To Care is to Struggle: Support in Radical Movements

17 February 2013 @ 5pm

Minnehaha Free Space – 3747 Minnehaha Ave. Minneapolis, MN

A talk by Kevin Van Meter of Team Colors.

How do radical movements respond to personal crises, trauma, care as well as issues that flow through our everyday lives?  Beyond seeing politics as a simply a set of issues and positions, how do we begin to construct new relationships, activities and projects that address issues such as mental health, care, trauma and grief, sexual assault, and interpersonal violence?

This discussion seeks to address some of these questions in two ways: in the specific sense of developing harm intervention systems, creating communities of care, addressing sexual assault and organizing around issues of mental health; and in the general sense of creating movements that don’t see such projects as appendages but rather as a core element in reconstructing our lives, creating movements that self-reproduce themselves, and to forge projects that challenge the social reproduction of capital and the state-apparatus by constructing new forms of life and new social relations.

About the Event:

The event will consist of a short talk followed by a facilitated discussion based on a recent article by Team Colors Collective member Kevin Van Meter called “To Care is to Struggle” published in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.  Copies of Perspectives will be available at the event and can be obtained from AK Press here: http://www.akpress.org/perspectivesonanarchisttheorymagazine.html

About the Speaker:

Kevin Van Meter is a member of the Team Colors Collective and has just relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota to complete his doctorate in Geography. Van Meter, with Team Colors, co-edited the collection Uses of a Whirlwind (AK Press, 2010) and co-authored Winds from below (Team Colors / Eberhardt Press, 2010).  Van Meters’ collaborative and single-authored work has appeared in various radical publications.