Maria Luiza Neves

scholars have suggested engagement in activism is one possible response to coping with oppression

But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.

Participants recalled being threa -tened and criticized, and feeling hopeless, fearful, shameful, guilty, disap -pointed, frustrated, angry, and exhausted. Nonetheless, participants still revered their experiences with grassroots activism positively

Similarly, people who are being selectively agentic often have a kind of faulty sensory appreciation. Perhaps relationships feel hard for you, they take willpower, so it’s tempting to believe that you’re Actually Trying, that you’ve brought the full weight of your genius to bear on the problem. You might even take some pride in the struggle. Like... See more

In some ways, I feel like it connects with activism because when we're in these spaces we can almost radically imagine what the future could look like. Like, “Oh, the future could be a situation where I'm in a garden and I'm doing crafts and I'm learning skills and sharing skills with the community.”

activism is not just a problem-focused strategy, but is “possibility focused

If news becomes so personalised that two citizens no longer share a common set of facts, how can they have a meaningful discourse about the world they share together?

Our democracies don’t rely on unanimity but on a basic shared reality. Without such a baseline, public debate becomes a collision between incompatible realities rather than competing... See more

walking around with stickers in one’s pocket and having something that is a direct response to these visual traces of reactionary, fascist viewpoints is an individually empowering thing