Participant-observer quest.

This website has a dual purpose. It is about the activist experience and the activist community, our nature, the delights, dilemmas and dangers of being an activist. Articles and projects focused on understanding and uplifting our community.

It is ALSO my personal experience, and the experience that those who work with me choose to share.

I have grappled a fair amount with how these two things, the general and the particular, the personal and the political (or whatever) interact. I have come to the conclusion that it is not either or but a continuum.  A continuum is a thinking tool I find very very handy in doing this work, and I employ it here. I will do my best to keep sorted what is me and what are all of us. I definitely want to avoid assumptions, generalizations, appropriations and other uncool things so common to people who belong to dominant groups. But I also can’t subsume myself or pretend I don’t have my own experience, which is, after all, the experience I know most about. I just have to watch that I don’t accord it more validity or importance than that of others. 

In general, while i make hopefully good use of the continuum, I plan to stay as far away as possible from that generally poisonous thought trap, the comparison.