Sense & Solidarity (a project I run with Sarah Stein Lubrano) is pleased to announce the Mayday Movement (anti-)Academy, a four-day workshop for community organizers, radical artists, activists, educators and other practitioners of the radical imagination to learn techniques and theories for changing hearts and minds.
We’re looking to grapple with some of the toughest challenges in left organizing and activism using our signature mix of psychological insight, radical imagination, and strategy.
We’re providing a space for new and established educators, activists, artists, thinkers and organizers to assemble, share resources, and inquire into topics including (but not limited to):
- How can use psychological insights to mobilize others, keep up momentum, and build solidarity?
- How can we see (the good kind of) emancipatory social change within our lifetimes?
- How can we create arguments and infrastructures to change hearts and minds and overcome fatalism, fear and factionalism?
- How can we strategize to make the best use of our very limited resources and energies?
- How can we cultivate the radical imagination in ourselves and those around us?
- How can we avoid burning out?
To do so, we at Sense & Solidarity draw on and combine:
- The intergenerational wisdom and best-practices of social movements
- Critical theories of ideology that analyze the way power shapes our feelings and imaginations
- Recent insights from the cognitive sciences into things like unconscious patterns, cognitive dissonance, the impact of social bonds, social media and more
Together, we’ll learn how to:
- Understand what does and does not change people’s minds (hint: actions over words)
- Be strategic and selective about whose hearts and minds we want to change (it can’t be everyone)
- Recognize and work with common fears, anxieties, hesitations and antagonism we might meet in our campaigns
- Think through if, how and when activism can provide a warm, empowering, welcoming community (and when not to!)
- Be tactical about disrupting and dividing our opponents, and learn to recognize when they’re doing the same.
- And much more…