Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 166: The Pleasure in Liberation 鈥� with adrienne maree brown
Speakers: Paige Smith, Am Johal, adrienne maree brown
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Paige Smith 0:00
Hello listeners! I鈥檓 Paige Smith with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Welcome back to our regular programming of Below the Radar! We hope you enjoyed our Voices of the Street mini-series in partnership with Megaphone Magazine over the last six weeks. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by author and organizer adrienne maree brown. adrienne is the recipient of the 2022 Jack P. Blaney Award for Dialogue from 丁香园AV Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, and sat down with Below the Radar during her visit to campus. adrienne and Am discuss community organization, solidarity, and the medicine of imagination in storytelling. I hope you enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:51
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Really delighted that you could join us again. This week we have a very special guest, adrienne maree brown is with us. Welcome, adrienne.
adrienne maree brown 1:02
Thank you for having me.
Am Johal 1:05
Yeah, really great to be able to speak with you. You're going to be later this afternoon, getting the Jack P. Blaney award here at 丁香园AV鈥攁nd I'll ask you a bit about that later, but maybe鈥擨 usually start with the question for our audience who might not be familiar with your work if you could introduce yourself a little bit.
adrienne maree brown 1:21
So my name is adrienne maree brown, I am a writer who lives in Durham, North Carolina, in the US. And I have been a part of movement, social justice movement, and movement transformation for the past 25 years. So a lot of the writing that I do, is particularly interested in telling the story of those who change the world, and uplifting the lessons that I've learned from trying to hold that work. And a lot of that is the dialogue works, I think that's where the award is coming from, for me. I'm also a podcaster, and an artist, and a proud aunty.
Am Johal 1:59
adrienne, I'm wondering, I'm always interested in people's stories about how they got involved in activism in the first place. And there's so many ways that people enter into the world of community organizing, politics, social change, and all of that, and wondering if you can share, you know, how you first got involved or the things that affected you in a way that were called into this work?
adrienne maree brown 2:23
Very early in my life, I already had a sense of questioning and critical thinking, and I was born to an interracial relationship of people who had fallen in love in the Deep South. And, so, I think my parents were always the kind of people who were like, "I know that's what people say we're supposed to do, but what actually feels right to our hearts, what feels right to our spirits?" So that was in me early, and one of the major politicizing events for me... I went to Columbia University, and while I was there, I got involved in student organizing, which was awesome, but I think a lot of people do student organizing, and then they go on to other things. And for me, while I was there, Amadou Diallo was murdered by the police, he was shot 41 times, he was unarmed. And something about that clicked in my spirit, you know, I was like that, that feels so wrong to me, that that's possible and that there's no consequence for it. And then the attacks of 9/11 happened, and right鈥攊t's basically right after I, you know, graduated and... or didn't quite graduate, but I stopped going to school and was working, and 9/11 happened, and then I saw how quickly my country galvanized to go to war. And I think those two events really solidified for me that we were living inside of these systems of oppression. And that if we didn't resist them, and envision something else, then we would all die. Like, it just felt very clear. To me, it's like, "Oh, it鈥檚 like, if we keep fighting and fighting and dividing and dividing, there's only one path that that leads to, which is the destruction of the planet, and that's the only place where we can be, so I really committed that I would be contributing to movements, in some way for my whole life. And I feel now you know, like, for years, it was as a facilitator, when that was my primary work. And I love... I love that work. I love holding a group and seeing all the different ways that they are and finding some common ground and a path forward. But yeah, that's what got me started and there was a clear way to apply my gifts in that in a way that could impact the world.
Am Johal 4:32
adrienne, I know that you spent some time working at the Ruckus Society, wondering if you can talk a little bit about your time there and the kinds of organizing that you're doing.
adrienne maree brown 4:40
Oh, yeah, that was a really exciting time of my life. I was really honoured that they hired me actually, because I just thought, 鈥淭hese are all the coolest people that I've ever met. And, you know, the Ruckus Society's mission is to increase the skillset that movement can bring to nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience, and I initially linked up with Ruckus, because they needed some organizational development support. They'd hit some roadblocks in terms of being able to build their network, and they asked me to come in and help. And as I came in, and kept coming in and visiting with them, I got really moved by their mission and moved by what they were up to. And when they invited me to come be their director, I was like, "Cool, let's do this." And even though I wasn't like the "action hero" person, I was the facilitator person. But I was able to facilitate in such a way that the founding leadership, which had been very white and very male, was able to transition to a leadership that was much more, you know, women of colour-led, trans people, queer people-led. And I'm really proud of the work that we did there. And a lot of really cool formations have come out of that, including the Blackout Collective, which has done a lot of the training on nonviolent civil disobedience, for the Black Lives Matter movement around the country, and for just Black uprisings around the world. So, I'm really honoured, I got to be there for five years, we collectivized, about halfway through my time there. So I was in a shared directorship role, I never think anyone should be an individual director, again, you know鈥攜ou're just鈥攍ike, it's not actually healthy, safe, or wise, if you can avoid it. Yeah, but that was, that was my work there.
Am Johal 6:20
In your work, you would have come across so many different types of community organizing, going around the States and elsewhere, and having done some community organizing myself, you know, one of the things about is it's one of the last free liberal arts educations left in the world, in a sense. You have to know a little bit about urban planning, it's great to know arts and literature, you have to read history, a bunch of things. And I'm wondering, there's a kind of intoxication with it as well, but also, the flip side of that is a kind of burnout, that happens as well, that's endemic to social movements. And I'm wondering, as you were doing that work, the way it can change who you are because of the intensity of the work, the seriousness of the work, but also the kind of鈥�
adrienne maree brown 7:12
Yeah, I mean, I think part of what happens, at least when I was very young, coming into the work, I had a really strong sense that what I did really mattered, and I had to take it very seriously, I had to know everything about every conflict, and I had to have a position on all things that were happening in the world. And it took a few years, for me to understand that I was thinking... I was still thinking inside of the capitalist training I had, you know, been socialized into, right? Like, I have to constantly be able to grow and learn everything and lead everything and come up against the force of oppression with an equal force, and as an individual, and I took a long time for me to understand that we're fighting systems. We're not fighting people, we're fighting systems. And so when you're fighting systems, especially systems you're embedded in, you cannot, as an individual, take that on and expect to have a huge impact. It has to be a community effort, and you have to be in communities that are willing to try other systems out. So that's part of why, you know, when I ended up in an executive position, one of the first moves I made and was interested in making was, "How do we share this power?" Because systemically, I don't want to perpetuate and exhaust myself trying to be a one-woman show or one-woman saviour. And I tell young organizers and activists that all the time, that it's like find a community where you feel that the load can be shared, of the work that you're doing, and find a community that is willing to actually be in practice of other systems, in addition to whatever it is you're fighting for, because I think it's... if you're in a hierarchical, top-down, oppressive, capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist system, and you say you're fighting against all those things, that's the quickest way to burn yourself out: the contradictions, right, will split you from yourself. I think if you get into a community where you're able to be in a collective, be in a space where decisions and resources and time and energy is all shared... And you know, you can't do everything, the goal is not a perfection of the alternative鈥搃t's experimentation. And Emergent Strategy was really born for me out of that idea that we have to be practicing the new world while we're in the shell of the old, not just talking about it and critiquing the shell. We have to actually be in a practice so that we grow the new musculature for a different kind of system.
Am Johal 9:41
And Emergent Strategy, so I did have a chance to read that, it's a wonderful book.
adrienne maree brown 9:45
Thank you.
Am Johal 9:46
Wondering if you can sort of speak to, you know, what made you think about writing a book about this topic in particular. Of course, being involved in community organizing, so many different movements, oftentimes, there isn't even time to think or talk about broader strategy in a lot of ways, it's fighting the day in and day out. But it's so important to be thinking about the endgame and ways of working and all of those kinds of things, but wondering if you could sort of speak about where the project came from.
adrienne maree brown 10:15
There's kind of a couple of streams. So one is, early in my life, I got to read the work of Octavia E. Butler. And if you ever see me, like, the whole wall behind me is dedicated to her work, I'm always thinking of her. And actually, as part of the Blaney award, I鈥檓 getting to pull together a group of the Octavia E. Butler scholars to have a gathering together and do some reflection on the future from here. But I was reading her work and Octavia E. Butler's work was always brilliant to me, because she was looking at the problems of the day and saying, "What if it was different? What would it take to be different? What would leadership have to look like to be different?" So, I was always reading her work and inspired by that. And then I came across the ideas of emergence and complex sciences. And what astounded me was this idea that actually, the small fractal and interdependent nature of all things, is actually the defining truth of our... our super system. Like the whole Earth and all that lives on it, and the way the universe interacts. And that the current situation we're in politically, is actually the anomaly, right? Humans, in some way, are the anomaly, we are the ones who are not satisfied with the scale of our communities and the scale of our lives, and are constantly trying to do something bigger and further outsized of that. So I started getting obsessed and looking at this. And then I was also being kind of nourished by what I was learning as a facilitator about, what it looked like to have people who had been socialized to compete against each other, come into a space and find ways to work in deep collaboration. So all of that was swirling around my head in around 2010, 2012鈥揑 was thinking about it, I went on a sabbatical in 2012. And I was watching ants, crawl up a wall and gather food, and watching birds flock. And I just, it clicked for me that I was like we are... we are nature. But we are forgetting to act as nature, we are forgetting to act as community, as communal animals, as communal species. And so it flowed from there. And the book is a mixture of those things, like, the best I knew at the time around how to be with each other, and what I think to be the fundamental elements of our species, and how we are with each other, principles for how to be with each other. And a lot of it is, like, really start to pay attention to the natural world around you as a teacher, in addition to anything else, and including yourself as a part of the natural world. And the biggest lesson of it is, how do we get in a relationship with change, that actually allows us to grow and to move intentionally towards a better way of being, rather than feeling pummeled by change, or as Octavia called it being "victims of change"? How do we partner with change? She has this quote, "All that you touch, you change, and all that you change changes you, the only lasting truth is change." And as an organizer, I always found that people were like, "Yeah, we want to change everybody!" But very rarely focused on we will also be changed鈥搃n everything that we touch and try to change, it will change us too. And I was like, okay, how do we build community around that idea? That there's no benevolent missionary who comes and just changes one way? It's always a mutual experience. And, you know, right now, we've got huge climate catastrophes. We've got a global pandemic. There's tons of economic crisis happening around the world. There's tons of鈥� you know, Russia's attacking Ukraine. I mean, there's like all these major changes happening. And part of what I'm interested in is how do we harness the energy of change, to move towards justice?
Am Johal 14:07
Those are wonderful words, and how you talk about Octavia Butler's work as well is just really profound and beautiful in terms of the resonances it still has. I know that you worked together with Walidah Imarisha on Octavia's Brood. I met Walidah Imarisha once for about one minute because my friend Matt was working on a book in Portland and he was meeting with her. And so I said hello to her and I took a photo but we haven't met in a proper way. So I know about the work. I heard about it from her, but wondering if you could speak about that project?
adrienne maree brown 14:40
Yeah, so Walidah Imarisha and I connected in 2010. And we were both, you know, thinking about Octavia Butler, thinking about science fiction as a place for ideating. And understanding the future. And she had come up with this terminology for it called visionary fiction. Like, how do we write stories that, inside the story, flip the constructs that we take to be normal? And we'd actually not met in person, when we decided to do an anthology together, we had only emailed each other back and forth, and been like, "I see what you're up to, I think it's really cool." You know, like, "Let's do this." So we ended up putting together this collection called Octavia's Brood, science fiction from social justice movements. And it's all these short stories from people who are on the frontlines of creating change in the world. And we were interested in that, because it's like, we feel all organizing is science fictional behavior, you're actually trying to shape the future, and trying to predict and understand what the possibilities of the future are. And we got very, very exciting stories back from people, visionary work that touched on climate, and immigration, and boundaries, and mental wellbeing, and all of it. And so we put that out in 2015, and then we toured it for about a year doing all these visionary fiction writing workshops. And it was really, you know, we also had this workshop on direct action and science fiction, where we would look at science-fictional classics, you know, because people don't even know that they love science fiction, but it's like, you watch Star Wars, you're in the Marvel Universe, you... you actually love all this stuff. So we would take these classic works that people loved. And we would say, "Who is the person in this who's experiencing oppression? And what kind of organizing would it take for that to change?" And it was always exciting, you know, people would be in The Lord of the Rings, like, "Okay, the orcs, like how do we organize the orcs?" You know, like, what does it look like? But we did all this touring with that to help people learn that what we're fundamentally trying to do is write a new story together. And one of the things we practice is collaborative science fictional writing. So, ideating the setting, and the story, and the politics, and the assumptions and even sometimes the characters, ideating all of that together, and then taking turns writing and sharing those stories with each other. And that process can bring medicine to communities, the medicine of imagination, the medicine of something else being possible.
Am Johal 17:10
Fascinating, fascinating project. Now, more recently, a few years ago, I think it was 2019, you had a book come out called Pleasure Activism, wondering if you can talk a little bit about that project.
adrienne maree brown 17:22
Oh, yeah, Pleasure Activism was a blast to write and a blast to work on. As I was working on Emergent Strategy, something that kept coming back to me was this essay from Audre Lorde called The Uses of The Erotic as Power. And in it, she talks about the erotic force of aliveness that is in each of us, and how all these different things can awaken it from, like, making love to your partner, to writing a poem, to painting a fence to something else, that it's like, there's something about that erotic aliveness being fully awakened and fully present, that makes it impossible to settle for self-negation. And I found that as a radical organizing and liberation tool, it made the most sense to me that those times when I felt the most alive had often been in movement spaces for me. And that aliveness, that sense that I can be my whole self, and this community is interested in my whole self, my full aliveness, as opposed to what oppression does, which is say, you can come here as long as you're willing to be, you know, in the US three-fifths of a person if you're a black person, or as long as you're willing to earn 70 cents on the dollar, if you're a woman, or as long as you're willing to, you know, not have a vote or whatever else, you know, some way that you subjugate yourself. Instead, this idea of like, what does it look like to claim my whole self and have that be not just accepted, but celebrated? And so I kept reading and listening, there's an audio recording of her reading this essay, which I highly recommend you go listen to, and immersing myself in it and then thinking about how that related to social justice. And in social justice, so often we are working ourselves to the bone, burning ourselves out, exhausted, and a lot of the work is around a "No," right? 鈥淧lease stop gentrifying our community please stop shooting us, we stopped locking us up, please stop deporting our community, please stop,鈥� you know, and there's so much "no" in it. But the question I was in is like, "What is the no making way for?" When the "No" should make way for the "Yes," for what we want and what we want to be, what we want to practice and experience. So, a lot of Pleasure Activism is about, how do we make justice and liberation, the most pleasurable experiences that we can have? Rather than, you know, these dregs of, you know, it's like, "I don't want to be there. I don't want to do this, this is awkward and uncomfortable." So there's a lot in the book about sex, and about drugs, also about fashion, laughter, and surviving cancer, you know, or dying from cancer, but still being able to find pleasure in that experience. What does it look like to experience pleasure as you're aging? So, I wanted to explore it, take a snapshot of what the options were. I wrote a lot of it, in the initial waves of the #MeToo movement. So a lot of the sexual content is really like, how do we reclaim our erotic aliveness and our sexual potential from the realm of patriarchy? What does it look like to build a culture of sensual consent? What does it look like to shift the realm of fantasy so that we actually are fantasizing about and longing for ourselves, rather than this, you know, skinny, white norm, that we're given as the most desirable thing? So that's what Pleasure Activism is about. I really, I've been blown away by the response to it, how much people need it. And at a very basic level, how much people need to be told that there's nothing wrong with them, there's nothing to fix, and that they deserve to feel good. And I think that's one of the longest legacies of being the victim of oppression, is that you're made to feel that you don't deserve to feel good, that that's the realm of the privileged鈥揳nd that's a lie. You know, every single body was created by the same divine mechanisms, and every single life deserves to have that same miraculous potential. So, it's a sacred book to me.
Am Johal 21:23
It's, it seems like, there's so much repressed inside of social movements, that what you're talking about, maybe taps into that, and opens up this space that people are maybe are thinking about, and not articulating themselves where there isn't space within movements for.
adrienne maree brown 21:39
And one of the things that I have often said is like movements are always a microcosm of the society that they're a part of. So if you're living inside of a repressive regime or repressive society, then the movement will also have a repressive content unless it intentionally tries to shift that. And I think, part of what I'm saying with all of my texts, is we need to be intentionally creating a different culture inside of movement that reflects the world we want, rather than the one that we were socialized by.
Am Johal 22:08
I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit when I think about your work in the way that you call for the need for a kind of affirmative approach in terms of movements, saying what they want, rather than simply being opposed to things, although that's often the context in which social movements emerge and organize around, but there's an affirmative space. And then also, when I think about your work as well, there's a throughline for me, which has to do with how do we maintain solidarity in the context of difference, and trying to articulate a space where this can be worked through in a generous and gentle way. And I'm wondering if you can sort of speak to what solidarity means to you, and how it can be held inside of social movements. There are so many important things that we're trying to get through鈥損eople have different starting points in movements and issues of class and other aspects. And I'm wondering how you think these things through today.
adrienne maree brown 23:08
I mean, I think that solidarity, one of the most important parts of it is that it's... it's the antithesis of charity, the antithesis of doing something for someone else that doesn't also impact or benefit you. To me, there's, you know, when I think of charity, and that sense of, "I will give to you in a way to assuage my guilt for creating oppressive conditions," you know, and I think a lot of people, even with really good intentions, at least begin their organizing work that way. "Let me help whoever the poor people are, these victims." Solidarity flips that on its head, and it's like, "Actually, any act that we take to liberate another, we're also liberating ourselves." We're also bringing ourselves back into the right relationship with our spirit, with our humanity, with justice, with what we're supposed to be here to do. And I get a lot of people who will be like, you know, "I want to join this movement or that movement." And I always say, go back to your own root system, like if you're trying to figure out what movement to be a part of, and where to throw your work in. And like, always go back to your own root system, and both be able to see the places where you are oppressed, and the places where you have privilege. And I really think that everyone has some elements of both, you know? It may not seem that way, it may take some support, and some help to figure it out. But go back to that root system. The place where you have privilege is one of the places where you can do the most work in your own lifetime. And that means, you know, for men, being able to work on patriarchy directly; for women, especially white women, being able to work on issues of racism, being able to work on issues of power, and not just emulating patriarchy, but actually being able to create a relationship to power that is just鈥揻or people who, you know, have been in this country a long time in the US as citizens, it's really thinking, "How can I be in relationship with those who are struggling to find home, those who are struggling to find safety?" I always, I think that that helps you always have a direct relationship, because then you know, it's not just the organizing you do, but also the choices you're making with your life, that puts you in a relationship of solidarity. And, you know, solidarity can look all kinds of ways. Sometimes it's literally just saying, "I'll take the lead from someone else who is living inside these circumstances." I stand with Palestine in a very strong way. And I've never been to Palestine, I don't have any Palestinian lineage, to my knowledge, but I take the leadership of people who are on the ground there who tell me what they're going through, what they're experiencing, and what the dynamics are, and how similar they are to the US in terms of that history, that legacy of colonization, in the name of freedom. I listen to that, and I take that guidance, you know, I'm like, "Okay, there's something unjust happening there. The Israeli state is up to some unjust things. What does that mean? How can I be in alignment with justice in that circumstance?" And again, then, where does dialogue... where does, what are the radical transformative conversations and experiences that can happen that can actually result in something different? Not just a peaceful coexistence while harm still happens over to the side, right, but an actual just coexistence? I think about that in the US, like, I live now in the south, but I live in a country where my own people have been killed, so many of them, killed by the police. So that issue directly impacts me, and how can I be both in solidarity with those who are experiencing that injustice? Well, one of the things I'm doing is building intentional relationships with those who are currently incarcerated, right? Their voices are often not heard, not taken seriously. They're dismissed as criminal in some way. But what I'm learning from being in solidarity with them is there's a lot of great teaching happening from these people who are like, "We've been persecuted, we've been misjudged, or we've been lied on. And we have found ways to build community with each other." And I want to be in solidarity with that, I always want to be in solidarity with those who are finding ways to return, I think to what our fundamental nature is, which is to be together in community. I think that's what we're鈥搕hat's how we're supposed to be even for, you know, a kind of curmudgeonly writer like myself. I can't survive without the community around me.
Am Johal 27:33
You know, you know, on the horizon, it's been going on for a long time鈥攊t's not like it just emerged. But the authoritarian populism wave, which we also see in Canada in the form of truckers' protests and that type of thing. But when you see the reemergence of Trump and others, the suturing of the Republican Party to the far right, and the mainstreaming of authoritarianism, essentially anti-democratic, and also, you know, a listless response, oftentimes from the Democratic Party itself, how do you maintain a sense of joy and the radical outside, to what's on the horizon, and what's playing out on the ground in terms of, you know, how should social movements and progressive people think through these things in a proper and serious way, and at the same time, sustain a kind of energy and joy around the work that we can imagine a world outside of these forces that are trying to force themselves onto the agenda?
adrienne maree brown 28:32
Mhm. I mean, I think one of the things that I'm always thinking about is how to make a just future more compelling. And this is one of the things that Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism really opened up for me. So I'm like, oh, like, if we're running around, and our message to people is always one of dour crisis, it's going to be hard to make an invitation to people who are being courted by the sort of sweet, sugary taste of capitalism, right? So I think about that often that like, our legitimate, authentic joy is actually one of the greatest weapons we have in the fight for a just future. Because what happens when you're living inside of that pleasure, and that joy, is that you have a compelling life that people are drawn towards, that people are curious about. I have been amazed how many more people asked me about justice since Pleasure Activism came out, than had done before, when I was very, very seriously talking about the climate, you know? And I'm able to still talk about the climate, but I'm able to talk about it from a perspective of what are the pleasures of Earth? What is the joy of being of this planet? You know, and the beauty that I could see in my imagination for what it would look like when we had a relationship with this planet that was not a destructive one. In the face of fascism, particularly, we have to remember that what we're offering to people is ultimately more powerful and more beautiful. And whenever I see that happening, that uprising, that, you know, I think of it as like that incredible backlash towards justice, I know that our work is successful. I know that our resistance has been successful. And that gives me joy, right? That I'm like, "Oh, wow, like, y'all are so challenged by the work that we're doing that you are trying to bend heaven and earth and contorting every aspect of your own lives and justice in order to stop us." And you only hurt yourself, you know? Meanwhile, we keep getting more free. And we keep getting more practice ground and we keep learning. And I'm really interested in the idea that we're constantly learning.
adrienne maree brown 30:36
I'll also say that I'm really interested in the idea that we don't actually know exactly what this just future is going to look like, because it needs to be multiple imaginations that feed it. Part of how we ended up in the circumstance we're in now is that totalitarian, authoritarian worldview, where one person, one idea is supposed to rule everyone else. But that's actually not how our species is wired. We are a biodiverse species in a biodiverse world. How many of us are in a room, there's that many experiences, there's that many worldviews. So it's like, part of what we're doing on the other side, on the pleasure side is saying, delight in the distinction of who you are, and bring that fully to bare in this community in this organizing in this work, the more difference that we're able to harness into a into a solidarity, the more powerful we will be. And I think history has shown that鈥攖hat some of the most incredible victories that we've had have come from really unlikely alliances. And I think that will continue to be the case. I think that's part of what we're looking at right now is, you know, how do we build an authentic solidarity between Black liberation struggles, which long for land; and Indigenous struggles, which long for sovereignty; and immigration struggles, which long for safety? Right? How do we, how do we鈥� that's not a resolved solidarity, right? You have to sit and think and work and practice that. And I'm really excited to be of the number practicing those things because capitalism and these sort of unjust systems, I think it's inevitable that they fall. They're top-heavy, you know? Top-heavy things topple. And so I think the question鈥攖here's a, there was a Detroit activist named General Baker. And one of the questions he posed to us years ago was, you know, everybody's always talking about "How do we get the people to show up?" And we need to be asking ourselves, what are we going to do when they get here? And I think about that often, of like, how are we practicing that new world so that when people arrive, we're like, "Hey, here's how to be in generative conflict. And here's how to feel your feelings in a responsible way that doesn't have negative impact on others. Here's how to form relationships of justice and liberation, here's how you can love each other. Here's how we're learning to process and make decisions together in a consensus way," like. Like, let's be in the practice of things that will actually help us survive. Because I also think about the fact that climate change at this point, pretty severe climate change is already unfolding, and more severe climate change is inevitable. And so we want to be ready. You know, I'm always thinking about like, are we ready? Because we need to be ready. Everything's gonna continue to become more chaotic. But chaos is an opportunity鈥攊f we're ready.
Am Johal 33:27
adrienne, is there anything you'd like to add?
adrienne maree brown 33:31
I feel very satisfied by this conversation actually. Thank you for being a great interviewer.
Am Johal 33:36
Wonderful to be in conversation with you and congratulations on the award. I'm going to be joining that this afternoon as well.
adrienne maree brown 33:45
Thank you.
Am Johal 33:46
And just, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
adrienne maree brown 33:50
I'm glad to be here, and thanks for having me.
[theme music]
Paige Smith 33:55
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by 丁香园AV鈥檚 Vancity Office of Community Engagement. This has been our conversation with adrienne maree brown.
Head to the show notes to view adrienne鈥檚 talk with 丁香园AV鈥檚 Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue titled 鈥淧ublic Reading and Dialogue on Octavia Butler and the Future鈥�. You can also find additional resources related to today鈥檚 topics in the shownotes as well. Thanks for listening, and tune in Tuesdays for more Below the Radar.