September
land, shelter, and community: exploring shared resources
edit 9/27: folks who are interested in joining us please call 612-217-1862 or email [email protected]
on some days that we meet we will be visiting communities in the twin cities. we would love for you to join us, just contact us to find out where we are at!
the hope for this workshop is to bring together people who are interested in exploring ideas and new visions of sharing housing and this earth that we live on together.
the idea would be to specifically look at/analyze the current situation of housing/shelter in the twin cities urban area and begin to identify different visions of alternatives to the “housing market” and the strengths and weaknesses of those alternatives (what they do or don’t address). what are the different possible ways to organize housing? what kinds of people are drawn to each model and for what reasons? whose visions are left out?
current homeowner? don't leave yourself out, we need you!
this discussion/analysis group will meet every other week and hopefully lead towards individuals or the entire group being interested in taking or continuing concrete projects around the issues we discuss. we will meet at a relatively new (3 years old) collectively-owned home in the east phillips neighborhood of south minneapolis that is in the process of defining what their coherent vision for the future will be (andrew lives in this collective). this group will be supportive of kids and childcare will be worked out among the group. if anyone has transportation or other needs please contact the facilitator and we will try to work something out using the resources of the people who attend.
organizations and models we could look at, draw from, and/or visit:
Location
House Dance Nation
Back by popular demand, I will be providing a few of the most popular House Dance steps for all levels of students especially beginning-intermediate level students. This is not a typical class where I will be teaching house dance routine. We will simply work on movements, as a workshop style and I will give time for each of you to practice and guide each student through the newly-learned step.
*House Dance Nation is a sharing space. The main purpose of House music and dance is to unite all people and make every feel comfortable to let loose and get down in an environment where all feel comfortable. We do not base our movements on judgement, as we move towards freedom.
House Dance is a style of club dancing that was created in the mid-70s after the death of disco. "House Music is Disco's Revenge" according to Frankie Knuckles, a founding creator of House Music. It is a style unique to the underground scenes of cities around the world.
The styles and movement are rarely seen in many parts of the mid-west these days, however anyone that may have had the privilege of visiting nightclubs or some of the daytime House events ~or Rituals ~ in larger cities such as New York's Coney Island Dance Party and Chicago's Smart Bar might ask themselves "what is this funky movement everyone's doing, and why haven't I seen THAT in my city?!?!" Well, now's your chance to get acquainted with what you've been missing out on... and no worries, you really haven't been missing out... While you sitting back being a wallflower, your soul has been dancing. NOW is the time to learn some new movements. No longer will your Wallflowerness exist... ~ It's Time to get down.
Description of House Dance:
The movement is comparable to break dancing, hip-hop or even ancient styles such as afro-carribean dance, yet the movement involves a lot of foot work. We will explore some movements such as, or similar to the loose legs, voguing, and the Charleston.
Location
Music as Cultural Resistance
This course is about learning to see music as more than something to just be passively consumed. Instead we will explore how music can be used as a tool of resistance so that our music can be as radical as our politics. The class will read and discuss some works of theory on music and cultural resistance, and we will also explore as a group ways to actually engage music as a resistant practice.
Prerequisites for the class are an interest in and willingness to participate in music performance, but note that this does not mean that you must be a trained musician in the traditional sense at all. I welcome any participants who are excited in music performance, even if they have not yet found a vehicle for their creative impulse.
Location
Before Occupy: Horizontalism and Social Movements in Argentina
In this class we'll study the experiences of egalitarian social movements in Argentina. After December 2001, Buenos Aires became well known among activists around the world for its experiments in radical democracy, as worker-run factories, unemployed workers' movements, and neighborhood assemblies inspired far-flung radical imaginations. As a class, we'll learn more about how these movements work, what their successes and failures have been, and how they negotiate class, gender, and nationality.
Depending on participants' interests, we'll read about the movements, learn about the 2001 collapse in Argentina, think about the context in Argentina that supported these movements (and our own context in the US), Skype with Argentine activists, and/or design solidarity projects with our compañeros and compañeras down south. This is popular education, so exactly what we learn and how is up to all of us!
Popular Education in Movement History, Theory, and Practice
This EXCO class will be a weekly seminar on popular education. We’ll engage with the history of popular education in the Twin Cities and globally, learning how it has been embedded in radical movements as well as discussing the critiques of, and challenges with, pop ed.
Participants will take turns leading discussions of readings, films, audioclips, curriculum, with an intentional focus of developing both ourselves and a usable curriculum or database of resources for a popular education center at the Minnehaha Free Space.
We will invite outside folks experienced in popular education and militant research to come lead some seminars, as well as give whoever wants to a chance to do so. We will keep track of readings and other resources so that they are accessible in the future.
Here's an example of one way to visualize a popular education approach -- as a 'spiral':
Location
Anarchist Writers Bloc - Minneapolis Chapter
This workshop is intended for anarchist* writers of literature, theatre, screenplays, poetry, etc. who would like to meet with other anarchist writers for discussion, collaboration, mutual critique, situation creating (such as distribution/readings/performances of our work), and shared reading in the hopes of creating the stories of a resistance to hegemonic society.
If you promote anarchist theory and action through your writing of literature, poetry, theatre, screenwriting, etc. then let us assemble and collaborate in our dream for a world free of oppressive order.
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*Here, haphazardly defined as the advocacy of abolishing all forms of domination and false authority. This includes the government, capitalism, religion, racism, sexism, private property, ecocide, domestication, colonialism, imperialism, ageism, etc.
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We are meeting Saturday, Nov 3 at 1:30pm at MayDay Cafe. This week we are discussing Bruno Masse's "Necropolis: Book I of the Malice Cycle" and discussion writings for a forthcoming anthology.
Location
Mead-Making
In this course we will explore the basics of fermenting honey to make mead. The first class we will explain the process of both wild and cultured yeast fermentation and begin by mixing our honey and water and introducing a cultured yeast to begin the fermentation. The second class will meet one week later to transfer the mead to a carboy or fermentation vessel. About one to two months after this, we will meet to bottle and everyone will go home with a bottle or two of some delicious mead. During these activities we will discuss the art of fermentation through personal and "historical" accounts of mead-making. Other discussions may include the ethics of beekeeping, yeast strains, the role of alcohol in dominate society versus the role in a small-scale gift-giving society, the differences between commercial and home-brewing methods and their effects on individual's health and the health of the environment (are they mutually exclusive?).
The class size is restricted due to the size of our brew (~5 gallons) and the size of the kitchen we'll use. Only 15 will be permitted to register (with the assumption that, likely, a few persons won't show).
Class times: Til late October, participants will be emailed with class times.
Location
Learn to Ride a Bike for Adults - Cycles for Change
This class is geared toward helping adults (12 years and over) who have never ridden before,or who haven’t ridden in a long time, become confident and competent cyclists. We will start with basic skills like balance, pedaling, and braking, and work individually with participants to move to more advanced skills like biking in a straight line, slow speed control, turning, and shifting.
*Please bring a bicycle and helmet with you to class. If you aren't able to do this, please call or email one of us to make sure we have enough extra bikes! We want to make sure everyone is able to participate.*
In partnership with Cycles for Change.
Location
Community-Based Research
What is research, and who does it? In this class, we'll start with the idea that everyone has questions, problems, and ideas that deserve exploring.
Each student will pick a topic that they'd like to learn more about. It can be a historical era you'd like to write about in a story, an community issue you'd like to organize around, a style of dancing that you've loved since childhood -- anything at all that you are passionate about.
As a class, we'll explore some of the following topics:
- Crafting a research question
- Collecting information from diverse sources, such as community archives, oral histories, academic research, photo/video/audio/other media, and others, with a special focus on library resources
- Using wikispaces, blogs, and other social media to publish and communicate research
- Choosing and utilizing appropriate forms of presentation, including writing, radio/podcast, and video/visual.
- Other topics the class decides upon!
Each session will begin with a discussion about research methods. The second half will be free research time for students to pursue their personal projects while drawing upon the insights and collaboration of the group.
Class will meet for eight consecutive Saturdays. The first several classes will be at the Rondo Community Outreach Library, but I hope to also have us explore the Minnesota Historical Society, the Central branch, and other community research spaces in the Twin Cities. Nothing is required other than your curiosity & willingness to learn in a collaborative environment!
Location
Intro to Social Preliminology:
The introduction to social preliminology class is intended to exist as a single medium that works to develop the context of social preliminology. Human civilization has perpetually been confronted with two extreme outcomes which can be broken down into the following primary categories: rise and downfall. The class will be tasked with developing a universal formula that can explain and depict this cycle using the human diversification factor. Further defined, the human diversification factor represents the unique attributes that distinguish communities, societies, nations, and civilizations from each other; both past and present. A comprehensive understanding of social preliminology is achieved by bracing ourselves with universal human behaviors and their impacts on a respective society’s environment in addition to its greater civilization at large.
The downfall of the Roman, British, and the Ottoman Empires collapsed for various reasons that are hardly uniform when observing the actual technicalities. Nonetheless, if we take a brief journey into history, we will observe that the Roman Empire collapsed as a result of a split between east and west, the British Empire fell due to its weakened position after the Second World War, and the final blow to the “sick man of Europe” (the Ottoman Empire) was delivered in the form of the First World War. In an effort to eliminate the abstractness that surrounds this subject matter, the prevalence of the societal infrastructure holds itself as an invaluable attribute that supports/sustains any human civilization. When the infrastructural variable is weakened and destabilized, adverse implications are felt in the political, economic, and social arenas of the nation-state, empire, or sovereign entity in question. As an example, the cost of World War Two economically devastated Great Britain while the infrastructural backwater of the Ottoman Empire leads to the creation of its derogatory nickname (the sick man of Europe).
