Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Mobility, after all, is generally less important to people than accessibility. When we go somewhere it’s not the movement that’s valuable, it’s the access to something – a school, shopping, a workplace, a friend’s house or a park – that really counts.
Don’t you think that true security lies not in our arming ourselves to the teeth against other people — that is, in our disconnection from them — but in our connection to them, to the web of mutuality that has bound societies, small and large, for millennia?
When hitch-hiking, a certain irony is common: Time and time again, the authors’ of this post have been picked up by drivers who immediately instruct them that hitch-hiking used to work, but now is impossible.
Marielle was a leading light in Brazil’s Feminist Spring, a new generation of Afro-Brazilian and indigenous women fighting back against Brazil’s intensifying attacks against people of color, women, LGBT people and other oppressed communities.
Jannie Staffansson, a representative of the Saami Council, wants what Chief Deskaheh had petitioned to the League of Nations nearly a century earlier: sovereign recognition for Indigenous Peoples on an international scale. It would allow equity at the negotiating table—a level playing field to fairly deal with the consequences of a warming planet in the face of land grabs and natural resource extraction.
As we remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and assassination 50 years ago, there is much to reflect upon considering the current events, ranging from increased militarism from this administration to gun violence that includes police violence, mass shootings and the protests that have responded and pushed for deep freedom and liberation.
Misogyny is contempt and ingrained prejudice against women, the extreme version of sexism. Misogyny is also the warping of masculinity and strength into dominance and aggression. Boys are taught that to be a man they must be hard and unfeeling, that being sensitive makes you inherently weak.
And so the question of “what if London were to become a National Park City?” was born. What a great question. But not content to have just come up with a great “what if?” question, he has spent the last 4 years trying to make it happen. W
Our experience of love, care and belonging are formed by our relationships in the civil sphere, not by the state or the market. Our lives are subsequently shaped, battered and sometimes improved by the state and the market, but the primary formation of our unique selves and our values is the work of civil society.
How do we get beyond the dependency-inducing trap of car culture? After 100 years in which auto-oriented infrastructure has dominated public works spending and reshaped civic life, how can we make our streets safe and healthy spaces?
The greatest threat to the “liberal world order” lies in its failure to reflect on its own fundamental injustices. It lacks accountability. If those who lead it can’t acknowledge its flaws – if Dr. King’s “revolution of values” can’t turn it into an engine of change for workers, the poor, refugees, and the other victims of its manifold failures – the system that Richard Haass wants to protect and improve will fail. And it will deserve to.
It was billed as “an emergency summit for change”, and it was a call that drew around 150 people from across the UK, and even some from further afield. Hosted at The Edge, a community-funded church building in the centre of Wigan just round the corner from the actual Wigan Pier (yes, that one, the one with the road famously leading to it), the event, exactly a year before Brexit becomes (or doesn’t) a reality, was co-presented by at least 40 organisations.
