(In eigener Sache)
A few things happened at once in late 2022. Emerald-mine guy bought Twitter, a publisher stopped maintaining a site I’d set up for a book, and the middle way between very short-form (social media) and genuinely long-form (books and stuff) seemed a bit more attractive as a space for thinking out loud, casually but with a bit more complexity than social media usually tolerates.
Bit rot is normal: platforms, sites, accounts come and go. So along with blog from the defunct book site (Why Social Movements Matter), I went back through the blog I’d been running for the MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism and sporadically afterwards, as well as pulling out a few things that had dropped off the Internet but that I liked enough to try and rescue from the gnawing criticism of the server-mice. Then I got a rush of blood to the head and tried to rescue Twitter threads, which is really time-consuming for a bunch of reasons (not least that I hadn’t been keeping a list at the time.)
Left to the Internet Archive are all sorts of event announcements, activist call-outs, rants, polemics and the other day-to-day movement things that don’t really make so much sense in isolation. Of course everything here is of its time and place too. As far as I can, I’ve put things in chronological order and dated them, but I don’t offer any guarantees.
Anyway, this particular collection (including all the posts before this one on the blog) is a bit of a settling of accounts with the previous decade or so, and hopefully a clearing of the decks for a bit more thinking out loud (but not as loudly as on social media or via a publisher).
EP Thompson once commented “We all of us make this kind of face at times, but we do not mistake a grimace for high theory.” Blogging though used to be a sort of middle way between writing a book and scribbling a comment – with a bit of making faces and a light sprinkling of theory, and hopefully not altogether fool.
Learning from each other's struggles 