Saturday School
A creative learning lab to embody, imagine and design for border abolition.
In our lifetime, conflict and climate change will continue, as will the necessity of migration.
Yet, faced with this ongoing reality, Governments spend billions in an industry of militarisation, surveillance and bordering in the name of ‘national security’, rather than invest in the prevention of conflict and war, building of community health and wellbeing, and adaptation in the face of climate change. Migration may be framed as a ‘threat’ by a hostile media and political landscape, but migration is also a space where our struggles and solidarities meet.
Saturday School is a 3-year creative learning lab for organisers to embody, imagine and design for border abolition. Through online and in-person gatherings, migrant organisers will be supported to initiate / develop a practical experiment that supports their communities to move towards border abolition. This includes all the ways we are organising for our collective safety, wellbeing and transformation.
Saturday School is a response to barriers migrant organisers often face: a mode of urgent reactivity, resistance and burnout, with little capacity or resource to imagine and organise beyond our current legal and political frameworks.
This is a recording of a conversation between writers and organisers who use speculative, sci-fi and creative writing practices as a strategy for social movement building.
With Gracie Mae Bradley, Hanna Thomas Uose, Phil Crockett Thomas, Season Butler, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, chaired by Joon-Lynn Goh.
Recorded Tues 6 Feb 2024.
‘What we call border abolition is concerned with expanding the freedom to move and to stay. This does not mean advocating for free movement in the world as it is currently configured but rather the transformation of the conditions to which borders are a response.’
- Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha
‘Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all the ways we can.’
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Are we practising what we want to become?
How are we imagining ourselves into the future?
What are we designing to replace borders?
- Saturday School 2023
See our Saturday School Resource Page
Resources
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Resources 〰️