“Feminism taught me the difference between a conviction in the head and a change in the way you live.” –Stuart Hall, speaking of things he learned from Catherine Barrett From 1996 to 2005 I worked at a summer camp in Western Massachusetts teaching kids conflict resolution skills. In a beautiful mountain setting, we worked to […]
Read more "Hold Together: We Need Conflict Skills Now More Than Ever"HI everyone! This post is a transcript of a talk organized by SFU’s Institute for the Humanities Friday Oct 13. Since the invitation to do the talk grew out of the Nurturance Culture blog, I decided to write it the same way I would write any other piece. I posted the in-process work here, and it grew […]
Read more "On Nurturance and Vulnerability in Academic Life"Have you ever had that dream where something bad is happening to you, but when you try to ask for help, you can’t speak? You try to scream for help but you just can’t get the words out? This doesn’t only happen in dreams. It happens in real life as well. Survivors of gendered violence experience this […]
Read more "Psychological Harm is Physical Harm 2: Why Survivors Lose Their Voice"The presidential debates, horrific as their results were, provided survivors everywhere with a strange, backwards gift. A recent piece notes: “It’s remarkable how many female viewers report feeling physically ill.” Trout has not touched any of them, not directly. Yet what survivors are reporting, watching him enter their living rooms via their TV screens, is that this kind […]
Read more "Psychological Harm is Physical Harm 1: Abuse Shapes the Brain"Of soup-friends and token-exchangers. I’ve noticed a pattern. (surprise!) It seems to me that two very different models exist of what people in our culture think we are doing when we nurture one another. This makes sense given that any modern culture is a complex swirl of ancestral inheritances only recently jumbled together and barely […]
Read more "Two Models of Nurturance (Which One Are You?)"My regular readers will know that I give my posts to a panel of mostly-male early readers before they go public. One of these early readers read For Men Who Desperately Need Autonomy and asked me to add a section flippantly called How You Can Put This Into Practice Right Now If You Are Flipping Out Because […]
Read more "Connection In Practice: The Tricks of Shame and Hope"The attachment literature teaches us that autonomy is a paradox. Jordan and I are in the car about to drop him off at a weeklong arts program working with teens on a small gulf island off the British Columbia coast. In front of us through the windshield is a farmstand: berries, eggs, a hand painted […]
Read more "For Men Who Desperately Need Autonomy"Attunement is not a ‘task’ that can be carried out. You can provide physical care in a connected or a disconnected way. The cues that tell the limbic brain ‘I’m with you; we are connected,’ are tremendously subtle. Connection isn’t forced through willpower or memorization; rather, it occurs when you allow your true self to […]
Read more "Nurturance is about more than ‘tasks’"Out of the Attic: dissociation and social justice This is a workshop created to help increase the general level of public knowledge about the spectrum of dissociative experiences and their connection to systemic oppression. Dissociative experiences are very common. Increasing awareness about how they feel and look, their causes, and how people can help or […]
Read more "Out of the Attic: dissociation and social justice"For additional reading: Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007) Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Indict the System: Indigenous and Black Resistance,” Briarpatch, November 24, 2014, https://briarpatchmagazine.com/blog/view/indict-the-system Charlene Carruthers, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and […]
Read more "A Resource List"