#i endeavor to be radically inclusive

[naomiknight-17]

I had an ask in my inbox from a follower who interacts with my blogs a lot and they told me something like

"That post you reblogged about the crabs is from a terf!" And I replied like, oh no, I'll go destroy it but can u be more specific?

Then I went and looked through 4+ days of my blog and... no crabs??? How old was that message?? Was it sent to the wrong blog? What is happening

[photomatt]

My Beliefs and Principles

A number of people are trying to brand me as transphobic, so I thought I would list out a number of my personal beliefs so folks coming across this in the future can judge for themselves.

I believe love is love, and consenting adults should be able to have whatever form of relationship they want or don't want. I believe governments should recognize all these unions with the same rights.

I believe people should be able to change their name, gender identity, and preferred pronouns whenever they want and however many times they want. I personally endeavor to follow all these preferences that are known to me.

I support adults making any modifications to their body they like.

I support people choosing to share or keep private the above.

This is not meant to be comprehensive, and in researching this post to make sure I was using the right language to express my beliefs I read through the Yogyakarta Principles and agree with everything in that document, which is much more comprehensive.

A few other points I'll include for context and history:

Both Automattic and WordPress.org, founded or co-founded by me in 2005 and 2003 respectively, have consistently supported LGBT+ organizations, contributors, and employees.

Automattic's open time off benefit includes full pay for medical time off has supported a number of people transitioning. We've invested considerable development time in updating or working around legacy HR systems to recognize the principles above, and will continue to as best practices evolve or we find mistakes.

When we remodeled Automattic's NYC office before moving in we made the bathrooms gender neutral. Same for a commercial warehouse I've recently remodeled.

I've personally donated to LGBT+ organizations as far back as 2016, and more recently have donated mid five figures to Human Rights organizations.

I have dedicated my life since the age of 19 to open source software, which I believe to be radically inclusive, and democratizing publishing, commerce, and messaging. My hope is this work contributes, even if in a small domain-specific way, to a more fair and just society.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Steve Corbin

According to a May 15 NBC News report, there are a multitude of issues that voters must discern about Joe Biden, Donald Trump and the independent presidential candidates before voting on Nov. 5. Logically, the importance of each issue differs between and among America’s 161.4 million registered voters.

One issue missing from the NBC News report that has become a focal point of the Biden camp, Make America Great Again Republicans and third-party candidates is democracy vs. authoritarianism. Specifically, on Jan. 20, 2025, will the duly elected and inaugurated president of the United States keep America as a democracy that dates back to the 1630’s in the New England colonies, or will it be the start of changing the country to authoritarian fascism?

If you’ve not heard of Project 2025, it’s very worthy of your independent investigation. Project 2025 is a playbook specifically created for Donald Trump and his supporters to use in the first 180 days of Trump’s 2025-29 presidential administration. The far-right extremism-based Heritage Foundation proudly takes claim for facilitating the creation of the 887-page turning-democracy-into-an-authoritarian-country document.

Project 2025’s two editors had assistance from 34 authors, 277 contributors, a 54-member advisory board and a coalition of over 100 conservative organizations (including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heartland Institute, Liberty University, Middle East Forum, Moms for Liberty, the National Rifle Association, Pro-Life America and Tea Party Patriots).

Project 2025 is a serious endeavor, if Trump returns to the White House, to make America a fascist country. After all, on May 20, Trump posted a video on his Truth Social media account depicting his 2025-29 administration as a “Unified Reich.” (Hitler’s Third Reich occurred from 1933 to 1945.)

Download the Project 2025 document (it's linked from this essay) so you can check out the disconcerting manuscript that tells Trump what specifically to do from Jan. 20 to July 18, 2025, to convert America into an authoritarian regime.

The 30 chapters of Project 2025 are a daunting read. Project 2025 proposes, among a host of things, eliminating the Department of Education, eliminating the Department of Commerce, deploying the US military whenever protests erupt, dismantling the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, removing sexual and gender protected discrimination and terminating diversity, equity, inclusion and affirmative action.

Additional mandates include: siphoning off billions of dollars of public school funding, funding private school choice vouchers, phasing out public education’s Title I program, gutting the nation’s free school meals program, eliminating the Head Start program, banning books and suppressing any curriculum that discusses the evils of slavery.

Project 2025 also calls for banning abortion (which makes women second-class citizens), restricting access to contraception, forcing would-be immigrants to be detained in concentration camps, eliminating Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, recruiting 54,000 loyal MAGA Republicans to replace existing federal civil servants, and ending America’s bedrock principle that separates church from state.

A news story in Politico described Project 2025 as an authoritarian Christian nationalist movement and a path for the US to become an autocracy. Several legal experts have indicated implementing the 180-day manual would undermine the rule of law and the separation of powers.

As noted earlier, Project 2025 is worthy of your independent investigation. So that you’ll be in-the-know as to what authoritarianism looks like, seriously consider reading one research-based book per month for the next five months as pre-election homework. Here’s my suggested reading assignment:

JUNE: "On Tyranny: 20 lessons from the 20th century," Timothy Snyder, 2017.

JULY: "Twilight of Democracy: The seductive lure of authoritarianism," Anne Applebaum, 2020. Chapters IV, V and VI get to the bottom line.

AUGUST: "Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America," Heather Cox Richardson, 2023.

SEPTEMBER: "Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America," Barbara McQuade, 2024. The 1,717 reference citations proves this is well researched and an honest read.

OCTOBER: "1984," George Orwell, 1949. Orwell’s novel shows Americans what life would be like under totalitarian and oppressive rule.

Reading even just one of these books will enable you to discern political candidate and party-based disinformation, misinformation and propaganda from truth, ready to vote on Nov. 5 and keep America a democracy.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Yasmine Mohammed

Published: Oct 24, 2023

In 2016, there was a march in Washington D.C. billed as a "Women's March" during which millions of women paraded down the streets in the name of women's rights—some of them carrying posters of a woman in hijab. As a woman who risked her life to remove that hijab off my head, I was furious at how people could be so ignorant as to appropriate a tool of female oppression as a symbol of women's freedom. The Islamist propaganda was so successful that these well-meaning women, who seemed like bright and educated individuals, actually bought the lie that this tool of misogyny was a symbol of women's empowerment.

More of you now share in my rage—now that you know about Mahsa Amini and have seen the Women Life Freedom protests in Iran. Now that you have seen women burning their hijabs in the streets and protesters being gunned down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, many of you can comprehend how grotesque it was to wave a hijab at a Women's March.

But at the time, you didn't know. You were useful idiots of a very large, very powerful, and very well-funded propaganda machine.

I tried to tell you. For the past seven years, I have been singing the same tune to anyone who would listen. I wrote articles, spoke on countless podcasts, went on the nightly news in countries across Europe, North America, and Asia, my message clear: Beware this alliance between the liberal Left and the Islamists.

In 2019, I published my book Unveiled with a clear subtitle: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. I used my own story growing up in Canada in an extremist family who married me off to an Al Qaeda terrorist to illustrate this unholy alliance between the radical Left and the radical Muslims. I risked my life to tell you all this. I understood that I could potentially be putting myself and my whole family in danger to get this message to you. I did my best to tell as many kind-hearted, altruistic Westerners that they were being duped and being used as useful idiots.

And duped you have been. A dozen Muslim majority countries execute people for the "crime" of homosexuality under Islamic Law. People are executed for renouncing Islam; there is no religious freedom, no freedom of speech, no freedom of personal expression under Sharia. It is the antithesis of liberal or progressive values.

Hijab is not a choice for the vast majority of women. Girls and women are abused tortured and killed by their families in honor violence and honor killings across the globe over this piece of cloth. Women have been imprisoned in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps most importantly for today's context, radical Islam is viciously antisemitic.

How can a group of people who bleat about diversity and inclusion be aligning with a religion that claims that even the earth itself hates Jewish people? Which hopes and predicts that a day will come when even the rocks and trees will call out, "Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me! Come kill him."

I have been shocked and infuriated that I have to explain over and over again that water is wet. How is this not so obvious already? And even though I spend nearly every single day in this endeavor, screaming like Cassandra warning about the Trojan Horse, even I didn't realize how right I was. Even those of us who have been watching this alliance over the years between the radical Left and radical Islam did not see this coming.

It's as if the subtitle of my book leapt off the page and is now walking down the street chanting, "Gas the Jews."

It is now personified in university leaders and politicians who are posting pictures of paragliders and celebrating the mass execution and torture of innocent people.

There could not be a more clear example of western liberals empowering radical Islam.

As Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette, put it on X, "I have been covering the toxic ideology for years. But if you had told me a month ago that this ideology would lead more than half of Americans under 25 to justify and excuse the torture and mass-murder of a minority group, I would not have believed you."

We are at a very important moment in history. We are at that moment that so many of us have talked about and thought about while studying history or after watching a World War II movie: What would I have done? Would I have been one of those Germans who hid their Jewish neighbors in their attics protecting them from the genocidal Nazis? Or would I have been one of the many Germans who was too scared to do anything but comply? Or worse: Would I have been one of people who was convinced by the hateful propaganda?

Wonder no more, dear reader. Your moment is here.

==

Plot twist: it turns out the people calling everyone "Nazis" were the real Nazis all along.

[educationalcardsgame]

Final self reflection

At the project's inception, I harbored a profound enthusiasm for the subject matter, as it resonated deeply with my personal convictions. Upon collaboration with my colleagues, it became evident that our diverse backgrounds served as wellsprings of inspiration, despite none of us having undergone primary education in the Netherlands. However, as we progressed beyond the initial ideation phase, we encountered invaluable feedback during our collaborative sessions. This feedback necessitated a significant directional shift in our approach. Consequently, we collectively discerned that our overarching mission was to equip students with the essential skills of self-reflection to mitigate potential errors in their academic and vocational pursuits while instilling in them the confidence and conviction to navigate life's challenges. This realization underscored the project's broader significance beyond mere educational orientation, encompassing broader societal issues such as self-belief and empowerment.

As a team, our collective aim was to imbue students with the capacity for introspection, facilitating not only immediate self-awareness but enduring self-understanding throughout their lifetimes. Drawing from my background as a fashion designer committed to fostering individuals' self-esteem through apparel, I redirected my efforts towards conceptualizing a game that would foster internal empowerment through reflective practices. This endeavor enabled me to develop a nuanced understanding of societal needs, fostering a heightened awareness of the mechanisms that drive productivity and innovation within our communities.

As a pre-master's student, my personal development plan (PDP) underscored my commitment to honing my design and user experience (UX) design skills, emphasizing a radical departure from conventional aesthetic-driven design paradigms toward a focus on functionality and sustainability. While I successfully addressed certain deficiencies in these areas, I acknowledge the existence of missed opportunities, which warrant further discussion. Engaging in extensive research broadened my appreciation for design's potential to positively impact children and adolescents, fostering a profound sense of purpose in my work.

Furthermore, my role within the group extended beyond mere technical contributions; I assumed the mantle of a positive influence, advocating for collaborative harmony amidst the inherent challenges of diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Although confronted with setbacks and interpersonal tensions, I remained resolute in my commitment to fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment, albeit acknowledging room for personal growth.

Reflecting on my performance within the group, I would assign myself a modest rating of 45%. While instrumental in propelling the project forward, I recognize the need for continued improvement, particularly in fostering effective communication and resolving interpersonal conflicts. However, these challenges have provided fertile ground for personal growth, enabling me to cultivate essential leadership and communication skills essential for future endeavors.

In conclusion, the project served as a crucible for personal and professional growth, affording me invaluable insights into the intricacies of collaborative teamwork, effective communication, and adaptive leadership. Moving forward, I am committed to leveraging these experiences to inform my future endeavors, fostering a more inclusive and empathetic approach to collaborative innovation.

[heavyweightheart]

when i was in recovery, it was peer-support communities that saved my life. it was the cost-free, non-hierarchical, radically fat positive and anti-diet, community-based mutual aid groups that made my recovery and so many others’ possible (messy as our work together sometimes was). now, many years after we created those types of communities out of necessity, i don’t see them anymore. everything is professionally mediated by a clinic or a brand or a program or a nonprofit.

it may be that my experiences were anomalous even at that time, or it may be that as size-inclusive and anti-diet movement has been coopted by the mainstream, they have become entirely the purview of professionals.

i want to encourage you all to create your own recovery communities. make discords, facebook groups, whatsapp groups, in-person meetings, meals together. take a leap and try things. some of our efforts fizzled and some lasted for years. but as food & body support becomes increasingly the domain of profit-driven professional endeavors, we will need more and more to stake out our own territories, and to be radical about what care looks like.

[dustedmagazine]

Apartment House on Another Timbre: Three Perspectives

If you survey the website of Apartment House, you won’t find an “about” page or any exposition of the ensemble’s history or philosophy. While such reticence is rare these days amongst artistic endeavors of any stripe, the very lack of information tells you something about Apartment House’s raison d’être. It’s all about the work, and the ensemble’s role is to make performances that are about the music, and not Apartment House’s take on the music. This renunciation of ego makes sense when you consider that the ensemble’s name derives from a John Cage composition; one of Cage’s intentions was to envision music that was open to the world and wasn’t about assertions of selfhood. Cellist Anton Lukoszevieze founded the ensemble in 1995, but its recording career didn’t get into gear until 2013.

Since then, the group has released 22 single or double CDs covering work by contemporary composers ranging from Cornelius Cardew to Christian Wolff to Linda Catlin Smith to Ryoko Akama. With a rotating membership, performances range from solos and duos to chamber ensembles. Thirteen were issued by the Another Timbre label, including three titles at once in late 2020, each presenting the music of a single composer — Martin Arnold (b. 1958), Antoine Beuger (b. 1955) and Maya Verlaak (1990). The act of releasing these albums simultaneously affords a chance to consider how Apartment House engages with the different intentions and requirements asserted by each composer. Dusted writers Marc Medwin, Michael Rosenstein and Bill Meyer cover the three recent releases.

Maya Verlaak / Apartment House— All English Music is Greensleeves (Another Timbre)

All English Music is Greensleeves by Maya Verlaak

Múm was an Icelandic group with singers channeling the wisely innocent voices of children while a lush landscape, rife with music boxes and other liquid-crystal sonorities, multihued the adjacent soundspaces. There is something similarly open about this music, something so unpredictably predictable, so comforting, so quietly inclusive! Belgian composer Maya Verlaak delves to the depths of experience’s networks while observing from just far enough to escape the iron grip and rationalizations of memory. This is music in which even the harshest sounds melt into a winning simplicity, a world of sound and sense in symbiosis.

It would be too easy to point toward modality to explain such a beautifully optimistic vision. After all, “All British Music is Greensleeves” tears that increasingly irrelevant construct to shreds in a hurry as two layers of sound, one prerecorded, spin bits of the tune down the dimly lit corridors conjoining memory and reflection. Chord, cluster and motive blur boundaries, even as space ensures a tidy trail of readily identifiable components needling consciousness reluctantly toward recognition. It’s a world with which Ives or Mahler might have made contact, had chamber music been more in their sights, such are the buds and blooms of poly-event amidst distantly lit string writing that refuses to answer Ives’ perennial question. The unfurling harmonies, formed of motives in quasi-counterpoint, are inextricably linked with their kaleidoscopic timbres. Recurrence is both evident and backgrounded but none so blatant as the delicious silences, almost periodic, separating the streamlined multivalences. Fortunately, as with many Apartment House recordings, vibrato is nearly absent.

The “Formation” pieces place a similarly subversive emphasis on relationship so subliminal that a simple listen won’t unlock the door or open the blinds. Any hats doffed toward conventional chord or set are quickly displaced by the gentle but insistent winds of change emanating from a vocal imperative or an intoned repetition. Mark Knoop and Sarah Saviet are in something near dialogue with overlapping technologies guided by a compositional voice whose questions also seek a malleable answer. The openness at the heart of Verlaak’s work stems from the various paths through subversion, re-subversion and integration integral to the majority of these pieces. What, in the case of “Song and Dance,” do performers do when confronted only with the analysis, or justification, for a musical score rather than with the score itself? What happens when the justification becomes the score? How is it possible, practical or desirable to confront musical parameters neither heard nor witnessed? The wonderful thing about such conceptions is that they really form the metanarrative of all artistic endeavor. No art, no matter how explicit, relinquishes all of its secrets, just as no single pitch or sonority, even those as pure as Apartment House offers with staggering consistency, is the actual embodiment of that sound. Composers and performers deal in approximations, and it is to Verlaak’s credit that the processes have been rendered at least partially transparent with such beautifully cooperative forces to give them form and voice.

Marc Medwin

Martin Arnold / Apartment House—Stain Ballads (Another Timbre)

'Stain Ballads' by Martin Arnold

This is the second release on Another Timbre by Canadian composer Martin Arnold, the first being The Spit Veleta a 2017 program of violin and piano solos and duos by Apartment House members Philp Thomas and Mira Benjamin. This time out, Arnold provides the group with a program consisting of a solo, a duo, a quartet, and piece for sextet. Across the four pieces, the composer balances a sense of lyricism with a fascination with the abstracted concept of “formlessness.” In his interview on the Another Timbre site, he puts it this way when asked about the title of the CD. “Stains are… radically specific – always stain-shaped. They might remind one of something – like when one looks at the inkblots of a Rorschach test (though significantly, they don't have Rorschach's added symmetry) – but they don't present a form, a coherent outline, a generic structure that can be abstracted and distilled; with a stain, form and content are the same thing. My work continues to aspire to that condition.” Each of the four pieces here delve in to the way that melodies and themes can be opened up to ride the edges of lyricism and abstraction.

The program opens with “Lutra” for solo cello and humming performed by Anton Lukoszevieze. The piece starts out with arco themes colored with hummed and bowed diaphanous overtones. Hovering at the upper registers of the instrument, threads are introduced, slowly progressing, punctuated occasionally by softly plucked notes. Staying within the same set of registers as well as harmonic and timbral areas, Lukoszevieze lets the notes resonate and serenely decay. In the last section the piece moves to percussively plucked notes with poised slow resolve, fading to hushed resonance in the final moment. “Stain Ballad” follows, orchestrated for cello, piano, viola, two violins, reed organ, and percussion. Arnold voices the various layers in a slow flux, moving in and out of synch with each other. The ensemble does a sterling job of maintaining an overall balance so that no one particular instrument is ever the sole focus. Instead, the various parts wend along as various subsections of the ensemble coalesce and then dissipate in to the mercurial overall flow of the piece. The striated parts adeptly take advantage of the timbral synergies and contrasts of the instruments as one moment, string arco melds with reed organ while in other sections, the percussive attack of Philip Thomas’ piano, the woody retort of Simon Limbrick’s percussion and pizzicato strings shift and shudder across each other.

The pairing of Lukoszevieze’s cello and Mira Benjamin’s violin on “Trousers” dives in to specific techniques like the utilization of multiple mutes, bowing with the wood of the bow, hushed microtones and a sliding sense of harmonics. Arnold talks about it, noting that “the sound of “Trousers” is certainly at odds with a “good” Classical sound: I shut down projection, fullness of tone, resonance, the consistency, stability and predictability of the sound being produced.” Over the course of the 22 minute piece, fragments of melody, muted textures and quavering string overtones play off of each other with measured consideration. Themes play out, get subsumed into the progression of the piece and then resurface. The recording closes out with “Slip,” a quartet for cello, violin, bass clarinet, and piano. The piece takes its name from the Irish slip jig, a jig that is in 9/8 as opposed to the usual 6/8 and a slowed pace accentuates the odd time signature. For the first quarter of the piece, cello, violin and bass clarinet move in woozy unison, lithely navigating the precarious phrasing. Pianist Mark Knoop’s entry, a quarter way in, introduces spare chords that serve to unsettle the phrasing even further, though the quartet never wavers in their assuredly ambling momentum. As the piece proceeds, the four parts veer off from each other, with lines dropping in and out. High-pitched violin arco sounds against crystalline piano chords making way for pizzicato cello and piano. The final section featuring Heather Roche’s dusky bass clarinet playing brings the piece to a transfixing conclusion. On Stain Ballads, Arnold continues to expand on his strategies toward opening up and abstracting melody, balancing compositional form with a sense of “formlessness.” With the members of Apartment House, he has found worthy collaborators.

Michael Rosenstein

Antoine Beuger / Apartment House—Jankélévitch Sextets (Another Timbre)

'jankélévitch sextets' by Antoine Beuger

In 1992, Antoine Beuger cofounded Editions Wandelweiser, the publishing arm of a community of like-minded, post-John Cageian composers. Along the way he has taken on the roles of artistic and managing director. Since Wandelweiser is a collective, his stewardship of the label and publishing arms makes him influential, but not an authoritarian figure. Quite the contrary. On Another Timbre website, there is an interview with Beuger that raises a provocative point about the authority of the score. He compares the current position of a classical composer to a perspective prescribed by Christian theology. The composer hands down rarefied instructions, which he (Beuger emphasizes the masculinity of this approach) best understands, and leaves to others the work of realizing his often very difficult and inscrutable instructions.

With Jankélévitch Sextets, Beuger takes a different approach. It is the fourth in a series of pieces that he wrote for specified numbers of musicians. Each composition deals with relationships implied by that number, and each does so employing mainly quiet, sustained tones. Additionally, each acknowledges a cultural figure; in this case, the Franco-Russian philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch. Beuger cites his appreciation for two of Jankélévitch’s ideas. First, music has no itinerary; it flows unpredictably. Second, sounds appear by disappearing. The latter point makes sense if you consider how you notice phenomena only after they stop. One suspects that if Jankélévitch was a fan of mid-20th century American music, he’d have had a lot of time for William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water (Till The Well Runs Dry).”

Beuger’s piece consists of repeated statements of a close bundle of long tones, each followed by a brief silence, with instruments insinuating themselves or dropping out during each pass. While the name is plural, the music is presented as a single, 64:20 long track, which asks the listener to accompany the ensemble through its entirety. The instrumentation consists of accordion, bassoon, bass clarinet, violin, viola, and double bass, which affords many opportunities for similar-sounding pitches to ease shift between close harmony and beating difference tones. This is not music that tugs at your sleeve; neither ingratiating nor imposing, it’s there if you wish to approach it, cycling through changes that reveal sounds by removing them. The music locates the essence of six-ness not in some contrapuntal exchange that draws attention to all the voices, but in the way that a group can persevere over time by allowing its members opportunities for respite. Apartment House’s treatment of this material captures its subtle balance. It takes discipline to blend sounds so patiently, and even more to do so in a way that don’t ask you to admire their restraint.

Bill Meyer

[jellypipemedia]

Art Industry and Equality

The Artist Industry, an industry that lets self-expression come out in a number of mediums. 

As an Artist myself, i can tell you how wonderful it has been to have a creative outlet like my multimedia. To express my ideas and watch the momentum of my work turn into something special. As many other Artists, it’s hard to find that validation and legitimacy in the industry that defines you as a professional and makes your career into more than a ‘hobby’. Some find that struggle more intense than others.

The idea that ‘All Artists have to struggle’ is a common ideology but beyond that- do all artists struggle in the same ways? Of course not. This could be combated with a number of different perspectives based off of different talent levels and different environments but commonly, artists are not given the same opportunities based off of more than just their talent. Different aspects come into play. 

The Artist Industry has been known for their inclusive atmosphere and supportive community, but is it set apart from any other industry when it comes to addressing equality issues? 

Misogyny/Trans-Misogyny , unequal opportunities based on gender, lack of recognition and the power struggle of legitimacy have all played their part in work industries all over- and the artist industry doesn’t escape that narrative.

A common theme that i find more than any other is women, queer, non-binary, and Fem artists struggle to find their power behind their art because they are usually dismissed, deemed illegitimate, or seen as ‘just a hobby’, or they could ‘make it a real job someday’. Their work isn’t given the credit it deserves or the recognition of legitimate work. Opportunities are missed quite often as work lays in favor of social stigmas and safe investments in uncomplicated people seem to flourish regularly. 

Stewing over my thoughts on this, I reached out to my social media circle looking for more perspective on the situation. I was able to connect with a couple of people, ask them their thoughts on how these aspects of the industry have affected them on a professional level and their influence on the industry . I want to keep the dialogue going about this and would love to hear more about the perspective of women, queer, fem, non-binary artists on the industry that claims to be so inclusive.  

With that being said, I had a great opportunity to talk with the Founder of ‘Siren Nation’.       *

Diving into ‘Siren Nation’ media, I came across their ‘LinkedIn’ page. Their Mission Statement spoke to me and left me wanting to dig just a bit deeper into the foundation of their cause.

“Siren Nation is a unique arts organization that showcases and creates performance and exhibition opportunities for women throughout the year. We are the only women’s collective that produces an annual festival showcasing the original work of women working in music, film, performance and visual art.

Siren Nation’s mission is to inspire and empower women of all ages to create their own art and to highlight the many achievements of women in the arts.”

When I was connected with Natalia Kay O’brien, I didn’t know much about Siren Nation or where our conversation would lead too. I had an idea of where i wanted to take this project, not having much more than a foundation and urgency to keep learning more about the perspectives of women identifying, queer and non-binary.

So, I asked if she’d be willing to help me out by telling her story and giving us an insight on her perspective of the industry.

Natalia:

I'd be super happy to help! There's an amazingly rich queer music scene in Portland and the Pacific Northwest. That is a big part of the reason I moved out here!

From 1999-2010 i produced a lot of events that centered queer folx -some from out of town, some in town.

Jay:

Awesome! I appreciate that a lot about Portland and the PNW. I've grown up in Portland most of my life.

Natalia: 

Lucky you!

Jay:

What are some of the events that you produced?

Natalia:

I started out doing house concerts for a spoken word artist out of NYC, then booking shows for/with traveling queer female artists i got connected with over time. I ended up doing the booking for mississippi pizza for a couple of years and got some more experience there producing shows--generally national folk acts--and booking artists. That helped me begin to get more familiar with the local music scene and get introduced to some amazing artists like Laura Gibson, long before they broke out. 

My experience and frustration, with the local music scene's dearth of female and queer presence and opportunities to get the kind of exposure that festivals offer, inspired me to found Siren Nation, an organization dedicated to promoting and empowering women artists.

As a queer woman I made sure that there was a strong queer presence during my tenure. We were supposed to have ‘Gossip’ headline the first festival and 3 weeks beforehand they broke their contract!

The seven years I spent with Siren Nation exposed me to new queer artists. Unfortunately, at that time, there was no such thing (in terms of identity) as nonbinary, and we didn't put enough effort into be trans inclusive. We produced, and they still do, 2 tribute nights, one for dolly parton, one for billie holiday, that have been happening annually for something going on 15 years! and then the annual festival, in november, which i produced from 2007-2010. 

Jay:

That's absolutely awesome that you contributed so much to the queer/fem community. I know how intensely hard it can be to demand that recognition and be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the world. It's no small thing. Can you give me an example of a time where you’ve experienced misogyny/trans-misogyny that directly affected your work as an artist?

Natalia:

I was tired of not seeing enough women and women-fronted acts on local festival lineups when there were SO MANY amazing female bands. My work as an artist (visual) has been almost entirely a private endeavor. however i do think there is a correlation between the fact that i considered my drawing 'doodling' and i'm a woman. I made art for years before I took on the identity and claimed it. I still squirm a little.

Jay:

I can totally understand that. I deeply feel like the accomplishments of women are often made out to be 'A nice hobby' or 'could be a job someday.'

Natalia:

Yes, exactly.

I can tell you as a booking agent for queer female artists in an industry that is heavily male, did not make for the most hospitable environment to work in. Getting club bookers to book an artist whose press kit screams 'radical feminist lesbian" let alone that she was doing spoken word which was just emerging...well, ultimately all they cared about was whether we could fill a room. There were some venues that didn't want to deal with us, in more conservative parts of the country, i.e. midwest and southeast.

I think trans-misogyny was unfortunately a little baked into Siren Nation in the sense that trans women have remained almost invisible within that space. Not enough queers involved with siren nation after I left!

So I tackled showcasing as many media as possible--music, film, visual arts and later fashion and comedy.”

Jay:

That's a powerful tool in today's world too. Being someone who is involved in a variety of media ( myself as well) is a powerful weapon to today's world of perspective. We have a lot more influence than people credit us for. Have you been affected by any people that are positive influencers in the queer community/have given inspiration to you personally?

Natalia:

The artists inspire me!! That's part of why I produced events because I truly believe in the artists and want to help them connect with a larger audience and want people to get exposed! Bands like Team Dresch, who really blazed trails for queer women punks, all around the country at a time when there was virtually no queer presence in media. Beth Ditto and Gossip, for being fearlessly brash, unashamedly fat, and a force! Women who were unafraid to be loud when it wasn't the norm yet--Sleater Kinney, Bikini Kill too!--inspired me and they were tackling issues that I cared about as a feminist in ways that I didn't see straight women doing.

I will never ever forget seeing Bikini Kill and Kathleen Hannah telling all the 'boys to go to the back'. It blew my mind having stopped moshing b/c it wasn't safe and she demanded and created that space

Jay:

I can definitely vouch for queer punk artists being a heavy influence in the queer community and causing pressure on 'social norms'! It's very empowering and the women in the scene are not a force to be reckoned with. It's still astonishing how such a positive and empowering movement got met with so much resistance.

Natalia:

Kinda like what I wanted to do with Siren Nation. Yeah, some people can't handle a strong woman especially if she is in any way not gender/hetero conforming.

Jay:

I'm sure Siren Nation impacted a lot of people to be the ferocious and powerful people they knew they were.

Natalia:

I hope so!! I know it was a space where, for example, at the tribute shows, artists got to meet and mingle backstage, and spontaneous collaborations would happen.

Jay:

That's the best part of festivals in general. Bring artists from all over and to create that opportunity for networking and creativity.

Natalia:

Right!??!

Practically every female artist who has broken out nationally performed at Siren Nation at some point and offering free workshops was an important way for us to empower and encourage women to create and make their own art.

Jay:

That's awesome! Does Siren Nation still have a website that I can reference too?

Natalia:

Yup! Sirennation.org

As an audience, I found festivals an amazing opportunity to get exposed to new artists.

Most of the language there that is about the organization, like mission statements and values, is mine.

Jay:

So why have you decided not to produce events for Siren Nation more recently? or does the organization take care of itself nowadays?

Natalia:

I left in 2010 because i was pursuing a masters degree, basically decided to pour all the hours and energy i had put into siren nation into a degree that would get me a salary for doing that kind of work. My co-founder December Carson has stayed at the helm and kept it going all these years. There are some longtime volunteers who help at events.

My dream that someday it could be a salaried job I finally realized was not going to be feasible

Jay:

That's a positive transition out of the organization tho! Did you get your master's degree?

Natalia:

Yes! It helped to know that it would carry on after I left, because it was my baby and I was very attached!  It has thrived over the years due to the dedication of the board members who make it happen. New blood comes in, and then they add fashion and comedy. It's been neat to see how it has evolved over the years and yes, I got my Masters, in Public Administration.

Jay:

That's so so so good to hear   Thank you so much for talking with me today- you have really been insightful and this is truly very inspirational to hear as a queer woman in the multimedia industry!

With ending our conversation, I felt like I made a breakthrough on what direction I wanted to take this project and found the encouragement to keep pushing through the media and highlight these amazing women, non-binary, and queer people. 

We lack recognition for being who we are while we make it in this industry. We struggle and fight back - gaining ground and getting traction. 

I’m excited to see where this project takes me and I'm glad to have you all on this journey. Stay alert for more to come!

[bluewatsons]

Martha Albertson Fineman, The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition, 20 Yale J Law & Feminism (2008)

Introduction

In this essay I develop the concept of vulnerability in order to argue for a more responsive state and a more egalitarian society. I argue that vulnerability is—and should be understood to be—universal and constant, inherent in the human condition. The vulnerability approach I propose is an alternative to traditional equal protection analysis; it is a “post-identity” inquiry in that it is not focused only on discrimination against defined groups, but concerned with privilege and favor conferred on limited segments of the population by the state and broader society through their institutions. As such, vulnerability analysis concentrates on the structures our society has and will establish to manage our common vulnerabilities. This approach has the potential to move us beyond the stifling confines of current discrimination-based models toward a more substantive vision of equality.

To richly theorize a concept of vulnerability is to develop a more complex subject around which to build social policy and law; this new complex subject can be used to redefine and expand current ideas about state responsibility toward individuals and institutions. In fact, I argue that the “vulnerable subject” must replace the autonomous and independent subject asserted in the liberal tradition. Far more representative of actual lived experience and the human condition, the vulnerable subject should be at the center of our political and theoretical endeavors. The vision of the state that would emerge in such an engagement would be both more responsive to and responsible for the vulnerable subject, a reimagining that is essential if we are to attain a more equal society than currently exists in the United States.

Before further developing the vulnerability thesis, I want to address some conceptual impediments to the idea of a more responsive state. First, an impoverished sense of equality is embedded in our current legal doctrine. We understand equality in terms that are formal, focused on discrimination, and inattentive to underlying societal inequities. Second, the view that the proper role of the state is one of restraint and abstention is politically powerful. Even self-identified progressive social reformers are suspicious of the state; the rhetoric of non-intervention prevails in policy discussions, deterring positive measures designed to address inequalities. Further, we idealize contract and correspondingly reify individual choice in ways that mask society’s role in perpetuating inequality. The fact that societal institutions play a significant role in maintaining and extending inequality is the very reason that we need a more active state, one that is responsive to that reality.

I. The Limits of Formal Equality

For centuries, the concept of “equality” in Western thought has been associated with John Locke’s philosophy of liberal individualism (and the creation of the liberal subject).1 “Equality” in the liberal model is the expression of the idea that all human beings are by nature free and endowed with the same inalienable rights. Although this vision of equality has inherent radical potential, in the United States today we have come to understand “equality” narrowly as the requirement of sameness of treatment,2 a formal anti-discrimination mandate, primarily enforced through the courts. We all know the litany of protected categories found in the equal protection doctrine: race, sex, religion, national origin, and so on.3 These classifications define individual legal identities and form the main axes around which claims for equal protection can be made. This system of identity categories defines the organization of interest groups. Indeed, these categories ultimately frame the content and influence the direction of American law.

Our current understanding of equality has been shaped in part by the twentieth century history of the use of the equal protection doctrine as a tool to fight blatant forms of discrimination focused on race, sex, and ethnicity. In particular, feminist legal reformers during the latter part of the century were suspicious of any difference in treatment, even if it was designed to favor women. They demanded formal equality and rejected any “special” consideration because, in their experience, any classification based on asserted gender differences led to exclusion and subordination.

The problem with a formal model of equality is that it is limited in several important ways. Indeed, “equality,” reduced to sameness of treatment or a prohibition on discrimination, has proven an inadequate tool to resist or upset persistent forms of subordination and domination.4 While this model might be used to successfully address some situations of discrimination, it fails to protect against others. Nor does our equal protection doctrine provide much protection against discrimination on the basis of categories not recognized as receiving heightened judicial scrutiny, such as disability and sexual orientation.

This version of equality is similarly weak in its ability to address and correct the disparities in economic and social wellbeing among various groups in our society. Formal equality leaves undisturbed—and may even serve to validate—existing institutional arrangements that privilege some and disadvantage others. It does not provide a framework for challenging existing allocations of resources and power.5 Unless some distortion is perceived to be introduced by impermissible bias, the state is not accountable. Nor is the state understood to appropriately intervene or interfere with the discrimination of private actors, be they in the “free” market or the “private” family. The formal equality model therefore not only fails to take into account existing inequality of circumstances, it also fails to disrupt persistent forms of inequality.

If we look at American society we see a long and growing list of material and social inequalities; we have no guarantee of basic social goods such as food, housing, and health care, and we have a network of dominant economic and political systems that not only tolerate, but justify grossly unequal distributions of wealth, power, and opportunity.6 Nevertheless, the sameness of treatment version of equality has proven resilient in the face of arguments for a more substantive concept of equality, one that is result-oriented and takes into account past circumstances and future obligations, considering need and disadvantage. What is more, sameness of treatment has been used to argue increasingly effectively against measures like affirmative action that might generate remedies for past inequities.

From a political and policy perspective, the current model of equality is further limited as an anti-discrimination principle because its protections do not appear to extend to everyone. Politically, this limitedness is problematic because it can and has resulted in significant backlash. Even more significant in the long run has been the fact that the goal of confronting discrimination against certain groups has largely eclipsed, even become a substitute for, the goal of eliminating material, social, and political inequalities that exist across groups. In this regard, identity categories are both over and under inclusive.7 The groups that traditional equal protection analyses recognize include some individuals who are relatively privileged notwithstanding their membership in these identity groups. Indeed, while race or gender may complicate and compound disadvantage, individual successes abound across these and other categories that the Equal Protection Clause demarcates. These individual successes create both theoretical and empirical pitfalls: Successful individuals who belong to a designated suspect class can undermine the coherence and dilute the strength of critical analyses based on asserted bias against the same identity group. At the same time, identity categories are too narrow. Poverty, denial of dignity, and deprivation of basic social goods are “lack-of-opportunity categories” that the current framework of identity groups does not recognize; such disadvantage transcends group boundaries.

The general tendency under a sameness of treatment equality framework is to focus on individuals and individual actions. The task under this approach is to identify the victims and the perpetrators of discrimination, as well as to define what were the prohibited activities, the individual injury, and the specific intent involved in each occurrence. Unless they are tied to individuals and discrimination, systemic aspects of existing societal arrangements are left out of the picture. It is as though existing material, cultural, and social imbalances are the product of natural forces and beyond the ability of the law to rectify. While it may be beyond the will of the law to alter, existing inequalities certainly are not natural. Inequalities are produced and reproduced by society and its institutions. Because neither inequalities nor the systems that produce them are inevitable, they can also be objects of reform.

II. The Restrained State

In American legal culture, the idea of the private acts as a principle of restraint and abstention. We accept the ideological assertion that it is appropriate to create barriers to keep the state out of our institutions and activities. This veneration of state non-intervention is a second major impediment to reforms intent on instituting a state that is more responsive to inequalities.8

State restraint is often expressed in terms of separate spheres ideology: there is a contrast between public and private domains, with the state cast as the quintessential public entity and the family cast as essentially private.9 Current conceptions of privacy are based on this dichotomy, which places some things and institutions presumptively beyond state regulation and control. The idea of family privacy “protects” the family and other intimate entities from state interference, while individual privacy shields certain intimate decisions from state control.10 Our economic institutions (such as the corporation) and our commercial practices (like those that govern wealth accumulation and distribution) are shielded by the black box of the free-market as it has been constructed in late American capitalism.11

Also contributing to a sense of inevitability when it comes to state restraint is the recently fashionable tendency to talk about the irrelevance—one could even say “withering away” —of the modern state.12 The suggestion is that one effect of globalization has been the displacement of the state by multinational corporations.13 Trade arrangements and treaties that span traditional geographic boundaries are agued to have rendered the state relatively impotent.

I propose a different interpretation. The state is not withering away. Rather, it has withdrawn or been prevented by entrenched interests from fulfilling one of its traditional roles in the social compact: to act as the principal monitor or guarantor of an equal society. The fact that nonintervention has facilitated a skewed and unequal society with the distance between rich and poor growing in recent years, makes clear that some form of prevailing power is essential to counter unfettered self-interest. Understood historically as the manifestation of public authority and the ultimate legitimate repository of coercive power, the state is the only realistic contender in that regard.14 One pressing issue for those interested in furthering a new vision of equality must be how to modernize or refine this conception of the state and then explicitly define its appropriate relationship to institutions and individuals within contemporary society.

A first step in this reconception is understanding that the state itself is manifested through complex institutional arrangements. Through the exercise of legitimate force in bringing societal institutions into legal existence and, subsequently regulating them under its mandate of its public authority, the state also constitutes itself.15 For example, although we often experience entities such as the family and the corporation as “natural” or inevitable in form and function, in reality such institutions are constructed and evolving; their identities are legitimated in law, hence by the state. Both intimate and economic entities are creatures of the state, in the sense that they are brought into legal existence by the mechanisms of the state. The state determines how both family and corporation, for example, are created as coherent entities entitled to act as such in society.

This process of institutional creation also establishes the state as the ultimate source of public authority. Its law tells us who may join together by structuring what will constitute a legitimate institutional formation and determines the consequences of that union, be it marital or corporate in form. Law defines the circumstances under which an entity and its actions will be considered entitled to the special protection of law. Once the legal union is established, the state may also insist on participating in its termination and can dictate the terms under which separation or dissolution may occur.

Many economists would respond to such observations with the assertion that the structuring of institutions can be, and increasingly is, handled through private ordering—through contract.16 However, contracts have no independent force; they are merely documents dependent on the institutions of the state to give them life through interpretation, implementation and execution. No matter how we try to isolate transactions, the state is always a residual player in so- called private arrangements, having fashioned both the background rules that shape those agreements and maintaining the background institutions upon which parties ultimately rely. The state, in exercising its unique role as the creator of legitimate social organizations susceptible to its ongoing coercive authority, should assume a corresponding responsibility to see that these organizations operate in an equitable manner.

Given the state of non-interventionist rhetoric, a brief digression on the issue of state competence is warranted. Critics of an active state often argue that state bureaucracies are inefficient and potentially corrupt.17 Because of the escalating sense of both the inevitability and the superiority of privatization within American political culture, we now live in an era of private schools, private prisons, even a private military—a world in which corporations perform functions that used to be classified as public in nature, displacing the state and its responsibility in doing so. It is as though the state—the public—cannot add anything distinctive. We just want to get the job done as quickly, quietly, and cheaply as possible, and it is presumed that private entities will be superior to the state in this regard.18

These worries about efficiency and corruption need to be addressed in any theory that argues for state action. While corruption can and should be addressed through criminal and regulatory law, we must inquire more thoughtfully into whether or not efficiency is the paramount or only appropriate measure of state success. Should social goods, such as education, or social responsibilities, such as those related to the criminal justice system, be measured only in terms of efficiency? Economic measures may be important, but are they the only bottom-line—the ultimate bottom-line?

Should independent and public values that further the public good, such as equality, justice, and fairness, not be measured and considered when we assess the value of public action? How can public goals be articulated and established without considering how they are consistent with public norms? Public values such as equality or justice are largely unquantifiable, which may explain why they are not typically addressed in neo-classical economics, nor often considered an integral part of the normative system that governs the market and other economic institutions. However, because the state is theoretically freed from the market and profit constraints placed on individual industries and businesses, it should be seen as in a superior position to develop expertise and competence in regard to the implications and implementation of public values. Unlike corporations, which are presumed to act only to maximize profits, the state can and does operate to accomplish more ambitious, even if ultimately immeasurable and illusive, goals. Further, if the preservation and implementation of public values are areas of state responsibility, this responsibility should extend to ensuring that to the extent possible, public goods are distributed according to those values as well.

III. The Vulnerability Thesis

In discussions of public responsibility, the concept of vulnerability is sometimes used to define groups of fledgling or stigmatized subjects, designated as “populations.”19 Vulnerability” is typically associated with victimhood, deprivation, dependency, or pathology.20 For example, public health discourse refers to “vulnerable populations,” such as those who are infected with HIV-AIDS.21 Groups of persons living in poverty or confined in prisons or other state institutions are often labeled as vulnerable populations. Children or the elderly are prototypical examples of more sympathetic vulnerable populations.

In contrast, I want to claim the term “vulnerable” for its potential in describing a universal, inevitable, enduring aspect of the human condition that must be at the heart of our concept of social and state responsibility. Vulnerability thus freed from its limited and negative associations is a powerful conceptual tool with the potential to define an obligation for the state to ensure a richer and more robust guarantee of equality than is currently afforded under the equal protection model.22

This vulnerability approach both expands upon and complements earlier work I have done in theorizing dependency. The technique is to focus on a concept or term in common use, but also grossly under-theorized, and thus ambiguous. Even when the term is laden with negative associations, the ambiguity provides an opportunity to begin to explore and excavate the unarticulated and complex relationships inherent but latent in the term.23 Thus reconsidered, the concept of vulnerability can act as a heuristic device, pulling us back to examine hidden assumptions and biases that shaped its original social and cultural meanings. Conceiving of vulnerability in this way renders it valuable in constructing critical perspectives on political and societal institutions, including law.24 Vulnerability raises new issues, poses different questions, and opens up new avenues for critical exploration.

Vulnerability initially should be understood as arising from our embodiment, which carries with it the ever-present possibility of harm, injury, and misfortune from mildly adverse to catastrophically devastating events, whether accidental, intentional, or otherwise. Individuals can attempt to lessen the risk or mitigate the impact of such events, but they cannot eliminate their possibility. Understanding vulnerability begins with the realization that many such events are ultimately beyond human control.25

Our embodied humanity carries with it the ever-constant possibility of dependency as a result of disease, epidemics, resistant viruses, or other biologically-based catastrophes. Our bodies are also vulnerable to other forces in our physical environment: There is the constant possibility that we can be injured and undone by errant weather systems, such as those that produce flood, drought, famine, and fire. These are “natural” disasters beyond our individual control to prevent.26 Our bodily vulnerability is enhanced by the realization that should we succumb to illness or injury there may be accompanying economic and institutional harms as a result of disruption of existing relationships.

Because we are positioned differently within a web of economic and institutional relationships, our vulnerabilities range in magnitude and potential at the individual level. Undeniably universal, human vulnerability is also particular: it is experienced uniquely by each of us and this experience is greatly influenced by the quality and quantity of resources we possess or can command.27 Significantly, the realization that no individual can avoid vulnerability entirely spurs us to look to societal institutions for assistance. Of course, society cannot eradicate our vulnerability either. However, society can and does mediate, compensate, and lessen our vulnerability through programs, institutions, and structures. Therefore, because both our personal and our social lives are marked and shaped by vulnerability, a vulnerability analysis must have both individual and institutional components.

A. The Vulnerable Subject

Understanding the significance, universality, and constancy of vulnerability mandates that politics, ethics, and law be fashioned around a complete, comprehensive vision of the human experience if they are to meet the needs of real-life subjects. Currently, dominant political and legal theories are built around a universal human subject defined in the liberal tradition.28 These theories presume the liberal subject is a competent social actor capable of playing multiple and concurrent societal roles: the employee, the employer, the spouse, the parent, the consumer, the manufacturer, the citizen, the taxpayer, and so on. This liberal subject informs our economic, legal, and political principles. It is indispensable to the prevailing ideologies of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and personal responsibility, through which society is conceived as constituted by self-interested individuals with the capacity to manipulate and manage their independently acquired and overlapping resources.29

The legal metaphor encapsulating this vision of societal organization is “contract.” Liberal subjects have the ability to negotiate contract terms, assessing their options and making rational choices. They consent to such agreements in the course of fulfilling society’s mandate that they assume personal responsibility for themselves and for their dependants. Privacy principles that restrain the state and its institutions from interfering with the liberal subjects’ entitlements to autonomy and liberty depend on this presumed competence and capability.

Vulnerability analysis questions the idea of a liberal subject, suggesting that the vulnerable subject is a more accurate and complete universal figure to place at the heart of social policy. There have been many critiques of the liberal subject, most of which focus on autonomy. For instance, feminist scholars have scrutinized and criticized the ways in which dominant theory and popular politics idealize notions of independence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency that are empirically unrealistic and unrealizable. Feminist critics, specifically in bringing dependency and care work into light and under scrutiny, have offered a model of interdependence in which the liberal subject is enmeshed in a web of relationships and perceived as dependent upon them.30

A vulnerability critique builds on these insights, but differs in several ways. Vulnerability is a more encompassing concept and, for that reason, analyses centered around vulnerability are more politically potent than those based on dependency. Because dependency is episodic and shifts in degree on an individual level for most of us, mainstream political and social theorists can and often do conveniently ignore it. In their hands, dependency, if acknowledged at all, is merely a stage that the liberal subject has long ago transcended or left behind and is, therefore, of no pressing theoretical interest. In addition, society has historically dealt with dependency by relegating the burden of caretaking to the family, which is located within a zone of privacy, beyond the scope of state concern absent extraordinary family failures, such as abuse or neglect. Thus largely rendered invisible within the family, dependency is comfortably and mistakenly assumed to be adequately managed for the vast majority of people.

By contrast, understood as a state of constant possibility of harm, vulnerability cannot be hidden. Further, while institutions such as the family may provide some shelter, they are unable to eliminate individual vulnerability and are themselves vulnerable structures susceptible to harm and change. Because vulnerability is ever-present and enduring, institutional as well as individual, it suggests a critique of dominant modes of thinking about inequality that is at once complementary to but more powerful than dependency. My argument is not for vulnerability to supplant dependency, for they each reveal different and important things. Rather, the assertion is that vulnerability analysis may ultimately prove more theoretically powerful.

In addition, the vulnerability perspective calls attention to another problematic characteristic of the liberal subject: S/he can only be presented as an adult. As such, the liberal subject stands not only outside of the passage of time, but also outside of human experience. The construction of the adult liberal subject captures only one possible developmental stage—the least vulnerable—from among the many possible stages an actual individual might pass through if s/he lives a “normal” lifespan. We must confront this foundational flaw in the liberal model if we are to develop legal and social policies that reflect the lived realities of human subjects.

The vulnerable subject approach does what the one-dimensional liberal subject approach cannot: it embodies the fact that human reality encompasses a wide range of differing and interdependent abilities over the span of a lifetime. The vulnerability approach recognizes that individuals are anchored at each end of their lives by dependency and the absence of capacity. Of course, between these ends, loss of capacity and dependence may also occur, temporarily for many and permanently for some as a result of disability or illness. Constant and variable throughout life, individual vulnerability encompasses not only damage that has been done in the past and speculative harms of the distant future, but also the possibility of immediate harm. We are beings who live with the ever- present possibility that our needs and circumstances will change. On an individual level, the concept of vulnerability (unlike that of liberal autonomy) captures this present potential for each of us to become dependent based upon our persistent susceptibility to misfortune and catastrophe.

B. The Vulnerable Society and Its Institutions

The vulnerable subject thus presents the traditional political and legal theorist with a dilemma. What should be the political and legal implications of the fact that we are born, live, and die within a fragile materiality that renders all of us constantly susceptible to destructive external forces and internal disintegration? Bodily needs and the messy dependency they carry cannot be ignored in life, nor should they be absent in our theories about society, politics and law. Surely the reality of our universal fragility has played some role in our construction of societal institutions. Contemplating our shared vulnerability it becomes apparent that human beings need each other, and that we must structure our institutions in response to this fundamental human reality.

Of course, societal institutions themselves are not foolproof shelters, even in the short term. Metaphorically, they too can be conceptualized as vulnerable: They may fail in the wake of market fluctuations, changing international policies, institutional and political compromises, or human prejudices. Even the most established institutions viewed over time are potentially unstable and susceptible to challenges from both internal and external forces.31 Riddled with

their own vulnerabilities, society’s institutions cannot eradicate, and often operate to exacerbate, our individual vulnerability. In fact, awareness of these institutional fallibilities may intersect with the specter of our own possible dependency, making reliance on these institutions particularly frightening.

One promising theoretical potential of making vulnerability central in an analysis of equality is that attention to the situation of the vulnerable individual leads us to redirect focus onto the societal institutions that are created in response to individual vulnerability. This institutional focus has the effect of supplementing attention to the individual subject by placing him/her in social context. The institutions of particular interest are those that are created and maintained under the legitimating authority of the state, since the ultimate objective of a vulnerability analysis is to argue that the state must be more responsive to, and responsible for, vulnerability.32

The state facilitated institutions that have grown up around vulnerability are interlocking and overlapping, creating the possibility of layered opportunities and support for individuals, but also containing gaps and potential pitfalls. These institutions collectively form systems that play an important role in lessening, ameliorating, and compensating for vulnerability.33 Together and independently they provide us with what Peadar Kirby refers to as “assets”— advantages, coping mechanisms, or resources that cushion us when we are facing misfortune, disaster, and violence. Cumulatively these assets provide individuals with “resilience” in the face of vulnerability.34

In his evaluation of violence and vulnerability, Kirby identifies three different types of assets that social organizations and institutions provide: physical assets, human assets, and social assets. 35 Institutions that provide us with physical assets are those that impart physical or material goods through the distribution of wealth and property. These assets determine our present quality of life, and provide the material basis for accumulation of additional resources—or resources that are more sustainable—in the form of savings and investments.36 Certainly tax and inheritance laws impact the distribution of physical assets and are part of this system, but so also are banking rules and regulations, and credit policies.37

Like physical assets, human assets also affect material well-being. Defined as “innate or developed abilities to make the most of a given situation,”38 human assets provide on an individual level for the accumulation of human capital or “capabilities.”39 Kirby identifies health and education as chief among assets in this category, making the institutions governing education and health care prime candidates for a vulnerability analysis.40 In addition to the examples Kirby provides, employment systems should be added; like education and healthcare, they develop the human being, impart assets that allow participation in the market and, thus, facilitate the accumulation of material resources that help bolster individuals’ resilience in the face of vulnerability.

Finally, social assets are networks of relationships from which we gain support and strength, including the family and other cultural groupings and associations. Kirby argues persuasively that social assets are also accumulated through political collectives in which individuals bolster their resilience by joining together to address vulnerabilities generated by the market.41 These collectives historically included trade unions and political parties, but today— as Kirby recognizes—the welfare state and insurance are also offered as alternative, often competing, means of protection against risk.

Kirby’s description of assets and asset-conferring institutions is analytically helpful in constructing a vulnerability analysis in that it illuminates the link between asset accumulation by individuals and the creation and maintenance of societal institutions. The nature of this relationship, coupled with the fact that asset conferring institutions initially are brought into legal existence only through state mechanisms, places such institutions within the domain of state responsibility. As asset-conferring entities, these institutions distribute significant societal goods and should be more specifically regulated; normatively, this state involvement requires that the state be vigilant in ensuring that the distribution of such assets is equitable and fair. Together with the concept of the vulnerable subject, understanding the state’s relationship to asset-conferring institutions gives us a vocabulary for arguing that the state should be held accountable for ensuring equality in response to individual and institutional vulnerability.42

IV. Assessing and Addressing Privilege and Disadvantage

Within the various systems for conferring assets, individuals are often positioned differently from one another, so that some are more privileged, while others are relatively disadvantaged. Important to the consideration of privilege is the fact that these systems interact in ways that further affect these inequalities. Privileges and disadvantages accumulate across systems and can combine to create effects that are more devastating or more beneficial than the weight of each separate part. Sometimes privileges conferred within certain systems can mediate or even cancel out disadvantages conferred in others. A good early education may triumph poverty, particularly when coupled with a supportive family and progressive social network.

Therefore, with respect to the assets any one person possesses, it is not multiple identities that intersect to produce compounded inequalities, as has been posited by some theorists, but rather systems of power and privilege that interact to produce webs of advantages and disadvantages.43 Thus, where other theorists expand the traditional equal protection analysis to account for multiple intersecting identities,44 a vulnerability analysis provides a means of interrogating the institutional practices that produce the identities and inequalities in the first place.

Using this systematic approach, a vulnerability analysis can address some of the ambiguities and anomalies that are evident in our current models of discrimination and in the identity categories these models utilize. Focusing on the interactions of asset-conferring institutions makes clear why some individuals can maneuver past disadvantages typically associated with our existing discrimination categories of race or gender to excel, even triumph, in a “white man’s world.” The various systems and institutions these individuals have encountered have provided them with the accumulated assets they needed to succeed. Such successes sometimes result in rejection of group identification and denial of group-associated disadvantages and measures designed to address them both by society in general and by successful individuals themselves. There are women CEOs who reject the idea that accommodations should be made for caretakers of small children or aging parents; wealthy and successful African Americans who launch campaigns against affirmative action in college admissions; and Latinos who are as adamant that we ferret out and deport undocumented workers as are their white counterparts.

These individuals do not disprove the existence of structural inequalities or the need for remedial action, however. Rather, they should be seen as the beneficiaries of institutions and systems in which privileges are conferred in more complex and particular ways than a simplistic focus on identity and discrimination would allow. Privileged within intersecting systems, these individuals have escaped both materially and psychologically from what are often cast as the inevitable disadvantages conferred by their gender, race, or ethnicity. Their successes lessen their identification with unmodified categories like race or gender and sometimes even make them opponents of the very policies that assisted them.

Just as privilege is not tethered to identity neither is disadvantage. Vulnerability is universal and, as such, transcends historic categories of impermissible discrimination. The sub-prime mortgage crisis affected white and middle-class people as well as those in the traditional suspect categories. Welfare reform during the 1990s should have been understood as a direct attack on all caretakers in that it undermined the value of unpaid care work and demonized motherhood outside of the patriarchal paradigm.45

The realization that disadvantage is produced independent of racial and gender biases in many—but of course not all—instances provides an important political tool. Mobilizing around the concept of shared, inevitable vulnerability may allow us to more easily build coalitions among those who have not benefited as fully as others from current societal organization. If we begin to operate from this perspective, institutional arrangements will be the targets of protest and political mobilization, and interest groups need not be organized around differing identities. The justice inquiry will also be reconfigured: it will focus on whether existing institutional arrangements are equally attentive across individuals and groups with shared vulnerability and assets are conferred in an equitable manner, or conversely if some subset is unduly privileged.

Of course, discrimination along identity lines unfortunately is likely to continue to occur; and, if it does, there will be an ongoing need to protest and remedy such discrimination. But, relative to relying on equal protection analysis, focusing on shared vulnerabilities and building a political movement around unequal institutional arrangements attendant to those vulnerabilities is a far more promising and powerful approach in addressing and correcting the disadvantage that persists in society. As noted earlier, discrimination-based arguments have accomplished too little with respect to dismantling broad systems of disadvantage that transcend racial and gender lines, such as poverty.46 Our understanding of equality has been so constrained by prevailing discrimination models that any radical potential of identity-based politics that may have once existed is now perhaps beyond resuscitation. The vulnerability approach will take us further, for despite progressive attempts to build strong and enduring coalitions across identity groups, such a coalition has not by and large emerged.

A vulnerability approach accomplishes several other important political objectives that illuminate both why a post-identity paradigm is necessary and how powerful it can be in addressing existing material and social inequalities. First, it allows us to celebrate the progress toward racial, ethnic, and gender equality that has been made under the anti-discrimination model. Institutions that were historically closed to women, African Americans, and other non-white males are now formally open, and many individuals have flourished as a result. Yet many are left behind, including some white males. Current anti-discrimination law and formal equality provide little in terms of rectifying many of the disadvantages these people face. Institutional exclusion in the formal, historic sense is not the reason that these individuals are not flourishing.47

Some politicians and policy makers have suggested that those left behind are merely suffering the just results of their own individual failures and inadequacies.48 These assertions rely on the assumption that unsuccessful persons have simply not demonstrated individual responsibility by taking advantage of the equally available opportunities afforded to them under existing societal systems. But the claim of failure of personal responsibility might be harder to make if we do not frame equality arguments in terms of the absence of impermissible discrimination but, rather, question whether the system provided an impermissible advantage to some individuals or groups. Within that framework, claims that individuals are entirely responsible for their own failures become less tenable. A vulnerability inquiry proposes a more thorough and penetrating equality analysis—one that considers structural and institutional arrangements in assessing the state’s response to situations of vulnerability before indicting the individual.

This structural focus illustrates a second political advantage to a vulnerability analysis: It brings institutions—not only individual actions— under scrutiny, redirecting our attention to their role in providing assets in ways that may unfairly privilege certain persons or groups, even if unintentionally. Remember that institutions as well as individuals are vulnerable to both internal and external forces. They can be captured and corrupted. They can be damaged and outgrown. They can be compromised by legacies of practices, patterns of behavior, and entrenched interests that were formed during periods of exclusion and discrimination, but are now invisible in a haze of lost history. Nonetheless, these institutions also have a vital role to play in addressing individual vulnerability. The resources they provide are the assets that allow us to live and aspire toward happiness despite our vulnerability. It is important that they operate in a non-discriminatory manner and neither favor nor disadvantage certain individuals or groups. Intent is irrelevant, what matters is whether or not these institutions are structured so as to respond unequally to the reality of our shared vulnerability. If they are, the burden would be on the state to either justify that inequality or act to adjust the institutional arrangements. This type of coercive institutional supervision can only be undertaken by the state in its capacity as the legitimate manifestation of public authority.

V. The Responsive State

Replacing the liberal subject with a vulnerable subject, and articulating a corresponding and compelling argument for fashioning a state more responsive to that subject, is not an easy task. Critics may argue that attacks on the liberal subject destabilize liberalism itself: If a competent, responsible adult is not at the center of social and political theory, will this not inevitably lead to less democratic modes of government and a more authoritarian state? The answer to such questions, which are anchored in an attachment to the status quo, should begin with some consideration of the history and development of our democracy and its institutions. Our current system has been built upon myths of autonomy and independence and thus fails to reflect the vulnerable as well as dependent nature of the human condition. This theoretical weakness has had practical implications that undermine our aspirations for equality and democracy.

In addition, we must think beyond current ideological constraints and consider the possibility of an active state in non-authoritarian terms. This theoretical task—reconceptualizing the role of the state—requires that we imagine responsive structures whereby state involvement actually empowers a vulnerable subject. Certainly state mechanisms that ensure a more equitable distribution of assets and privilege across society would contribute to a more robust democracy and greater public participation. The choice, then, is not one of an active versus inactive state per se, but rather whether the state is constructed around a well-defined responsibility to implement a comprehensive and just equality regime.

As stated earlier in this Essay, our present conceptions of the state underestimate or even ignore the many ways in which the state—through law— shapes institutions from their inception to their dissolution.49 Currently, the state minimally supervises these institutions in fulfilling their essential role in providing the assets that give us resilience in the face of vulnerability. The mandate of equal protection under statutes and the Constitution prohibits discrimination and, absent the demonstration of compelling differences and/or state interest, equality of treatment is the legal norm. However, by relying on the myth of the autonomous individual, the formal equality model fails to address substantive inequalities and differential allocations of privilege produced by our institutions.50 Instead, by focusing on equal protection and formal equality, the current model mires us in a battle of identity politics where every gain by a minority individual becomes a justification for abandoning the pursuit of substantive equality. Moreover, when one person or group gains, other individuals and groups often perceive themselves as losing. This paradigm pits some against others in a negative manner, deflecting sustained attention away from the institutional arrangements and systems that distribute disadvantage across people and groups.

Under both the vulnerability and nondiscrimination approaches the mandate is the same—the establishment of a regime of equality—but the foci and indeed the manner in which equality is imagined are very different. A vulnerability analysis greatly magnifies state responsibility for the institutions and structures the state constructs and utilizes. Vulnerability analysis demands that the state give equal regard to the shared vulnerability of all individuals, transcending the old identity categories as a limitation on the recognition that the state has a vital role to play in protecting against discrimination. A vulnerability analysis begins by first considering how the state has responded to, shaped, enabled, or curtailed its institutions. Has it acted toward those institutions in ways that are consistent with its obligation to support the implementation and maintenance of a vital and robust equality regime; a regime in which individuals have a true opportunity to develop the range of assets they need to give them resilience in the face of their vulnerabilities?

This inquiry into institutional and structural advantages and disadvantages would require a substantial reorientation of political culture, as well as some adjustments to legal institutions and theory. The legislature and its actions would become the primary institutional manifestation of the state. Its mandate would be to be responsive to vulnerability, which would result in a more nuanced sense of what constitutes equal opportunity than currently theorized— one that is more sensitive to existing inequalities and more demanding of the state. This imperative would be placed on the legislature and executive in the first instance: the mandate to be more responsive to and reflective of vulnerability. The legislative and executive fulfillment of that imperative ultimately would be monitored or supervised by the courts, looking to see if the state fulfilled its responsibility in assessing individual equality claims.

The questions a vulnerability analysis poses for equality are not restricted to a focus on discrimination against certain individuals or groups.51 Rather the state is required to ensure that institutions and structures within its control do not inappropriately benefit or disadvantage certain members of society. The operation and impact of those institutions and structures become the focus of legislative and executive action. The vulnerability inquiry examines the ways in which societal resources are channeled to see if the result is to privilege and protect some while tolerating the disadvantage and vulnerability of others. This focus on the structuring of societal institutions reflects the fact that the state has an affirmative obligation not to privilege any group of citizens over others and to actively structure conditions for equality. Imagine how much more fruitfully political and policy discussions might proceed if this framework was the one by which legislative and executive actions were gauged.52

A focus on the state and its institutions, as well as privilege and disadvantage, would also change the nature of the legal inquiry presented for judicial determination. It would move courts away from assessing the individual characteristics of designated groups within society to see if they are the subjects of animus. The vulnerability paradigm calls on courts to look beyond the identity of the disadvantaged developed over the past few decades under a discrimination paradigm. While the old identity categories – gender, race, sexuality, and so on—should not be totally removed from consideration, we must reframe our concerns in order to reveal and address things about the organization of society that are otherwise missed.

Similarly, under this approach, the task is not to explore the intent behind the actions of individual employees, educators, landlords, and so on. Individual intention is not the issue, nor is discrimination. Ill will is irrelevant when all of society is operating with the same set of prejudicial assumptions and beliefs such that our culture ignores the many ways it is organized to privilege some and not others. Because the shared, universal nature of vulnerability draws the whole of society—not just a defined minority—under scrutiny, the vulnerability approach might be deemed a “post-identity” analysis of what sort of protection society owes its members.

By recognizing that privilege and disadvantage migrate across identity categories, we are forced to focus not only on individuals, but also on institutions – the structures and arrangements that can almost invisibly produce or exacerbate existing inequality.53 A vulnerability approach does not mean that different treatment, even the conferral of privilege or advantage, is never warranted. It means that if the state confers privilege or advantage, there is an affirmative obligation for it to either justify the disparate circumstances or remedy them.54 This would then be the political and legal culture of equality in which the state and our societal institutions and their actions were judged.

VI. A More Positive Equality

Interestingly, the same-sex marriage debates reveal a concrete contemporary application of an approach that is not based on the idea of discrimination against some group, but instead eschews state action that privileges a few while leaving others outside of its protective structure. In some cases, plaintiffs have focused their arguments on the privileges associated with marriage that were denied to same-sex couples. Those benefits are “assets” in a vulnerability thesis – material and relational advantages that arose from or were conferred by the way that the institution of marriage has been structured.

In 1999, the Supreme Court of Vermont looked into its own early American history and held that same-sex couples were entitled to receive the legal benefits and protections that were previously only afforded to married couples of opposite sexes.55 The court’s rationale in extending these benefits (or assets) to same-sex couples derived, not from arguments of formal equality under the Equal Protection Clause, but from a more expansive and earlier notion of equality derived from the experience of colonial America.56 The Vermont Constitution’s Common Benefits Clause predated the Fourteenth Amendment and was not based on a concept of discrimination,57 nor was it focused only on protection for a specific category of persons. The Common Benefits Clause states, in part, “[t]hat government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community, and not for the particular emolument or advantage of any single person, family, or set of persons, who are a part only of that community . . . .”58

The court distinguished federal jurisprudence from its interpretation of Vermont’s Common Benefits Clause, which it characterized as concerned with ends rather than merely means. It noted that federal courts had been “broadly deferential to the legislative prerogative to define and advance governmental ends, while vigorously ensuring that the means chosen bear a just and reasonable relation to the governmental objective.”59 By contrast, underpinning the Common Benefits Clause was the notion that “the law uniformly afforded every Vermonter its benefit, protection, and security so that social and political preeminence would reflect differences of capacity, disposition, and virtue, rather than governmental favor and privilege.”60

Baker v. Vermont’s discussion of the Common Benefits Clause is an end- focused analysis. The majority continued, noting that the clause “prohibits not the denial of rights to the oppressed, but rather the conferral of advantages or emoluments upon the privileged.”61 Further, the Common Benefits Clause, “at its core . . . expressed a vision of government that afforded every Vermonter its benefit and protection and provided no Vermonter particular advantage.”62 The majority in Baker did not limit the potential classes whose interests are protected under the Common Benefits Clause to those groups identified by the U.S. Supreme Court as protected under the Constitution. For, as the Court noted, “the plaintiffs are afforded the common benefits and protections of Article 7, not because they are part of a ‘suspect class,’ but because they are part of the Vermont community.”63 This fact alone compelled the Court to “police a political process whose product frequently discriminates between citizens in respect to benefits and privileges.”64 Baker employs a creative and positive mode of inquiry in line with the vulnerability approach: It is concerned with whether the state, in fashioning its institutions, acts with equal regard for the shared vulnerability of all its legal subjects.

Conclusion

Equality must escape the boundaries that have been imposed upon it by a jurisprudence of identity and discrimination, and the politics that has grown up around this jurisprudence. The promise of equality must not be conditioned upon belonging to any identity category, nor should it be confined to only certain spaces and institutions, be they deemed public or private. Equality must be a universal resource, a radical guarantee that is a benefit for all. We must begin to think of the state’s commitment to equality as one rooted in an understanding of vulnerability and dependency, recognizing that autonomy is not a naturally occurring characteristic of the human condition, but a product of social policy.

Footnotes

1. See generally JOHN LOCKE, TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT (Ian Shapiro, ed., Yale Univ. Press 2003) (1689).

2. MARTHA ALBERTSON FINEMAN, THE ILLUSION OF EQUALITY 46 (1991) [hereinafter THE ILLUSION OF EQUALITY]; see also MARTHA ALBERTSON FINEMAN, THE AUTONOMY MYTH: A THEORY OF DEPENDENCY 10 (2004) [hereinafter THE AUTONOMY MYTH] (“Equality is manifested in mere formal or legal guarantees of sameness of treatment for individuals.”).

3. Interestingly, in this catalogue, as well as in the law, class is absent as a suspect classification. See San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1 (1973) (rejecting the application of strict scrutiny to an education policy allegedly discriminating against students on the basis of class). Class bias would bring economic arrangements into question and, for that reason, would be incompatible with a formal equality analysis that ignores disparate underlying circumstances, including economic inequality.

4. See, e.g., FINEMAN, THE ILLUSION OF EQUALITY, supra note 2, at 46, 174 (describing how sameness of treatment has failed to provide equality for women in the context of divorce).

5. FINEMAN, THE ILLUSION OF EQUALITY, supra note 2, at 36-37 (analyzing the economic and social inequalities that persist despite the use of the formal equality model).

6. See, e.g., John W. Lee III, Class Warfare 1988-2005 Over Top Individual Income Tax Rates: Teeter-Totter From Soak-The-Rich to Robin-Hood-In-Reverse, 2 HASTINGS BUS. L.J. 47, 147-49 (Winter 2006) (analyzing 2005 Census data documenting the growing rich/poor gap in American society).

7. I acknowledge that discrimination does exist, and I do recognize that these personal characteristics might work to complicate the experience of vulnerability for any individual. My claim is merely that discrimination models based on identity characteristics will not produce circumstances of greater equality and may in fact lead to less in many circumstances. For an example of this argument in the context of family law reform, see chapter three of FINEMAN, THE ILLUSION OF EQUALITY, supra note 2.

8. To a great degree, our concept of the private also shields non-governmental actors from equality scrutiny. When deemed to be private actors, there is no state action to prompt constitutional scrutiny. See, e.g., Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000) (affirming the Boy Scouts of America’s First Amendment right to exclude homosexuals from membership in the organization and noting that no constitutional right or law providing public accommodation free from discrimination exists to contest such exclusionary policies). This aspect of the private verses public debate is beyond the scope of this essay, which focuses on state responsibility, particularly in so far as the state is responsible for the creation and maintenance of societal institutions. In this context, the state is an active player and there is no private action exemption.

9. The family is the quintessential private institution—private in its relationship with both market and state. On the other hand, while the market is cast as public vis-a-vis the family, it is private when paired with the state, a truly chameleon institution. Cf. Iris Marion Young, Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory, in FEMINISM, THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE 421 (Joan B. Landes ed., 1998) (discussing the ways in which privacy rhetoric excludes particular persons and ideas from public discussion).

10. See FINEMAN, THE AUTONOMY MYTH, supra note 2, at 59, 208.

11. Id. at 223-25.

12. See SASKIA SASSEN, LOSING CONTROL? SOVEREIGNTY IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION 9-10 (1996) (arguing globalization has resulted in the partial erosion of the nation-state); see generally ROBERT O. KEOHANE, AFTER HEGEMONY: COOPERATION AND DISCORD IN THE WORLD POLITICAL ECONOMY (2d. ed. 2005) (discussing the growth of international trade regimes and neoliberal institutions and the decline of the traditional realist model of nation-state politics).

13. SASSEN, supra note 14, at 8.

14. The “state” referred to in this analysis is not necessarily the nation state. The term is used to refer to an organized and official set of linked institutions that together hold coercive power, including the ability to make and enforce mandatory legal rules, and which is legitimated by claim to public authority. In form the “state” could be locally, nationally, transnationally, or internationally organized.

15. See generally JOAN WALLACH SCOTT, GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY 48-9 (1999) (discussing the ways in which state authority is continually reconstituted and reaffirmed by actions taken in the name of protecting the public and how these actions depend upon a series of gendered exclusions).

16. See Victor P. Goldberg, The Enforcement of Contracts and Private Ordering, in HANDBOOK OF NEW INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS, 491, 491 (Claude Ménard & Mary M. Shirley eds., 2005) (“The primary purpose of contract law is, most would concede, to facilitate private ordering. The parties are the best judges of their interests and the law should, as much as possible, stay out of the way.”).

17. See, e.g., need author of article, in PRIVATIZATION: A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE need correct pincite (V. V. Ramanadham, ed., 1993) (discussing popular conceptions of public or government institutions as inefficient, corrupt, or adverse to change).

18. Experience with Halliburton in Iraq, for example, may indicate that the private is not always the cheapest. Nor does experience support the notion that private entities are always more efficient or less corrupt than state efforts.

19. See FINEMAN, THE AUTONOMY MYTH, supra note 2, at 33-35.

20. See, e.g., CAROLINE KNOWLES, FAMILY BOUNDARIES: THE INVENTION OF NORMALITY AND DANGEROUSNESS 108-09 (1996) (discussing popular constructions of children, women, and minorities as vulnerable, pathological, and in a perpetual state of victimhood).

21. Public health is a fertile area for analysis of vulnerable populations in this mode. For an interesting example of vulnerable population analysis, see LEIYU SHI & GREGORY D. STEVENS, VULNERABLE POPULATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES (2005). The authors consider vulnerability in the light of multiple, cumulative risk factors in regard to designated groups within society classified as to racial/ethnic background, low socioeconomic status, and lack of health insurance. See id. at 2. The designated population approach is not premised on the universality of vulnerability, as I argue, but is limited to specific categories.

22. See supra Part I.

23. For the development of the dependency theory, see generally FINEMAN, THE AUTONOMY MYTH, supra note 2.

24. As I have earlier defined the term, dependency is deemed “inevitable” when applied to biological or developmental stages of life and “derivative” when considering the social arrangements inherent in caretaking. The theoretical insight is that caretakers need resources in order to undertake care for children, the ill, the elderly and so on, and are thus derivatively dependent. Society is structured in such a way as to make the private family the primary source of those resources, resulting in great inequalities, including that other societal institutions that benefited from carework are free to evade responsibility to accommodate or compensate caretakers in any way. See FINEMAN, THE AUTONOMY MYTH, supra note 2, at 57-70.

25. I understand vulnerability, in its individual universality, to be similar but not identical to inevitable dependency. Whereas both are universal, only vulnerability is constant, while inevitable dependency is episodic, sporadic, and largely developmental in nature.

26. Environmental disasters are not always beyond society’s influence: Human actions can exacerbate environmental threats, as we see with global warming, water pollution, and war, for instance. Human-induced environmental catastrophes, as well as institutional failures more generally, raise additional questions about the ability of institutions to mitigate vulnerability.

27. Vulnerability is like derivative dependency in that it is profoundly shaped by social institutions. However, while only some individuals in society are derivatively dependent as a result of the care work they are assigned or assume, everyone is vulnerable. So, while vulnerability is both inevitable and universal, it is also socially constructed in its particularities.

28. FINEMAN, THEAUTONOMY MYTH, supra note 2, at 18-20.

29. For my critique of the liberal subject, see id. at 224-27.

30. See, e.g., id. at 161-75 (discussing feminist critiques of autonomy and the myriad of ways in which social institutions structure individuals’ lives).

31. My conception of vulnerability departs from that of other theorists, such as Judith Butler who argues for a theory of vulnerability that is preoccupied with the human capacity for loss, death, and tragedy. Butler proposes a framework of grief and suffering as a mechanism of reconsidering the ways in which certain lives become more privileged or valued than others. See JUDITH BUTLER, PRECARIOUS LIFE: THE POWERS OF MOURNING AND VIOLENCE 30 (2004). By examining grief and finding ways togrieve, Butler argues that we “might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others.” Id. However, Butler’s theory stops short of calling for restructuring our institutions in ways that reflect our vulnerability. Because institutions are simultaneously constituted by and producers of vulnerability, we must continually challenge these institutional practices and the meting of social resources. Thus, where Butler remains suspicious of “governmentality” and the ways in which the state intervenes to protect the population, my theory of vulnerability requires an active engagement with these institutions precisely because they are vulnerable and receptive to demands. For example, Butler does not challenge the ways in which the formal equality model and anti-discrimination framework perpetuate inequality and mask vulnerability under the guise of autonomy. See id. at 25-26.

32. These institutions in combination with the legal and governmental structures that bring them into existence and monitor their activities constitute the state as I conceive of it. See supra p. 6.

33. See BRYAN S. TURNER, VULNERABILITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS 25-44 (2006). Turner recognizes the importance of a vulnerability analysis in the development of international institutions that are receptive to human needs. However, Turner’s theory of vulnerability focuses on the ways in which human rights abuses create vulnerability and prevent institutions from effectively protecting the population.

34. This discussion on systems addressing vulnerability builds on PEADAR KIRBY, VULNERABILITY AND VIOLENCE (2006). In discussing resilience, Kirby builds on earlier definitions that understood resilience as “enabling units such as individuals, households, communities and nations to withstand internal and external shocks.” Id. at 55 (quoting the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean).

35. Id. at 55. Kirby identifies a fourth category: environmental assets. He notes that this set of assets is often overlooked due to the prevalence of economic analysis, which in its neoclassic form gives “priority to monetary value and which, by and large, treats environmental assets as ‘externalities.’” Id. at 69. Systems and institutions falling into this category include those addressing issues of global warming, bio-diversity, wildlife and natural resources that affect individuals and societies worldwide. Id. At 69- 72.

36. Id. at 54-55.

37. Kirby notes that residential property is the single biggest asset class, accounting for forty to sixty percent of total household wealth in Europe and around 30 percent in the United States. He warns that a crisis in the housing market could be worse than a depression, a warning that seems prescient in view of the recent world-wide crisis generated by the sub-prime debacle. Id. at 59.

38. Id. at 60. This aspect of Kirby’s work reflects some dimensions of Amartya Sen’s analyses. He notes that Sen does not address vulnerability, but emphasizes capabilities and what constitutes “well- being” in a way that “highlights important dimensions of what we can call the social production of resilience.” Id. at 55. I believe Kirby’s multiple asset-conferring institutional analysis is richer and more helpful in articulating a basis for state responsibility than is the Sen focus on the development of individual capabilities. In setting out a system approach in which a variety of structures confer different, complementary types of assets, Kirby is reaching for robust categories that capture the complex dimensions of the idea of resilience. Id.

39. Martha Nussbaum has argued that social justice is best achieved through a “capabilities” based approach. See, MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM, FRONTIERS OF JUSTICE: DISABILITY, NATIONALITY, SPECIES MEMBERSHIP 70, 164 (2006). Nussbaum argues that situations of substantial dependence, for example that of a person in a vegetative state or a person who is permanently confined to a wheelchair, result in certain individuals requiring more resources than others. Id. at 164-65. The capabilities approach attempts to define a minimum level of human capability “in a way informed by an intuitive idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of the human being.” Id. at 70. By focusing on the base level of human worth and defining the components of that life, Nussbaum’s theory perpetuates social inequality in potentially dangerous ways. Enabling society or even individuals to define what does and does not constitute a valuable life echoes with arguments historically resulting in eugenics, discrimination, and social inequality. As such, Nussbaum’s theory of dependency and human capabilities fails to capture the benefits of a vulnerability approach that challenges social inequalities while maintaining an ethic of universal applicability.

40. KIRBY, su35. Id. at 55. Kirby identifies a fourth category: environmental assets. He notes that this set of assets is often overlooked due to the prevalence of economic analysis, which in its neoclassic form gives “priority to monetary value and which, by and large, treats environmental assets as ‘externalities.’” Id. at 69. Systems and institutions falling into this category include those addressing issues of global warming, bio-diversity, wildlife and natural resources that affect individuals and societies worldwide. Id. At 69- 72.

41. Id. at 64-69.

42. It would be interesting in future work to broaden the idea of asset categories. Perhaps distinctions between asset-conferring, asset-preserving, and asset-enhancing systems would be helpful. Also relevant to the idea of resilience, and for that reason eminently worthy of study, are those institutions that do not confer individual assets per se, but provide some collective social good, such as maintaining order. In this category would be the criminal justice system and the armed services. Of further interest are the systems designed with institutions, not individuals, as the primary regulatory objects. Such systems guide capital and nation states in accumulation and consolidation, and determine the range and viability of international interactions and relations. I would place international treaties and United Nations conventions in this system, since they are directed toward the governance of collective entities. Individuals might be benefited through such systems, but they are not perceived as their primary objective.

43. See e.g., Angela P. Harris, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory, 42 STAN. L. REV. 581, 587 (1990) (“Feminists have adopted the notion of multiple consciousness as appropriate to describe a world in which people are not oppressed only or primarily on the basis of gender, but on the bases of race, class, sexual orientation, and other categories in inextricable webs.”); see also id. At 588- 89, 598, 601 (critiquing gender essentialism).

44. See Judy Scales-Trent, Black Women and the Constitution: Finding Our Place, Asserting Our Rights, 24 HARV. C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 9 (1989) (focusing on the intersections of race and gender for black women in light of the various standards of review under the Equal Protection Clause).

45. See MARTHA ALBERTSON FINEMAN, THE NEUTERED MOTHER, THE SEXUAL FAMILY, AND OTHER TWENTIETH CENTURY TRAGEDIES 101-10 (1995) (discussing mothers of all races characterized as deviant for their rejection of the patriarchal form of family).

46. See supra notes 4-9 and accompanying text.

47. Affirmative action plans are premised on the anti-discrimination model. They are perceived as temporary adjustments to the formal equality paradigm necessitated by past discrimination. Since they are based on historic individual identity categories, they do not focus us on institutions, which is where we need to direct our attention if we are to address the more complicated forms of disadvantage we face in a post-equality society.

48. See FINEMAN, THE AUTONOMY MYTH, supra note 2, at 34.

49. See supra p. 6-7.

50. See supra Part I.

51. This also helps to problematize the claim that because some members of a group succeed, the system is functioning appropriately and need not be monitored or transformed.

52. A fundamental question about our current societal arrangements that might spark controversy would begin with a consideration of why we organize work and wealth the way we do. I would like to see a discussion in state legislatures and Congress asking such questions about the workings of the law itself as: Why do we privilege contract over status, market over family or individual? Why does law divide up the market analytically and put its various parts in competition with each other: corporation versus workers versus consumers versus government? Why aren’t all corporation constituencies represented in corporate governance and only shareholders viewed as stakeholders? Why do we accept the idea of a minimum wage, but view as incomprehensible the idea that there might be a maximum wage under law? Why do we have a fictitious public-private divide imposed on the family and in employment? Lawmakers in other countries ask such questions and respond to them in their policy-making. At a minimum the vulnerability approach would be premised on the idea that it was inappropriate for the state and its institutions to protect and privilege some, to shield them or to mediate their vulnerability through the creation and maintenance of societal institutions, and it would force us to uncover the ways the state allows some to struggle with vulnerability and dependency.

53. The concept of vulnerability also allows us to avoid the argument based in the theme of individual responsibility that there is no longer any problem in the United States since certain individuals from protected identity groups have experienced successes.

54. The current prevailing perspective is that state action of this type is inappropriate. We are a people embedded in a national ideology of individualism that is protective of individual liberty and composed of mandates about individual responsibility, state non-intervention, and negative rights.

55. Baker v. State, 744 A.2d 864 (Vt. Sup. Ct. 1999).

56. Id. at 876-77.

57. Id. at 877-78.

58. VT. CONST. ch. I, art. 7.

59. Baker, 744 A.2d at 871 (emphasis omitted).

60. Id. at 876-77.

61. Id. at 874.

62. Id. at 875.

63. Id. at 878 n.10.

64. Lawrence Friedman & Charles H. Baron, Baker v. State and the Promise of the New Judicial Federalism, 43 B.C. L. REV. 125, 152 (2001).

[crashinglotus]

The 10 Principles

RADICAL INCLUSION

All kinds are welcome.

I say welcome to people every day.

Inside Willis Tower is a wall that says "WELCOME" 3 feet tall and in 15 languages. People's eyes light up when they recognize their native words. We receive guests from all walks of life, from every country and culture. Learning how to treat all our guests with equal fairness is a constant work in progress.

In our increasingly global-complex-connected society, every single person has work to do on being better at radical inclusion.

Our prejudices fail to define us. They may protect us, help us navigate reality. We define them. Taking opportunity to create something new instead of reinforcing a negative prejudice is a win for the universe.

And when people feel welcome, when they feel free to exist as their true expression of self, they bring warmth and smiles. They are agreeable. They work with you. We work together.

Incredible things happen when we work together with positive intentions.

I felt radically welcomed by my Camp Bisco friends. By the group at the Ten O'clock camp out. By my teachers and peers at Central Crossing. By my Cypress family, spending time together at retreats. By my family, who have tried very hard to understand. By my loves in this life. By strangers and one-chance-encounter friends.

The growing I have done because of people following this principle is invaluable.

This is the last of the Ten Principles of Burning Man (told in cat memes) I will reflect on. It is my intention to continue focusing on Burning Man as the festival completes, and begin looking ahead to attending the event next year for Burning Man's 30th anniversary.

Experiencing Burning Man would be the penultimate moment of learning and understanding my humanity, which I realize more and more, is my calling in life.

I hope you will all find your own ways to support me in this endeavor, whether sending out a few words of positive intention to the universe, or giving me guidance and emotional support as I work with all my being to make the event my reality.

Some of us take different paths. When I dream, my path leads me to Burning Man. So I'm taking steps to start getting there.

Be light. Be love. Believe. 💚

PARTICIPATION

Yes, life is a participatory act. No room for spectators. Especially at Burning Man.

Certain events in my life turned me from a spectator to a participant. This change was gradual, subtle, and also spurred on by instant moments of huge transformative power.

I've tried brain change entheogens. I have fallen in love. In fact, I constantly remark to myself on how surprising it is to feel so many different kinds of love. Agape, brotherly love, spiritual kinship, amorous love, the Greek loves, the Spanish loves. These things put you back in the centre of your own universe. I radiate love every day.

And I swear, sometimes when I look at people I can see the energy flowing from their hearts. Maybe too many entheogens.

I began adopting the ethic: Work smart, play hard. Have a reason to sleep when you crawl into bed.

And I have chosen these past few days to reflect on Burning Man principles because I feel how strongly this festival has affected culture and consciousness. For 29 years, humans have participated in perhaps the most evolved event in our history. Each creating ten thousand ripples out into the rest of the world.

Mark Zuckerberg has been to Burning Man, Lady Gaga, Anne Hathaway, Diddy (Puff Daddy). Politicians, too, and cultural gatekeepers from nearly every sphere of influence.

And when 70,000 people get together and throw a one of a kind party in the desert, strange things happen to space time.

There's a saying about drug culture. In the 60's, the hippies took acid and made the world weird. In the 90's, the whineys took Xanax to make it normal again.

But no pharmaceutical brain tranquilizers can undo the universal implications of a young brain exploring itself on acid. That's just too big of an event for the universe.

So whether you support me, or you find yourself reading these posts with an attitude of cynical interest, at least know that your life on this earth is made different because of events like Burning Man, and other events where millions of people get together to do incredible things with their nervous systems.

We are creating a new culture, or as Timothy Leary calls us, a New Breed of human being more advanced than any to come before us. I know I have met a few of you already. I know, not everyone in their lifetime, will evolve with us.

Even so, every single living hominid creature can benefit from knowing the principles I have shared over the past few days.

I have saved what I consider the most important for last. Stay tuned.

RADICAL SELF EXPRESSION

Different strokes for different folks. Different scenes for different genes.

We deal with a concept called brain castes. In every social group, not just human, but in many organisms, species-identical groups will have variations within the group.

Flocks of birds will have a few that cry out in danger. Some that fly faster. Some that fly slower, get eaten, support the food chain.

Gorillas and lions have alpha males, who express different physical characteristics.

And in humans, we have a huge number of different brain castes.

According to your genetic predisposition, and the environment creating the social order you participate in, your brain is circuited to see things in a certain way. You have a unique type of intelligence that moves our species into the future.

For better or worse. If you drive a car to work, then you are moving our species into the future for the worse. But that's a part of your understanding.

Some people understand computer science. Some study biology. Some feel religious or spiritual.

Some carry around anger and negativity. They make others reject them. They provide examples.

Notice how much we love extreme examples. Like the tattooed lizard guy, or the world's fattest man. The bearded lady. These people are important to our survival, sometimes by showing us what we don't want to be, how we don't want to evolve.

Your job is to be you! Your brain works in a certain way, and that way is integral to the whole of our species.

Sandi West Henson told me how she saw it: Your feelings are valid.

And she's so right. The impulses of your nervous system are valid. They work beyond your simple mammal brain to create the full expression of "you."

So allow the universe to be itself through you!

Feel everything you need to feel!

The spiritual people call it our "calling." The things we were brought into this world to understand. For everyone, what you are meant to understand is different.

I have to laugh when I see people trying ruthlessly to get other people to see what they see.

Others are not meant to see what you see! No one sees through your synergetic-eye-brain system. No one knows your thoughts and memories.

These are all parts of your unique being.

And you can feel good about that! You are here because you are important, for something, and maybe it's as small as giving someone a hug when they need it, or as big as helping our species into the age of space migration.

Who knows? You determine the form of your expression.

IMMEDIACY

Life is a participatory act, no room for spectators. Even the act of watching is a form of participation.

My whole life I have been watched by people. Small people who judge whether I am attractive or unattractive. Whether what I'm doing is agreeable or disagreeable. It gets so distracting! Small people think small thoughts about me, I pick up on them, and they trip me up.

Small people read my status updates but don't 'like' them. They are too busy in their heads, spectating and judging.

Small minds zone out in front of television screens until drool falls down their chins. I refuse to do that anymore. I love cinema and television, but if a show makes me feel like going slackjawed instead of engaged and like I am learning something, I can't put in the effort for it.

My life is a series of time-sensitive investments. I refuse to waste what I'm given on 45 consecutive minutes of action shots. On garish sex scenes that destroy my individual notions about intimacy. On scripted reality shows. On bright flashing colors void of information about how to succeed at being human.

Lately, I watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It made me laugh and I felt it was a good representation of culture. Everything I watch is about learning and growing.

Talking with one of my incredible coworkers one day, he said that people all over the world are full of intelligent ideas and incredible perspectives, but all they do is sit in their rooms and fail to make a change in the world.

I feel many of us are like this, full of great ideas but having never learned how to participate in our own lives.

CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY

As the sun begins to set on day 3 of Burning Man, I reflect on the principle of Civic Responsibility.

As a tour guide, I am an Event Organizer, and being on the blunt end of Civic Responsibility comes with the territory.

For example, when I load elevators, people fit the best, and feel the least awkward, when everyone faces the same direction. I had a gentleman, when I asked him to turn around in the elevator, say: "You mean I'm not allowed to face the group I'm with?" (which would have made him the only person facing everyone else in the elevator.) At that point, it became my civic responsibility to explain how everyone fits more comfortably facing the same direction.

As a participant, who also knows what it means to be an organizer, the best thing I can do while participating in group events is lead by example. Every individual has the power to set the mood and tone of their own reality tunnel. When you start working with groups and tribes, you see how the interdependence of "having a good time" relies on the nature of each individual.

Bonnaroo had a "rule" this year. Don't be that guy.

People get dicey about having rules told to them, but on a basic human level, there exist certain ways, and certain levels of tension, that work more effectively for group settings. Tribes do not have tolerance for disruption to the social systems necessary for their survival.

But sometimes, disruption is necessary for survival.

COMMUNAL EFFORT

Some of mankind's greatest achievements, and the current highly advanced level of our society, stem from the most complex and interconnected community structures ever to form on this planet.

Community has never looked like this before. We are physically more isolated, but also, thanks to electronic communication, remain in close personal contact with highly specialized groups of friends and peers. We don't walk down the street to spend time with our one friend in the neighborhood. We snapchat our best friends. We express via status update to our unique friend lists. We communicate with people who get us, and who are willing to support and work with us.

Camus said "To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."

And he knew a thing or two. When we get around other people, our tribal instincts kick in, and we get judgemental, emotional. We carry strong opinions. We feel, deeply, it's important others see what we see. This is a biological psycho-mechanism that is slowly losing its importance for our species.

I feel strongly that working with others always demands a sacrifice. People, in their unconsciousness, steal your energy, they waste your time and demand your attention when they aren't entitled to it. People trap you in their mind games. They attempt to bring you down to low-vibration frequencies. This is the cost of working with others. This is why, if you want to be happy, you shouldn't get too concerned about people.

I feel, ultimately, this sacrifice of energy and time is worth it. Working with human beings is worth it. When we get together and focus our energy, we build the world's tallest buildings, the world's most progressive festivals, and, just by thinking and being together, we create new realities that affect the flexible fabric of space-time.

Often I think back on when I attended a Christian music event, Winterfest, with Dakota and his parents Jeff and Carrie. At one point, the 15,000 attendees were asked to be together silently in prayer. The magnitude of that silence absolutely moved me, and I reflect on it still today, as I see news of millions of people around the world meditating collectively for global consciousness change.

Something unique happens when individuals work together with positive intentions. Incredible outcomes occur.

DECOMMODIFICATION

Imagine what people could accomplish with their energy and time in a culture free from "having."

Have you ever considered what you would do with your day if you were free from working, to earn the money, to buy the stuff?

We interact differently with each other when we stop constantly exploiting our peers for cash and resources. Almost every "job" in America is a form of exploitation. Even my job exploits people, considering my company turns a profit, and the CEO makes a hell of a lot more than I do even though I unquestionably work harder. I have no need to convince you of the pitfalls in our economic system. They are self-evident.

GIFTING

Imagine what people could accomplish with their energy and time in a culture free from "having."

Have you ever considered what you would do with your day if you were free from working, to earn the money, to buy the stuff?

We interact differently with each other when we stop constantly exploiting our peers for cash and resources. Almost every "job" in America is a form of exploitation. Even my job exploits people, considering my company turns a profit, and the CEO makes a hell of a lot more than I do even though I unquestionably work harder. I have no need to convince you of the pitfalls in our economic system. They are self-evident.

RADICAL SELF RELIANCE

If you want to have a good time, avoid putting that time in someone else’s hands.  Radical self reliance is a celebration of all things you can do for yourself!  By being radically self reliant, you lift the burden of taking care of you off your neighbor and lift up the kinds of interactions we can have with one another into a higher realm.  When all our needs are met, especially self met, we can begin to give back and engage with others from a place of fulfillment, not a place of lack or need.  Radical Self Reliance allows for high quality interactions to take place at Burning Man and beyond, it helps prevent anyone from taking away your good time, because you provide the good time no matter what!  I love Radical Self Reliance it is useful and life saving among the 10 principles.

Meditating on these 10 concepts has completely changed my mind and the direction I’m headed.  The benefits of integrating these principles into your life are HUGE and have lasting ripples that go out out out into the world.  Honoring even one of these principles can have a positive impact and I’m super thankful to have found them and the opportunities they lead me toward.  Burn on!! 

[wineanddinosaur]

South L.A. Wine Club’s Lindsay Williams Is Addressing Social Justice With Wine

Lindsay Williams, a registered nurse (Ph.D.) based in Los Angeles, is at the forefront of two national crises: Covid-19, and an industry-wide reckoning of BIPOC issues in wine. As the founder of South L.A. Wine Club (SLAWC), she organizes wine tasting events that bring together and commemorate BIPOC and other marginalized people in wine. What began as a personal passion pursuit to learn more about viticulture has morphed into a robust platform. SLAWC’s overarching philosophy is to cultivate a community culture around wine tasting that includes enjoyment, education, and engaging dialogue, as well as facilitating connections with winemakers in South L.A., Inglewood, and other neighborhoods.

Williams’ welcoming demeanor and thoughtfully curated events (happening virtually, for now) provide inclusive, accessible spaces for those who are “wine-curious” and haven’t had access to wine education and culture. She recently launched the South L.A. Speaks series pairing local leaders and winemakers, and donated half the proceeds from wine sales to Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. This year, she also co-founded Our Glasses Full, an ongoing non-profit collaborative series that celebrates Black Joy, a collective jubilation, compassion, and call to action for bettering the lives of BIPOC individuals. She believes that Black Joy is at once pleasure and a powerful tool, and an act of resistance to social unrest; and that the act of savoring and sipping (wine) can not only be celebratory, but radically transformative.

“The business and culture of wine cannot be separated from the people that make it on one end, and consume it on the other,” Williams says. “Our Glasses Full and South L.A. Speaks are meant to reconcile this spectrum, and acknowledge the fullness that comes from celebrating all these aspects.”

1. What are you doing right now to shake up the industry to propel it forward?

Working in collaboration with my colleagues and friends in wine, and also focusing on my audience as a significant source of content and guidance in planning wine content. This year, I co-founded Our Glasses Full with some of my closest sisters in wine: Chevonne Ball of Dirty Radish, Alisha Sommer of Somersalt, and Roxy Narvaez. We hosted Juneteenth Saber Celebration this year, our inaugural event celebrating Black Joy through wine and user-submitted sabering videos as a way for wine professionals to contribute to the success of the event. Following this event, we want to commemorate other historic events and commemorations for BIPOC and other marginalized persons in American history through wine — which include Indigenous Peoples’ Day for October, Kwanzaa for December, and Women’s History Month for March.

In addition to this, South L.A. Wine Club celebrates and educates members of the South Los Angeles and Inglewood communities, so I started the South L.A. Speaks series to highlight the contributions of the South L.A. Community and pair our discussions with wine! So far, I have featured community therapists, social justice advocates, and natural healers, and paired our conversations with wines from local winemakers. Moreover, the wines were available for pickup and drop-off in South Los Angeles, and we donated half the proceeds of sales to Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.

Lastly, to celebrate and highlight voices within my community, I recently started the South L.A. Speaks series to connect with South L.A. and Inglewood residents about their work, how we are staying safe and sane, and celebrating each other with wine. I recently featured community therapists and social justice advocates with wine available for purchase from Serenity Farm and Vineyard and Final Girl Wines, both who are local winemakers in Los Alamos. We then donated 50 percent of the profits from the event to Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. It is truly exciting to see how wine can be a venue to connect with people, share our struggles and triumphs, and then support causes that benefit us all.

2. Is there any personal or professional introspection you’d like to share in light of what’s been going on with Black Lives Matter and the coronavirus crisis?

Personally and professionally, I think this is a time of great change and upheaval — and with that, what emerges is the importance of the relationships we’ve cultivated and the interconnectedness of systems. The toxicity of capitalism and the disparities it creates were already an issue (within the U.S. in general), but Covid-19 and the ongoing civil unrest has made it so these issues cannot be ignored. It will be interesting to see, this time next year, if the reckoning that is happening right now in wine continues for lasting and systemic change. As a Black woman, I encounter these issues every day, and as both a nurse and wine professional, I face these issues professionally. The fear that I once had to speak up on these issues has dissipated, so our industry will need to get used to being uncomfortable, empathetic, and recognizing and highlighting marginalized voices that typically have not been heard.

3. Tell me about your journey and involvement with the wine industry.

I developed a curiosity for wine in 2013 as a function of professional networking and social mobility. At the time, I was in graduate school and on the path to receive my Ph.D. in Nursing at UCLA (which I received in 2015). This represented a new social sphere of ivory tower academics, where I did not fit because of my ethnicity and age (I was in my mid-20s; and I observed that the average age of nursing Ph.D. students here were in their mid-50s). I found myself at conferences, mixers, and in classes where people were talking about wine, and I had no idea what they were talking about. Wine was not on my dining room table growing up, so I had no base of knowledge to build on. After a handful of occasions of sheepishly ordering whatever “red” was available, I started googling different wine labels and developed a small lexicon of wine terms that would help me break the ice and have substantive conversations with peers and colleagues.

In 2015, I went on a wine trip to Temecula and tried Leoness Cellars wines. It finally clicked why people loved wine so much. After that “Eureka!” moment, I started asking more and more questions, visiting wine shops and going to wine festivals to try more and more types of wine, which ultimately turned into a hobby, then a passion. I am a person driven by curiosity, harmony, and continuous improvement through acquiring new knowledge, so wine represented all these facets.

In 2016, I moved to South L.A., and sought to have the same growth and experiences with wine, but found there was nothing. In September, I started SLAWC on Meetup as a casual way to connect with like-minded people in my neighborhood. I was delighted to find not only similar minds, but an entire community. In the three years since starting South L.A. Wine Club, I have grown from hosting casual Meetups to offering curated events that bring in winemakers and distributors to this rapt audience.

4. What is the mission you envision for South L.A. Wine Club, and how are you achieving it?

The mission of South L,A, Wine Club is to create community among wine enthusiasts in South L.A. and Inglewood through accessible and affordable wine events, wine tastings, and wine education. I achieve this by building meaningful and substantive relationships with winemakers, distributors, wine brands, and curating events specifically in [these] areas. My events are not just for residents of South L.A., but for everyone who wants to celebrate this community.

Additionally, my community historically only had access to varietals and winemakers that were in grocery stores and liquor stores. Considering food insecurity and the pejorative connotation between liquor stores and communities of color, there are very few ways to access and enjoy wine in the neighborhood without driving across town. Our communities deserve to taste and enjoy these wines right in our areas, and that’s what I endeavor to do.

5. What’s the coolest thing you get to do in your job?

The best part of my work is meeting with new audiences and seeing the delight that comes with them trying something new and loving it! Even when they don’t like something, I use that as an opportunity and teachable moment; and at the end of the experience, they now know more about their palate and tastes than they did before.

6. Due to the pandemic, many individuals have had to pivot to survive and thrive. How has your business and role changed in the last six months?

The transition to virtual events was very difficult for me, particularly because I am also a doctorally-prepared registered nurse working on the frontlines of Covid-19 response. I went radio silent the first few months because I was overwhelmed with this seismic change.

With that challenge came the great opportunity to think strategically about what events could be in the future. For one thing, I wanted to keep virtual content short and digestible — that is, what could keep peoples’ attention and still be educational? Moreover, I had to consider, what is a potential format that holds space for the myriad of thoughts and experiences that we are all having right now? We are all struggling in some way, so for me, there was no point in hiding that from my audience. In my Instagram Live series and interviews, we talk about wine, but also social justice, creating harmony in our lives, self-care, and many other things.

7. What’s a significant shift your business has made in the last six months that you had never considered before?

How SLAWC can connect to other wine professionals nationally, through features in Black Wine Professionals, Our Glasses Full, and other collaborations with other wine professionals. I recently co-hosted an event with Amy Atwood Selections, Pinkies Up L.A., Zafa Wines, and Swift Cafe, a local Black-owned restaurant in the Crenshaw District. We collaborated to bring Zafa Wines to South L.A. paired with dinner, and an Instagram Live conversation with Krista Scruggs (the owner and winemaker) and I. It was an incredible event that brought these wines and the spirit of the event close to home and benefitted Black-owned businesses.

8. What about [changes that] you had thought were not possible before, but have become “standard” in this “new normal”?

That a virtual conversation can feel as enriching and fulfilling as an in-person tasting or visit. After months of attending virtual classes and tastings, I find I am now able to connect to more people than before.

9. How are you using your position to push forward on racial equity and respective issues in the industry?

I don’t take the name South L.A. Wine Club lightly — I know that with this name, I not only represent [myself], but also my community and its residents. Wine culture and the systems that maintain it are inextricably linked to systemic racism, injustice, and harm. So I am constantly questioning these practices in the work I do.

In addition, I bring my 10-plus years of health care experience into this work, and I see the startling disparity in health care access in hospitality workers. I am developing projects as an advocate for hospitality workers that no longer have access to health care or are underinsured with costly healthcare plans like COBRA.

10. What do you envision is next for yourself and South L.A. Wine Club?

Continuing to craft a caring and uplifting culture through our virtual content and collaborations with people nationwide. South L.A. Wine Club endeavors to be a pillar of strength within our community and a catalyst for positive change. With this in mind, I hope to have an operational base to host classes and curate more virtual events which speak to important issues that affect marginalized people/communities. Historically, much of our understanding of wine practices stems from elitist European “traditions.” SLAWC challenges these social constructs and offers insightful discussions that welcome all people into the fold, where they can feel a part of the wine-culture tapestry. Since it’s fluid and ever-evolving, we also ask what and how that looks and feels; wine sparks these vital discussions.

Additionally, with all of my initiatives and in being a small business (owner), I’m applying for grant funding as well as constantly seeking out new ways and opportunities to partner with like-minded wine professionals and brands that serve my community’s best interests. Lastly, I’m excited to be working on creating a wine club box; and although operational details haven’t been finalized yet, it will include curated varieties from local winemakers I want to spotlight. For instance, just last week I had an event that showcased 2018 Brut Rosé from Loubud Winery and the 2019 Passetoutgrain from Blue Ox winery that I would want included. The idea is that pickup of these wine boxes would be from my home (for the time being) and/or from South Los Angeles restaurants and businesses, such as with Swift Cafe where I did an event with them a few months ago.

The article South L.A. Wine Club’s Lindsay Williams Is Addressing Social Justice With Wine appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/south-la-wine-club-lindsay-williams/

[johnboothus]

South L.A. Wine Clubs Lindsay Williams Is Addressing Social Justice With Wine

Lindsay Williams, a registered nurse (Ph.D.) based in Los Angeles, is at the forefront of two national crises: Covid-19, and an industry-wide reckoning of BIPOC issues in wine. As the founder of South L.A. Wine Club (SLAWC), she organizes wine tasting events that bring together and commemorate BIPOC and other marginalized people in wine. What began as a personal passion pursuit to learn more about viticulture has morphed into a robust platform. SLAWC’s overarching philosophy is to cultivate a community culture around wine tasting that includes enjoyment, education, and engaging dialogue, as well as facilitating connections with winemakers in South L.A., Inglewood, and other neighborhoods.

Williams’ welcoming demeanor and thoughtfully curated events (happening virtually, for now) provide inclusive, accessible spaces for those who are “wine-curious” and haven’t had access to wine education and culture. She recently launched the South L.A. Speaks series pairing local leaders and winemakers, and donated half the proceeds from wine sales to Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. This year, she also co-founded Our Glasses Full, an ongoing non-profit collaborative series that celebrates Black Joy, a collective jubilation, compassion, and call to action for bettering the lives of BIPOC individuals. She believes that Black Joy is at once pleasure and a powerful tool, and an act of resistance to social unrest; and that the act of savoring and sipping (wine) can not only be celebratory, but radically transformative.

“The business and culture of wine cannot be separated from the people that make it on one end, and consume it on the other,” Williams says. “Our Glasses Full and South L.A. Speaks are meant to reconcile this spectrum, and acknowledge the fullness that comes from celebrating all these aspects.”

1. What are you doing right now to shake up the industry to propel it forward?

Working in collaboration with my colleagues and friends in wine, and also focusing on my audience as a significant source of content and guidance in planning wine content. This year, I co-founded Our Glasses Full with some of my closest sisters in wine: Chevonne Ball of Dirty Radish, Alisha Sommer of Somersalt, and Roxy Narvaez. We hosted Juneteenth Saber Celebration this year, our inaugural event celebrating Black Joy through wine and user-submitted sabering videos as a way for wine professionals to contribute to the success of the event. Following this event, we want to commemorate other historic events and commemorations for BIPOC and other marginalized persons in American history through wine — which include Indigenous Peoples’ Day for October, Kwanzaa for December, and Women’s History Month for March.

In addition to this, South L.A. Wine Club celebrates and educates members of the South Los Angeles and Inglewood communities, so I started the South L.A. Speaks series to highlight the contributions of the South L.A. Community and pair our discussions with wine! So far, I have featured community therapists, social justice advocates, and natural healers, and paired our conversations with wines from local winemakers. Moreover, the wines were available for pickup and drop-off in South Los Angeles, and we donated half the proceeds of sales to Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.

Lastly, to celebrate and highlight voices within my community, I recently started the South L.A. Speaks series to connect with South L.A. and Inglewood residents about their work, how we are staying safe and sane, and celebrating each other with wine. I recently featured community therapists and social justice advocates with wine available for purchase from Serenity Farm and Vineyard and Final Girl Wines, both who are local winemakers in Los Alamos. We then donated 50 percent of the profits from the event to Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. It is truly exciting to see how wine can be a venue to connect with people, share our struggles and triumphs, and then support causes that benefit us all.

2. Is there any personal or professional introspection you’d like to share in light of what’s been going on with Black Lives Matter and the coronavirus crisis?

Personally and professionally, I think this is a time of great change and upheaval — and with that, what emerges is the importance of the relationships we’ve cultivated and the interconnectedness of systems. The toxicity of capitalism and the disparities it creates were already an issue (within the U.S. in general), but Covid-19 and the ongoing civil unrest has made it so these issues cannot be ignored. It will be interesting to see, this time next year, if the reckoning that is happening right now in wine continues for lasting and systemic change. As a Black woman, I encounter these issues every day, and as both a nurse and wine professional, I face these issues professionally. The fear that I once had to speak up on these issues has dissipated, so our industry will need to get used to being uncomfortable, empathetic, and recognizing and highlighting marginalized voices that typically have not been heard.

3. Tell me about your journey and involvement with the wine industry.

I developed a curiosity for wine in 2013 as a function of professional networking and social mobility. At the time, I was in graduate school and on the path to receive my Ph.D. in Nursing at UCLA (which I received in 2015). This represented a new social sphere of ivory tower academics, where I did not fit because of my ethnicity and age (I was in my mid-20s; and I observed that the average age of nursing Ph.D. students here were in their mid-50s). I found myself at conferences, mixers, and in classes where people were talking about wine, and I had no idea what they were talking about. Wine was not on my dining room table growing up, so I had no base of knowledge to build on. After a handful of occasions of sheepishly ordering whatever “red” was available, I started googling different wine labels and developed a small lexicon of wine terms that would help me break the ice and have substantive conversations with peers and colleagues.

In 2015, I went on a wine trip to Temecula and tried Leoness Cellars wines. It finally clicked why people loved wine so much. After that “Eureka!” moment, I started asking more and more questions, visiting wine shops and going to wine festivals to try more and more types of wine, which ultimately turned into a hobby, then a passion. I am a person driven by curiosity, harmony, and continuous improvement through acquiring new knowledge, so wine represented all these facets.

In 2016, I moved to South L.A., and sought to have the same growth and experiences with wine, but found there was nothing. In September, I started SLAWC on Meetup as a casual way to connect with like-minded people in my neighborhood. I was delighted to find not only similar minds, but an entire community. In the three years since starting South L.A. Wine Club, I have grown from hosting casual Meetups to offering curated events that bring in winemakers and distributors to this rapt audience.

4. What is the mission you envision for South L.A. Wine Club, and how are you achieving it?

The mission of South L,A, Wine Club is to create community among wine enthusiasts in South L.A. and Inglewood through accessible and affordable wine events, wine tastings, and wine education. I achieve this by building meaningful and substantive relationships with winemakers, distributors, wine brands, and curating events specifically in [these] areas. My events are not just for residents of South L.A., but for everyone who wants to celebrate this community.

Additionally, my community historically only had access to varietals and winemakers that were in grocery stores and liquor stores. Considering food insecurity and the pejorative connotation between liquor stores and communities of color, there are very few ways to access and enjoy wine in the neighborhood without driving across town. Our communities deserve to taste and enjoy these wines right in our areas, and that’s what I endeavor to do.

5. What’s the coolest thing you get to do in your job?

The best part of my work is meeting with new audiences and seeing the delight that comes with them trying something new and loving it! Even when they don’t like something, I use that as an opportunity and teachable moment; and at the end of the experience, they now know more about their palate and tastes than they did before.

6. Due to the pandemic, many individuals have had to pivot to survive and thrive. How has your business and role changed in the last six months?

The transition to virtual events was very difficult for me, particularly because I am also a doctorally-prepared registered nurse working on the frontlines of Covid-19 response. I went radio silent the first few months because I was overwhelmed with this seismic change.

With that challenge came the great opportunity to think strategically about what events could be in the future. For one thing, I wanted to keep virtual content short and digestible — that is, what could keep peoples’ attention and still be educational? Moreover, I had to consider, what is a potential format that holds space for the myriad of thoughts and experiences that we are all having right now? We are all struggling in some way, so for me, there was no point in hiding that from my audience. In my Instagram Live series and interviews, we talk about wine, but also social justice, creating harmony in our lives, self-care, and many other things.

7. What’s a significant shift your business has made in the last six months that you had never considered before?

How SLAWC can connect to other wine professionals nationally, through features in Black Wine Professionals, Our Glasses Full, and other collaborations with other wine professionals. I recently co-hosted an event with Amy Atwood Selections, Pinkies Up L.A., Zafa Wines, and Swift Cafe, a local Black-owned restaurant in the Crenshaw District. We collaborated to bring Zafa Wines to South L.A. paired with dinner, and an Instagram Live conversation with Krista Scruggs (the owner and winemaker) and I. It was an incredible event that brought these wines and the spirit of the event close to home and benefitted Black-owned businesses.

8. What about [changes that] you had thought were not possible before, but have become “standard” in this “new normal”?

That a virtual conversation can feel as enriching and fulfilling as an in-person tasting or visit. After months of attending virtual classes and tastings, I find I am now able to connect to more people than before.

9. How are you using your position to push forward on racial equity and respective issues in the industry?

I don’t take the name South L.A. Wine Club lightly — I know that with this name, I not only represent [myself], but also my community and its residents. Wine culture and the systems that maintain it are inextricably linked to systemic racism, injustice, and harm. So I am constantly questioning these practices in the work I do.

In addition, I bring my 10-plus years of health care experience into this work, and I see the startling disparity in health care access in hospitality workers. I am developing projects as an advocate for hospitality workers that no longer have access to health care or are underinsured with costly healthcare plans like COBRA.

10. What do you envision is next for yourself and South L.A. Wine Club?

Continuing to craft a caring and uplifting culture through our virtual content and collaborations with people nationwide. South L.A. Wine Club endeavors to be a pillar of strength within our community and a catalyst for positive change. With this in mind, I hope to have an operational base to host classes and curate more virtual events which speak to important issues that affect marginalized people/communities. Historically, much of our understanding of wine practices stems from elitist European “traditions.” SLAWC challenges these social constructs and offers insightful discussions that welcome all people into the fold, where they can feel a part of the wine-culture tapestry. Since it’s fluid and ever-evolving, we also ask what and how that looks and feels; wine sparks these vital discussions.

Additionally, with all of my initiatives and in being a small business (owner), I’m applying for grant funding as well as constantly seeking out new ways and opportunities to partner with like-minded wine professionals and brands that serve my community’s best interests. Lastly, I’m excited to be working on creating a wine club box; and although operational details haven’t been finalized yet, it will include curated varieties from local winemakers I want to spotlight. For instance, just last week I had an event that showcased 2018 Brut Rosé from Loubud Winery and the 2019 Passetoutgrain from Blue Ox winery that I would want included. The idea is that pickup of these wine boxes would be from my home (for the time being) and/or from South Los Angeles restaurants and businesses, such as with Swift Cafe where I did an event with them a few months ago.

The article South L.A. Wine Club’s Lindsay Williams Is Addressing Social Justice With Wine appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/south-la-wine-club-lindsay-williams/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/south-la-wine-clubs-lindsay-williams-is-addressing-social-justice-with-wine

[khalilhumam]

Ghana’s leapfrog experiment: Free senior secondary school for all youth

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Ghana’s leapfrog experiment: Free senior secondary school for all youth

By Rebecca Winthrop Africa is a young continent and getting younger by the year. By 2050, half of all the people in Africa will be under the age of 25 and it will be home to a full 25 percent of all the world’s working-age population. But this tremendous asset—a continent full of energetic, bright, and creative young people—will only be the “demographic dividend” that the African Union aspires to if countries invest in the education and skills of all their children and youth. This task is much more difficult today given the economic downturn on the continent in the wake of COVID-19. Luckily, there are experiments taking place in African education systems that started before the pandemic hit that can provide inspiration for today’s challenges. For example, Ghana’s initiative to radically expand access to senior secondary schooling, especially to the highest quality schools in the country, can shed light on how to increase inclusion without investing in the costly endeavor of building new schools. As countries in the region struggle to address the impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic—from public health needs to rising poverty to increasing social instability—finding more cost-efficient ways to help the regions’ aspiring youth enter or finish secondary school is important in the short and long term. But what has been Ghana’s approach and how was it done?

A Leapfrog experiment: Rapidly expanding access to top quality schools

In 2017, Ghana started nationwide implementation of its Free Senior High School policy. The initiative was spearheaded by President Nana Addo Akuffo who was deeply concerned about the one-third of students that the government estimated passed the exam to attend senior secondary school but could not afford to attend. In a recent conversation, Dr. Matthew Prempeh, Ghana’s minister of education, describes the process of finding a pathway to deliver on the president’s promise of free senior secondary school for all youth.

You don’t develop a country based off only elitism. You develop a country where the masses of the populations are trained and educated to a level that they can all lead productive lives in the country.

“When I came into my position, I had seven months to figure out how to deliver free senior secondary education before the start of the next school year,” says Dr. Prempeh. To access senior secondary school in Ghana, students need to pass the Basic Certificate of Education Examination (BECE) and choose a school they wish to attend, which could be anywhere in the country. With 85 percent of children enrolled in the nine years of required basic education that runs through junior secondary school, the prospect of free senior secondary was hugely popular with the country’s youth. The largest problem Minister Prempeh faced in realizing this vision was that there simply were not enough seats in the schools that students wanted to attend, and it would take too long to build the infrastructure needed. While Ghana currently has 700 public senior secondary schools, 55 are widely recognized as the top schools in the country. These are the schools from which top universities fill their ranks and businesses and government agencies fill their leadership positions. In the first year of free secondary education, 362,000 qualified students were enrolled, which included 80,000 more children who otherwise could not have afforded it. In the second year, over 490,000 students passed their BECE exams, but there were only 290,000 classroom seats. What was to be done with the extra 182,000 students? One option was simply to change the rules mid-stream and only accept those students with the highest exam grades to match the number of seats available. Advocates of this approach argued that it would give the government time to build classrooms, and over time all of Ghana’s young people who passed the BECE exam could enroll. This approach would likely have been acceptable to the families of the top-scoring students, but these students would most likely have come from the wealthy families and private schools. But what about the poor student from a rural area whose family sacrificed everything to help her pass the BECE? “You don’t develop a country based off only elitism. You develop a country where the masses of the populations are trained and educated to a level that they can all lead productive lives in the country,” says Minister Prempeh. With this commitment to equity, the Ministry took up the challenge of finding a way for all eligible students to attend senior secondary. “I wanted to embrace the leapfrog mentality and see how we could tackle access and quality at the same time. It is not so complex. We just had to know how to count and measure, and if we did that correctly, we could get it right,” says the Minister. The solution? Year-round schooling for schools with fewer seats than students interested in attending. Inspired by the experience of his deputy minister, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, who earlier in his career had led year-round schooling initiatives in the U.S., Minister Prempeh and his team got to work measuring and counting. For the most popular—and highest quality—schools in the country, students were assigned to either the “green” or “gold” track and alternated attending school 11 weeks at a time with vacation breaks in between. This way, by adjusting the length of the school day and the school calendar and even increasing teaching hours from 1,080 to 1,140 per year, Ghana plunged into free universal secondary education. Today, the ministry is beginning to build more schools to ease congestion and ultimately sees year-round school as a temporary measure. The rollout of year-round schooling was less than smooth. Parents and students alike expressed a range of concerns: caring for children during the many school breaks, frustration with siblings in different tracks—making family calendars difficult—and concern about how the frequent breaks would affect learning. Admitting that there could have been better communication to families and students, Minister Prempeh defends the decision nonetheless: “Whose child was supposed to wait to enroll in top senior secondary schools?” He argues that most of the concerns came from families whose children traditionally attended the top schools.

The need to continue investing in young people

While the verdict is still out on how this has impacted student learning, the ministry has partnered with ID Insights and others to document and evaluate the program, and this innovative approach is likely to be a good one with lessons for today when all education systems are struggling to do more with less. In addition, any strategy that provides for more inclusive and equitable access to education across elite and marginalized groups, especially at the secondary level, helps fend off social unrest. In fact, researchers argue that equitably expanding access to educational opportunities can “breed peace” and in some cases reduce the risk of conflict by two-thirds. This is something many leaders across the continent who are worried today about mounting instability, especially among frustrated youth, would do well to take note. According to Minister Prempeh, Ghana’s top senior secondary schools, many of which are long-standing boarding schools, have long played a special role in helping build social cohesion in the country. Over the decades, these schools became the place where the best and brightest of Ghana—from all over the country and from different tribes and traditions—would come and spend their formative years. Citing his own experience as a student, Minister Prempeh describes the strong bonds developed in these schools, “We feel a strong affiliation to our school that rises above tribal differences and we learned to work together and contribute to Ghana the country.” Perhaps this has played a crucial role in Ghana’s long record of peace and stability across over 100 tribes while each of its neighboring countries has struggled with civil war. Indeed, now is not the time to back off from investing in Africa’s young people. “The current president believes that it is not resources that make a nation but human beings,” says Minister Prempeh. Ghana’s youth would agree with him.

[agritecture]

Bringing It All Together: Blue Planet Consulting Rebrands as Agritecture Consulting

I’m elated to announce that Agritecture and Blue Planet Consulting will formally merge into one company, Agritecture LLC. Since 2011, when I first founded Agritecture.com, I’ve had big dreams for how agriculture could be integrated into the built environment. Now, with this merger, our team will be more equipped than ever before to master the art, science, and practice of our trade.

I’m now writing to you all to address the how, what, and why of this merger:

How: Two things got me to this point: persistent hard work and surrounding myself with phenomenal people.

In 2011, persistent hard work meant publishing on Agritecture.com as often as possible. It meant voraciously reading every bit of published material out there, synthesizing the information, and sharing it on the blog. It meant weeks learning CAD, plant science, and systems design just so that I could create the rendering for the BXVF, my thesis project at Columbia University.

Persistent hard work also meant getting hands-on experience by volunteering at Sky Vegetables. I learned a lot that summer about horticulture and design, and eventually applied what I learned in signing a lease to manage that facility.

However, one person’s hard work won’t go very far, so I surrounded myself with comrades who shared my vision for a future full of green and productive cities. In 2013, I co-founded the Association for Vertical Farming with Max Loessl and with guidance from my mentor, Dr. Dickson Despommier. Together we began building a network of organizations who can communicate and collaborate as a unified movement.

In 2014, an opportunity arrived to converge what I was learning and who I was meeting, and thus I founded Blue Planet Consulting with angel investor Jeffrey Tucker. Jeffrey took a big chance on me when he decided to back BPC, and he continued to believe in me as I navigated the high seas of small business leadership. I will be forever grateful for that trust and support.

Things weren't always easy, but slowly we began to hire more of the exceptional folks who power our company. We’re now at 9 full-time consultants including horticulturists, engineers, designers, business managers, sustainability managers, and operations directors.

I’m so proud of my dream team for their skills and work ethic, their vision and their perseverance, their commitment to sustainability and community. Our staff has a tendency to go above and beyond, providing legendary service to our clients. We’ve developed an efficient and jovial team dynamic that improves our careers and our quality of life. This can be evidenced in the team loyalty – I’m grateful to say we haven’t had a single full-time staff member leave the company to date. People matter more than technology or business model. My mother, and HR guru, Rostya Gordon-Smith taught me that from a young age.

In addition to developing our team and data, we’ve mastered our methodology. Everything from lead vetting, to client onboarding, to conducting feasibility studies has been iterated on. We’ve honed in on our processes, which is why now it is again time to push ourselves beyond our collective comfort zone. I’m confident that this merger will help bring about new clients who will expand our impact to more cities and people across the globe.

FInally, everything we’ve worked for physically comes together at our glowing new Brooklyn office. While I have fond memories of our cozy former office, the new larger space allows us to explore our creativity and learn from our industry colleagues. For example, this year at NYC AgTech Week we’re displaying LED’s from 8 lighting vendors, four +Farms, a giant custom farm, a living wall, an augmented reality solution, sensors, controllers, and dosers. This innovative equipment makes our industry tick, and we’re thankful to all the vendors who have sent us their equipment to display. Thanks to you all, we’ve built a one-of-a-kind ‘agritecture’ showcase that attracts new entrants to the sector in ways a standard conference or networking event never could.

What: So what will change and what does this merger mean?

Well, previously, Agritecture was just a blog, while Blue Planet Consulting was just a consultancy. While the two always operated as sister companies, the family of companies will now converge to create a greater positive impact`.

That means that the blog, the workshops, the conferences, +Farm, and the consulting practice will all be under one unified roof. This will radically streamline the structuring of new partnerships for our various endeavors moving forward, and will help simplify our branding and communications.

Why: Blue Planet’s primary consulting service has been feasibility studies for indoor vertical farms and greenhouses.

We’ve learned a lot working with over 30 clients including Farm.One, Sky Vegetables, Project Farmhouse, and Square Roots. We’ve helped these companies avoid common mistakes, we’ve challenged their assumptions, and we’ve brought years of data to their projects.

The work we did with these clients incubated our ideas and abilities, but they were all primarily focused on efficiency, ie: growing as much as we could with as few resources as possible. However, not all urban farms are solely about profit or efficiency ― many are established with equal or greater goals of social cohesion, environmental restoration, or food justice. Others are created simply to inspire. The term ‘agritecture’ inclusively allows for many possibilities, which is why it was important for us to brand the new entity as Agritecture Consulting.

With this new brand, we’ll be better equipped to design high-performing agriculture amenities for new types of clients. Clients who are just opening their eyes to agritecture concepts: architecture firms, real estate developers, universities, grocery stores, hotels, and utilities companies to name a few. Bringing our two companies together further reinforces our commitment to an innovative yet practical approach to urban agriculture.

Conclusion: I’m incredibly lucky to have so many extraordinary people helping me realize my dream.

Together we are developing the art, science, and practice of integrating agriculture into the built environment. Now, we invite you to engage with us and work together to transform our cities into the sustainable ecosystems we believe they can become.

Want to learn more? Visit the new Agritecture.com

[festfashions]

With Burning Man off to a kicking stat this year, I though it might be interesting for my followers to learn a little bit more about the event. I’ve loved the idea of Burning Man for years, and I’ve promised myself I’ll go next year for the 2018 Burn. For just a taste of what Burning Man is about, here are the 10 Principles of Burning Man, directly from their website.

There’s also a really good documentary called “Spark: A Burning Man Story” on Netflix for those interested in more. I really liked watching that one. I can’t wait to someday take photos at this amazing event.

The 10 Principles of Burning Man

Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey wrote the Ten Principles in 2004 as guidelines for the newly-formed Regional Network. They were crafted not as a dictate of how people should be and act, but as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the event’s inception.

Radical Inclusion Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

Gifting Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

Decommodification In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

Radical Self-reliance Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.

Radical Self-expression Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

Communal Effort Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.

Civic Responsibility We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.

Leaving No Trace Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.

Participation Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.

Immediacy Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

[chrisengel]

...subjective freedom implies a form of self-determination which begins with the thwarting intervention of drive followed by the redefinition of my causality: it corresponds to ‘my ability to choose/determine which causes will determine me. “Ethics”, at its most elementary, stands for the courage to accept this responsibility’ (Žižek 2006b: 203). This “positing the presuppositions” (Hegel) is the minimal but crucial power of the subject, through which we can retroactively assume a new causal link. Put differently, the causal link in which we are embedded creates an effect it cannot contain and threatens to subvert the cause itself. This is why freedom, for Žižek, has the form of a loop: we have a chance to disconnect and opt for a different cause, i.e. choose a process of subjectivation with a different content. The whole point is that while I cannot choose directly what I will be in the future (as that would entail bypassing the process of subjectivation through the other), I can nevertheless embrace change by transforming my past, identifying with one of my past history’s un-actualized causal chains. The key move towards liberation thus begins with perceiving my cause as virtual. From a political angle, the Žižekian “defence of lost causes” (such as communism) is precisely the attempt to actualize an opportunity that was missed at a given historical conjuncture – and that, if actualized, could change the future.11 This is why Žižek endorses Hegel’s claim that infinity is not to be conceived as endless expansion but ‘active selflimitation (self-determination)’ (Žižek 2006b: 205). Why? Once again, because nothing escapes necessity, including its own excess:  The question of freedom is, at its most radical, the question of how this closed circle of fate can be broken. The answer, of course, is that it can be broken not because “it is not truly closed”, because there are cracks in the texture, but, on the contrary, because it is overclosed, that is, because the subject’s very endeavor to break out of it is included in advance. That is to say: since our attempts to assert our freedom and escape fate are themselves instruments of fate, the only real way to escape fate is to renounce these attempts, to accept fate as inexorable. [. . .] accept fate as inevitable, and you will break its grasp on you. (207) What this means is not that we should simply accept the current state of things as fate, as something we cannot change,12 but rather that we should change it by recognizing its nullity, the fact that, precisely as necessity, its foundations are void. If we agree with this understanding of freedom as overidentification with the causal chain inclusive of its un-actualized causes, perhaps the key political questions, simple as they may sound, can be put along these lines: what is it that brings about the dimension of drive? How can drive be connected to a specific political project that actualizes our lost causes? The starting point must be that every authentic political decision, for Žižek, is ultimately marked by its radical contingency, its abyssal trans-strategic value – which not only guarantees that we are acting freely, but also makes it impossible for us to establish a priori what will happen after the act. However, we could still legitimately argue that a politics of the Real, that is to say a politics founded upon (as opposed to “bewitched by”) the axiom of the irreducible amalgamation of Symbolic and Real, needs to find ways of strategically conceiving a given project as “driven”, i.e. as an intervention in the Real, rather than activate itself after the (f)act. More precisely, we should claim that drive itself – the intrusion of traumatic negativity opening up the potential for change – can take place as the (unexpected, excessive, pervasively unconscious) result of our concrete political engagement with a lost cause, no matter how such engagement is pre-empted by its ideological context. What if the problem that lies ahead concerns the necessity to become aware of how the gap between our inevitably limited strategy towards “promoting change” and change itself is already immanent to our strategy? The wager here is that the conscious definition of, and engagement with, an authentically subversive political strategy already necessarily includes drive and the dimension of the act, for although the act brought about by drive is by definition incommensurable, it can be conceived as synchronous with the attempt to disturb the core of the hegemonic ideological constellation. If the act emerges ex nihilo, its incommensurability and unpredictability must nevertheless be conceived as an integral part of the strategy that targets the inconsistency of the ideological edifice – which means that the real question has to do with the strategic definition of the feasibility of an intervention that successfully politicizes class struggle.13 ..... what I am suggesting here is that the disruptive dimension of the act be conceived not only as the explosion of unstoppable revolutionary urge at the level of ontic reality, but also as the vital component of that surplus of thought which typifies the psychoanalytic approach.

2010 - Vighi - On Zizek's Dialectics