When you talk to author and activist adrienne maree brown, you feel everything is going to be all right. You’re inspired by her hope, belief, and commitment just enough to muster your own. This must have to do with the way she sees possibility for change absolutely everywhere, which came about through her many roles. Brown is also a poet, social justice facilitator, science fiction scholar who is co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, and a doula.
It’s the first anniversary of her book, “emergent strategy”—inspired by Octavia Butler’s ideas of the human relationship to change. And after a year of back and forth scheduling, we were finally able to sit down and talk about what it means to see the world through an emergent strategy lens. She describes the concept as “the way complex plans for action and complex systems for being together arise out of relatively simple interactions.”
Applied to social justice work, it’s a way of being, a way of approaching facilitation and movement-building that helps us to allow action to organically happen. It is necessary groundwork, she says, to enable another important idea—put forth by her friend and mentor, the late Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs—that of transforming yourself to transform the world.
[For more on this story by Zenobia Jeffries, go to http://www.yesmagazine.org/pea...-be-alright-20180327]
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