation that broke down the elements within the subgroup. At the end of discussion, students appeared to be thoughtful, continuing to allow these topics to simmer in the back of their minds. All of these ideas left the group with a single question to sit with: what would a society look like under emergent strategy?