Negotiating our Words: co-building a Glossary for Anti-Imperial Study invites cultural and community organizers, educators, information workers, and practitioners engaged in anti-imperial [1] efforts to gather and co-build a working glossary of terms as a tool for shared study [2]. Drawing on the facilitators’ interwoven pedagogical and publishing practices, this workshop holds capacity to rehearse the collective negotiation of defining and redefining the terms that ground our work. While this workshop will be limited in its english-language facilitation, participants are encouraged to share the many languages they may carry as part of the collective glossary-building process. We hope to extend the ways this workshop may be engaged and iterated on in the future toward a multiplicity of tongues and points of access. As the facilitators, our role is NOT expert, but co-learners with participants who feel a calling to organize within the container in which we still study together.

Co-Building a Glossary
So often, when political alignment is assumed, groups forego the process of clarifying shared definitions of common terms. While this bypassing often happens in periods of increased repression and urgency, it can water down the intentions and impacts of our shared work. This workshop emerges through the understanding that the negotiation process itself is a fractal of the larger whole: through discussions around our various entry-points into the language that grounds our work, we learn about the contexts that shape our collaborators’ lives and come to deeper understandings of our own. Drawing on lived experiences, hyper-local histories, embodied knowledge, personal relationships and textual references, the glossary we will co-build reaches toward practices of relational citation [4] and language justice [5]. Rather than cementing rigid definitions, our conversations aim to clarify the multiple contexts that inform our words and build capacity to hold their divergent meanings while energizing the intentions of our actions.

Together, we will collectively develop a set of key terms and working definitions that may aid in work within our respective contexts. Contributors will be invited to share their terms as part of a wider-reaching collective glossary in the weeks that follow, while the facilitators will support the process and invite contributions from our broader communities. With rigorous consent, communication, and crediting, the final wider-reaching collection will be published as a resource for shared study that can be used and iterated on by other groups.

This workshop is organized as part of “on the land … in the poem,” ungovernable study’s curriculum of conversations, gatherings, and practices initiated alongside the 59th Carnegie International and organized autonomously in dispersed locations by a myriad of groups and practitioners. To learn more about “on the land … in the poem,” please visit ungovernable.study; to learn more about ungovernable study’s other initiatives, please visit liberatorypractice.org.

Prompt for Participation
Participants are invited to bring a word that has been meaningful to their practice, alongside a related image, text, object, memory, or personal reference. [6] Terms may be informative to anti-imperial efforts as they manifest in contributors’ worlds, more broadly foundational to their practices, and/or terms they desire to deepen their understanding around in conversation with others. At the workshop, folks will be invited to be in conversation around the terms they bring and arrive at working definitions of those terms to share with the group. Together, participants will discuss, deepen, and redefine the terms gathered together, with the understanding that we may not arrive at resolution.

Workshop Agreements
Although we invite the divergences and complexities that will unfold through negotiating language, we feel that such an invitation must be supported by clearly articulated shared agreements. We offer what follows as points for our shared departure.

This workshop is for those who feel aligned with the following:

• We work toward rejecting imperialism, racial capitalism, settler-colonialism, racism, classism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, anti-blackness, xenophobia, and any other form of hoarded power, structural violence, and prejudice. 

• We understand that how each of us works toward rejecting said forms of hoarded power and structural violence may look different, especially from within the imperial core in the so-called united states. Within the various positions we are born into, we may inherit varied contradictions and do our best to navigate them with care and moral discernment. 

• While working toward rejecting said forms of hoarded power and structural violence, we work toward loving the living beings of the past, present, and future, the planet, and the habitats that we constitute and which sustain our lives. 

Borrowed from Press Press’s community agreements for workshops, we propose these practices for our gathering:

• We speak and listen from the heart. 

• We understand that fruitful conversation sometimes requires that we are challenged and uncomfortable. 

• We will not confuse safety with uncomfortability. We will not confuse conflict with abuse. 

• We will use ‘I’ statements as much as we can. 

• We will strive to remain present when others are talking and sharing. 

• We will hold empathy and compassion in our actions and in our words. 

• We will be mindful of the space that we take up. 

• We will honor our shared vulnerability through confidentiality. 

• We will approach conflicts, disagreements, and misunderstandings with curiosity, seeing them as opportunities for learning, growth, and deep collaboration. 

• We will practice consent as best as we can, recognizing that all prompts, questions, and activities proposed are by invitation. 

• What’s missing? Any revisions or additions? 

Please RSVP to the workshop at this link. 

Footnotes

Resources