Otesha is going to be at the NUS’s Student Activism 2011 conference tomorrow at Goldsmith’s University. Below is a post I wrote for their blog explaining the workshop we’ll be giving. It’s a subject the Otesha team is thinking a lot about at the moment, so I’m sure we’ll have more to say about it here in the nearish future.
Our ‘Power and Privilege’ workshop is likely to be one of the most personally challenging events at Student Activism 2011 – both for the participants and for us. It can be an intense but also intensely rewarding experience. How do we know? Not just because we’ve delivered it many times but because we’ve been challenged by it ourselves when we have taken part as participants.
Based on the principles of anti-oppression, it aims to make visible many of the often invisible, structural imbalances of power and privilege in society and to confront our own biases and prejudices – even those of us who strive hard to avoid exercising such bias in our selves and our own lives and relationships.
And it shows that, while we may strive hard to avoid exercising prejudice, some of us are privileged by societal norms and structures, no matter whether we are committed to fighting privilege. Prejudice is not, as one writer has said, only ‘individual acts of meanness’ but something much more all-pervasive.
Having these issues laid bare is, we think, essential to activist communities and groups who genuinely want to make their work and their movements inclusive and diverse, and to ensure that everyone has access and everyone has a voice.
And for Otesha, as an environmental education charity, we see it as essential to addressing environmental injustice whereby the ravages of environmental destruction hit the poorest and marginalised the hardest. Ensuring that all voices, perspectives and needs are heard and respected is crucial to environmental justice, and anti-oppression work can do much to work towards this. Whether your work has an environmental, social, or economic focus (though at Otesha we don’t think they can be separated!), these questions are crucial to successful, effective activism.
So this Saturday participants in our workshop will engage in personal reflection, get training in how to improve individual practices and conclude with practical action planning. This introductory workshop is meant to give participants the tools to embark on an ongoing process of change, and begin to build a more just society and stronger environmental and social movements. We hope you find it stimulating, thought-provoking and that you can make it integral to your campaigns.
If you’re interested in learning more about anti-oppression work and thinking, here are some really thought-provoking resources: