Raise your hand if you’ve experienced hurt in a social justice context. Organizing for social change can be fraught with conflict, reactivity and even, sometimes, lasting brokenness that weakens the whole system organizing for change. If we bring our habitual and engrained responses to conflict into our interactions with others, we risk harming other people as well as the work. Sociological discourse has long argued how change happens, conflict theory often being the victor, which means that change literally happens through conflict. Perhaps we should think more about conflict and even train for its eventuality, populating our organizing toolboxes with skills and wisdom for navigating harm and working toward repair.
Join us for our program “Harm & Repair: Embracing Conflict as Social Change” with Holly Roach Knight, Tuesday, January 18, 2022, 7:00 pm on Zoom. We will send a link prior to the program to those who have registered.
“We cannot fully create effective movements for social change if individuals struggling for that change are not also self-actualized or working towards that end. When wounded individuals come together in groups to make change our collective struggle it is often undermined by all that has not been dealt with emotionally.” – Bell Hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, 2015,
Holly Roach Knight is a long-time social justice organizer and recent recipient of two master’s degrees, a master’s degree in social justice & community organizing from Prescott College, and a master’s degree in contemplative education from Naropa University. She studies conflict in social change and is developing a body of work around navigating harm and repair in the organizing process.
As a systems thinker for social change, Holly challenges us to learn from our organizing and consider how interconnected we are. As a proponent of contemplative social change, Holly urges us to steward our own inner change as a vital contribution to our work as change makers. Holly is also a yoga teacher and a student of cultural somatics. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.