Category: Podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:36 — 46.6MB)

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Season 2 episode 15 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview Aviah. A sneaky extra episode after the season closer! It took us a while to get back together.

Aviah is a lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, and is a community organiser the rest of the time. She is involved in the East End branch of Sisters Uncut, a national direct-action collective fighting cuts to domestic violence services as well as state violence. She is also involved in Hackney Copwatch, London Renters Union and the Kill the Bill Coalition, a national movement resisting the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill.

“Effectively, if you can organise enough people to [know their rights and intervene] in a coordinated way, then you can actually withdraw consent from policing altogether”
– Aviah

Show notes, links

• Netpol: the network for police monitoring
• Newham Monitoring Project, which shut down in 2016 after running for 36 years
• United Families and Friends Campaign, a coalition of people affected by deaths in state custody.
• There are Copwatch groups in Hackney, Bristol, Manchester, Lambeth, Liverpool, Southwark, Haringey, and Cardiff.
• the Anti-Raids Network, community resistance to immigration raids

To find out about Copwatch, if you’re considering getting involved: either DM an existing group (accounts listed above) or email [email protected]!

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there’s always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Continue reading “Becoming ungovernable (Aviah from Hackney Copwatch)”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:15 — 6.4MB)

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Season 2 episode 14 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where… we wrap up for season 2!

Show notes, links

Sign up to our newsletter to hear about our future conflict courses!

And finally, some perennial resources:

• our sister facilitation collective Navigate have a conflict facilitation booklet (from back when they were called Seeds For Change Oxford).
• See our “What is facilitation?” podcast episode page for more general facilitation resources.

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there’s always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Continue reading “Season 2: that’s a wrap!”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:23 — 26.1MB)

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Season 2 episode 13 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we talk about a few tools to respond when conflict is happening in a meeting.

‘The sad update that we have is, at least to our knowledge, there is no fancy Magic Bullet intervention.’

Show notes, links

An outline of the VERA model:

Validate	“I understand why it seems that way…” “Yes, I can see why you think that…”	“Yeah, I’ve definitely heard that it’s a struggle to get council housing, given the long waiting lists…”
Explain	“I like to think of it more like…” “If we look at [this fact], then…”	“…but I don’t think that’s because of ‘too many migrants’ taking houses – especially as so many migrants are barred from social housing lists…”
Reframe	“So if we look at it from that angle…” “Which means I think…”	“…I think the the real problem is decades of underfunding of social housing, meaning that there aren’t enough houses for the people who need them, and the ones that are there are often shit quality…”
Ask	“What do you make of that?”	“…does that make sense?”

Some of the other tools we mentioned:

Name, frame, pause.

• Pro = don’t need a solution to respond with this, or even know what’s going on.
• Example phrase = “It feels like there’s some disagreement and heat here that’s not really being acknowledged. Is there something I’m missing here? Do you two maybe have different priorities when it comes to this topic?”

Request a group pause.

• Pro = can use the break to reduce the heat and switch tracks to approach the conflict from a different direction
• Example phrase =  “I think things are getting tense here, and I don’t think I can continue to focus, could we maybe take a few mins break and come back?”

Enhanced name, frame, pause — where you talk to someone else to explore a challenge and why your group isn’t already dealing with the problem. Pro = dealing with thornier problems is easier with support.

Some resources:

• Seeds for Change’s guides on giving and receiving feedback and active listening
• A handout from Boston University about using “I statements”

And finally, some perennial resources:

• our sister facilitation collective Navigate have a conflict facilitation booklet (from back when they were called Seeds For Change Oxford).
• See our “What is facilitation?” podcast episode page for more general facilitation resources.

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there’s always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Continue reading “Toolbox: You’ve named it, now what?”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:57 — 24.4MB)

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Season 2 episode 12 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we talk about how to deal with conflict in the moment where it spikes up, using a frame called an “OODA loop”.

‘Conflict doesn’t have to be fighting or loud. It can be a stickiness, or a tenseness that our body is picking up on.’

Show notes, links

Why this is a useful frame: intervening in conflict situations can feel difficult; it is easier when you do these steps first!.

In the “Observe” step, a few things to look for:

• volume changes
• an issue “cycling” back again and again
• issues being raised but not addressed
• participation changes (did some people leave the space and not come back)
• feeling tense in your body

In the “Orient” step, a few questions to reflect on:

• Who is involved, and who isn’t?
• Who is visibly involved, who could be not visibly involved?
• What roles are people taking (formal and informal)?
• Why do you think it’s happening now? (e.g. specific timings
• What’s your position in this?
• How could this pan out? Do you think it will escalate, or fizzle out?

In the “Decide” step, a few areas to consider:

• WHEN to intervene: never; later but not now; now; a mix
• WHO should intervene: you? You + someone else? Other people, not you?
• WHAT you could do: have a side chat with people you think are “in conflict”; checking in on what a person who has been harmed wants; activating a pre-existing conflict process; name that conflict is happening, and explicitly park it til later; take a pause, to make a plan; name + ask people what’s happening; find out what (some / all) people need; name and frame.

In the “Act” step… good luck! More on potential interventions next week…

Other resources on OODA loops as a model:

• A podcast that talks about OODA loops in more depth than we do…
• …or a blog post breaking down the OODA loop steps, if you prefer written things.

And finally, some perennial resources:

• our sister facilitation collective Navigate have a conflict facilitation booklet (from back when they were called Seeds For Change Oxford).
• See our “What is facilitation?” podcast episode page for more general facilitation resources.

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there’s always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Continue reading “Toolbox: Conflict in the moment”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:51 — 23.2MB)

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Season 2 episode 11 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we talk about a model to understand some different positions that exist in conflicts.

‘This tool forces you to think about what it would be like for you to be in any of these different roles: having caused harm, having been harmed and having witnessed harm. We often don’t want to think about the possibility of ever causing harm.’

Show notes, links

Why this is a useful frame: these different positions have different needs; all of us could occupy any of these positions at any one time.

Some links to things mentioned in the episode:

• The Karpman drama triangle
• The first Exploring Collective Liberation course

And finally, some perennial resources:

• our sister facilitation collective Navigate have a conflict facilitation booklet (from back when they were called Seeds For Change Oxford).
• See our “What is facilitation?” podcast episode page for more general facilitation resources.

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there’s always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Continue reading “Toolbox: Positions in conflict”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:21 — 29.9MB)

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Season 2 episode 10 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview Elio. They organise with SWARM (a UK-based collective founded and led by sex workers who believe in self-determination, solidarity and co-operation) and are a branch organiser for United Voices of the World (UVW, a grassroots trade union of low paid, migrant & precarious workers and we fight the bosses for dignity and respect through direct action on the streets and through the courts!).

“Our focus is less on convincing the outside world that sex workers deserve dignity, and [more on] providing dignity to sex workers”
“Urgency will never end…but what might end is your capacity to be able to respond”
– Elio

Show notes, links

SWARM: community building, community resourcing

• Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Swedish Model (aka The Nordic Model)
• New Resource: ‘How We Ran A Mutual Aid Fund’

UVW sex worker organising: helping to organise sex workers as workers

• The United Sex Workers branch of UVW
• Strippers union United Voices of the World (UVW) wins landmark legal victory proving strippers are ‘workers’, not independent contractors

Decriminalised Futures: popular education, arts

• Their Lady of the Night School
• The Decrim Futures archive includes both recording from their 2019 conference, and also videos from the “We can build a different world” event
• The Decriminalised Futures exhibition at the ICA in London, running from 15 Feb to 22 May 2022

Some other projects:

• Decrim Now, a campaign group pushing for the full decriminalisation of sex work
• The Dialtone Project, giving old phones you don’t need to the sex workers who do
• Volunteering with the English Collective of Prostitutes
• You can buy a copy of the acclaimed Revolting Prostitutes book
• And finally, the most succint “political outlooks on sex work” meme out there:

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there’s always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Continue reading “Sex worker solidarity in practice (Elio from SWARM)”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:22 — 23.8MB)

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Season 2 episode 9 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we talk about safer spaces policies, as a tool that groups use for a variety of reasons.

‘Safer spaces policies can create a void that people will then fill with punitive approaches to difficulty, difference and conflict’

Show notes, links

After a callout for safer spaces agreements, a few groups kindly offered to have their agreements shared, to give you some examples:

• AFem2014 policy + explainer + glossary (though the event wasn’t without issues: see this write-up and another write-up)
• SWARM conference in 2019
• Sisters Uncut
• Young FOE Scotland has a longer safer spaces agreement,  a more concise policy, and they will also sometimes make group agreements or smaller policies built on these too for specific events
• Iconiq Academy’s braver spaces agreement

A few other resources that we mentioned in the episode:

• Mainstreams and margins
• The distinction between calling in and calling out

Perennial resources:

• our sister facilitation collective Navigate have a conflict facilitation booklet (from back when they were called Seeds For Change Oxford).
• See our “What is facilitation?” podcast episode page for more general facilitation resources.

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there’s always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Continue reading “Toolbox: Safer spaces policies”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:44 — 24.6MB)

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Season 2 episode 8 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview Nell, Martha and Naomi from Youth 4 Climate Leeds. We talk about shifting tactics from just strikes, working in solidarity with other groups, “de-diversification”, and navigating being a group during a pandemic!

“Both the cause and the effects of climate change is interlinked with racial justice”
– Nell

“There is sometimes an ethic within activist circles like, ‘I can change the world by myself.’ And then you end up just taking on so much work and it just becomes ridiculous. Like, I remember like, it must have been early 2020 and I was going to three meetings a week all in different places”
– Martha

Show notes, links

Youth 4 Climate Leeds Twitter (@yleedsuk), Instagram (@youth4climate_leeds) and Facebook. You can find links to school strike groups across the country on the UK Student Climate Network website.

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there’s always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Continue reading “Youth-led climate organising (with Youth 4 Climate Leeds)”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:52 — 30.0MB)

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Season 2 episode 7 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we talk about maintenance meetings: a meeting you hold for the overall health of your group.

‘It’s a space to focus on the maintenance of your group, rather than waiting until the car breaks down. It’s like a regular MOT’

Show notes, links

Some example elements of a maintenance meeting:

• Doing a capacity check, to see how much time people have to put into the group over the next chunk of time
• Invite difficulties – “one thing you want to raise with the collective / a person”. To give it some structure, you could ask for difficulties across a few different areas e.g.
  with power in the group (is it serving us? is it comfortable?)
  the purpose of the group (more regular than ‘at the annual strategy day’)
  the practice of the group (how do we make what we do better?)
  the people in the group (do we connect enough? are there tensions to bring out?)
• Do some spectrum lines to map how people are feeling e.g. on enjoyment, fulfilment, connection

If you would find it helpful, you can also use a version of a maintenance meeting agenda and slide template that we’ve used within R+R.

Perennial resources:

• our sister facilitation collective Navigate have a conflict facilitation booklet (from back when they were called Seeds For Change Oxford).
• See our “What is facilitation?” podcast episode page for more general facilitation resources.

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there’s always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Continue reading “Toolbox: Maintenance meetings”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:20 — 36.0MB)

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Season 2 episode 6 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we interview Kadeem, Nirad and Zahra from No More Exclusions.

“It goes back to how the teacher stands at the front. The students act to passively receive. We don’t want to reproduce that amongst ourselves”
– Nirad

“Whether the law changes, and then the culture has to catch up, or whether we make it unconscionable to exclude and then the law catches up whenever it does. We don’t mind ultimately. School exclusions will be abolished in this country in our lifetime”
– Zahra

Show notes, links

No More Exclusions Twitter, Instagram and Facebook + their website.

NME have a shop, a crowdfunder, a newsletter. Check out the work they’re doing on a moratorium on school exclusions.

And also, the Soul Shack that Kadeem mentions!

We now have a Patreon! Please help keep the podcast going, at patreon.com/resistrenew. If not, there’s always the classic ways to support: like, share, and subscribe!

Continue reading “Resisting school exclusion (with No More Exclusions)”