Resources Library

Anti-colonialism: Actively working against colonialism.

Carework: Labor that centers care and fierce compassion for one another.

Critically Queer: I define critically queering as redefining the ways in which we exist and love through an active engagement with time, place, space, and representation, continuously working towards more just and accountable relationships with ourselves and others. This working definition encompasses various abolitionist, antistate, queer theorists and activists before me.

Community Accountability: Community accountability strategies aim at preventing, intervening in, responding to, and healing from violence through strengthening relationships and communities, emphasizing mutual responsibility for addressing the conditions that allow violence to take place, and hold people accountable for violence and harm. This Includes a wide range of creative strategies for addressing violence as part of organizing efforts in communities when you can’t or don’t want to access state systems for safety. (The Audre Lorde Project, National gathering on transformative and community accountability, 9/2010)

Emergent Strategies: A spectrum of recognizing the complexities of the world, functions, systems around us, and how they can intricately be shifted and re-imagined within our own lives. (adrienne maree brown 2017) 

The Empire:...the organized catastrophe in which we live today. It is not really an ‘it’ but a tangle of habits, tendencies, and apparatuses that sustain exploitation and control. We argue that it entrenches and accumulates sadness: it crushes and coops forces of transformation and detaches people from their own powers and capacities. It keeps us passive, stuck in forms of life in which everything is done to us or for us. This takes place through overt violence and repression, the entrenchment of hierarchical divisions like heteropatriarchy and racism, by inducing dependence on institutions and markets and by effective control and subjection. (Montgomery, berman 2017: 280-281)

Emotional Abuse: While there is no set standard definition for emotional abuse within the context of intimate relationships, it can be understood as the ‘use of verbal and nonverbal communication with the intent to harm another person mentally or emotionally, and/ or to exert control over another person.’ These abusive actions can span a wide range of behaviors including threats, coercive control, verbal aggression, and exploitation. (Guadalupe-Diaz 2019, 69)

Joyful Militancy: A Process of continual questioning in the ways we interact with worlds, a disruption of the binary between optimistic and pessimistic, along with uses affinities to strengthen emergent relationships (Bergman, Montgomery 2017).

2SLGBTQIA*: Two-Spirited, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, Intersex, Asexual

Magic: Magic, defined, in some ways, the unexplainable happenings around us that can evoke feelings of wonder.

Resilience: adrienne maree brown defines resilience as “The ability to become strong, healthy or successful again after something bad happens. the ability of something to return to its original shape after it has been pulled, stretched, bent, etc.  an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change….’Resilience: (v) the way the water knows just how to flow, not force itself around a river rock; and surely I can stretch myself in the shape my own path is asking of me.’-Corina Fadel”(2017, 123)

Self-Accountability: The process of taking accountability for your own actions or harm.

Structural Settler Colonialism: How settler colonists’ ideologies have built the current governmental and institutional structures that were made for continuing the war upon Indigenous peoples.

Spells: The intentional actions to cultivate and build magic.

Transformative Justice: Transformative Justice (TJ) is a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm and abuse-Mia Mingus 2019