on agency & what it gives us
guerrilla gardening is a way that people can take back not only their present, but also their future – even as it seems under dire threat from an economic and social system apparently hellbent on human self-eradication.
Damien Gayle • ‘I Call It Botanarchy’: The Hackney Guerrilla Gardener Bringing Power to the People
‘I Call It Botanarchy’: The Hackney Guerrilla Gardener Bringing Power to the People
Damien Gayletheguardian.comGaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you.
Simon Sarris • The Most Precious Resource Is Agency
taste can be a practice—a result, even, of living authentically.
Haley Nahman • #176: Accounting for taste
How do we encourage those around us to be active dreamers without coming off as people with their heads in the clouds? The phrase “dream a little” can be so hard to even imagine as people who have been so conditioned to not push past the corners of their own imaginations.
studioananda.space • Dreaming Into Action With Annika Hansteen-Izora
Often, hope works best alongside tools for proactively tackling future challenges. If our work becomes a catalysing force for people to imagine things they would not have been able to imagine otherwise and act upon that imagination, then that’s powerful, and for me, this is a slow form of critical activism.
Anab Jain • Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics
Meanwhile, the majority of “normals” (to borrow a term from the sci-fi film Gattaca) are expected to take orders, complete tasks, stand in line, clock in and out . . . punctually, obediently, subserviently. No dancing in the halls, and certainly no daydreaming about a world put together differently.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
Worldbuilding, for me, was a form of expansive hope—a necessary imagination for being alive.
Morgan Harper Nichols • A Necessary Imagination
“That feeling of helplessness comes out of the fact that all our agency is being channeled through these media,” he said. “We have these events that are ponderously large, like climate change or gun control, and to view them only through the lens of what happened or the abstraction of what people are saying strips away the notion of our agency and... See more