Add these to your bedtime reading ! We’ve always tried to be transparent about our learning here at Rhizome, but Viv McWaters has far outshone us with her fantastic post Tasting an amygdala hijack. A cautionary tale of when the lizard brain asserts its presence. You only need to look at the comments to know […]
Here at Rhizome we talk a lot about activism, though we like to think we have quite a broad view of what that actually means . We see it as both the more obviously political ‘campaigning’ work and the building of alternatives, building community. What’s one without the other, right? Not for everyone. This week […]
I understand the merits of Facebook as a campaigning tool. By nature I tend to be averse to anything that’s a)mainstream corporate and b)so fashionable, but I’ve taken the time to listen to those that use it and understood what they see in it as an information and organising tool. More to the point I’ve […]
The census is creating a difficult tension for activists. Many folk are reluctant to fill it in knowing that the data is being processed by US arms company Lockheed Martin (whose fingers are in all kinds of other undesirable pies such as providing interrogators for Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay, data processing for the […]
I’ve had leadership on the mind this week, mainly due to spending some time writing a proposal for some work developing a youth leadership programme for young people involved in the Woodcraft Folk. For some leadership is a dirty word. It’s too closely related to hierarchy. Indeed there’s a moment on many direct actions when […]
I’m not much of a newspaper reader, but I did pick up the Work section of last Saturday’s Guardian, which had been left on the seat of my train home from Gathering Momentum. The front page advertised a guide called The secret to public speaking. Once you cut past the decision to hang the whole […]
Brighton Uncut put on a twitter direct action ‘training trail’ on Sunday. I was very sceptical, but finally got round to looking at it today and enjoyed my meander through their material. I’d be interested in your views. What do you think? Where does this stand on the waste of time => better than nothing […]
One part of what we do here at Rhizome is to work with activists to explore what it means (for them) to take nonviolent action for change. We’re also practitioners of nonviolence in our own activism. After you’ve been around a while it’s easy to get complacent and to think you’ve heard all the arguments […]
Kate Whittle over at Co-operantics has produced 5 cartoon booklets for Co-operativesUK in a series called From conflict to co-operation. They’re aimed at community co-ops but look useful for any community initiative or enterprise. The tone, length and content all seem great from a first glance. Take a look: Booklet 1: Conflict – where it […]
Finally we’ve started the process of uploading our resources to our new resources page. Help yourself. Feedback always welcome. And if there’s anything missing that you’d like to see up there, get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.
