Shahram Khosravi, Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran (New Texts Out Now)

Shahram Khosravi, Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran (New Texts Out Now)

Shahram Khosravi, Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran (New Texts Out Now)

By : Shahram Khosravi

Shahram Khosravi, Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Shahram Khosravi (SK): In the shadow of an “Iranophobic” misrepresentation by the Western media and politicians, observing details becomes even more significant. I believe that an anthropological perspective capitalizing on an ethnography of everyday realities of people, and of how they are affected by political forces beyond their reach, offers an opportunity to contextualize Iranian’s lives within the larger framework of international conflicts.

This book arose also from concerns about an absence of anthropological voices among the myriad academic and nonacademic voices who define, represent, and analyze Iran and Iranians at a distance. It aims to offer an anthropological understanding of Iran.

What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

SK: This book is made not out of other books, but out of walking and listening. I took long walks along the streets with Iranians and hung out in squares and on street corners all night long. We drove aimlessly throughout Tehran and Isfahan. I walked along walls to see what people write and paint on them. And during all these days and nights, I listened faithfully to their stories. Walk any day or any night in Tehran, and you will hear and witness a story. If not a story, then a joke or a rumor. When you live a precarious life—with the threats of war and foreign invasions, intense environmental disasters, and political insecurity—then you live in shadows of death, and to cope with it you need stories, jokes and rumors.

In this book, I have attempted to explore the paradoxes in Iranians’ everyday lives. On the one hand, there are the multiple precarities: a sense of disconnectedness, imaging a futureless tomorrow, home(land)lessness, intense individualism, and growth of incivilities. On the other hand, there is hope, performed in the repetition and replication of political engagement.

While young Iranians describe themselves as being stuck in belataklifi, purposelessness and endless waithood, while they are forced to endure, while they are regarded as “unproductive” and a “burden”, and while they find themselves forced into a petrifying immobility (both social and spatial), they are full of aspirations and inspiration. If there is indifference to the suffering of others, and if there is a sense of political detachment and lack of engagement, there are, at the same time, signs of the opposite. If many young Iranians express hopelessness, they still possess hope at the same time. For instance, there is a recent but forceful engagement with environmental movements and protests against public punishment. If they are supposed to be “invisibilized” by legal and political processes, then they are more visible than any generation before. This book has been an attempt to juxtapose these paradoxes in Iran in the first decade of the twenty first century. I have attempted in this book to employ hope as a method of analysis. Through ethnography and storytelling, one of my aims has been to replicate and transform hope.

This book is the outcome of a long conversation and ethnographic engagement with Iran and Iranians.

How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

SK: This book is the outcome of a long conversation and ethnographic engagement with Iran and Iranians. This conversation has been going on throughout my life, first as an ethnic minority Bakhtiari migrant in Isfahan, then as an émigré outside Iran. My ethnographic engagement, however, first started in 1999. The engagement and conversation resulted in Young and Defiant in Tehran, published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2008. The book examines how young, middle-class Tehranis struggle for identity in the battle over the right to self-expression. I looked closely at the structures confronting Iranian youth and the ways transnational cultural influences penetrate and flourish. Focusing on places of gathering, such as shopping centers, the book explored the practices of everyday life, through which young Tehranis demonstrated defiance against the official culture and parental dominance. Such places were sites of opposition, but also served as creative centers for expression and, above all, for imagination. I attempted to show the transformative power these spaces had and how they enabled young Iranians to develop their own culture, as well as individual and generational identities.

This book is different from Young and Defiant in Tehran in several ways. Unlike Young and Defiant, it extends its focus beyond both the middle class and Tehran. The data are collected mainly in Tehran, but also in Isfahan and from migrant workers from the rural areas. The case of the Julfa neighborhood in Isfahan, a city wrongly branded for cultural conservatism, depicts a multifaceted city, where daily contestation over urban spaces reflects social changes at large. I also include ethnographic inquiries from my own village in the Bakhtiari region. Many men and women from my village worked in construction or the service sector in Isfahan and Tehran for long periods. Broadening the ethnographic field to cover voices not only from Tehran but also from peripheries, I aim to show the magnitude of precarity plaguing urban and rural Iranians.

Whereas Young and Defiant in Tehran focuses more on the spatial relations in everyday life, a main theme in this book is the temporal aspects of Iranians’ everyday life: waiting, queuing, imaging a futureless tomorrow, feeling nostalgia, hoping, replication and repletion, and transiting from youth to adulthood. Another difference is that Young and Defiant was formed in a hopeful time for Iranians. During the reform-minded government of President Khatami (1997–2005), a relatively open political atmosphere emerged.

Precarious Lives took its form in more recent years characterized by multiple precarities, a shrinking of hope, people imaging a futureless tomorrow, home(land)lessness, intense individualism, deterioration of human capital, increasing violence (domestic and public), and growing political incivilities.

Precarity here is used to cover a broad range of social vulnerabilities that Iranians are struggling with: from insecure work conditions and physical insecurity to hopelessness, alienation, and disconnectedness from a sense of social community.

This precarity is the consequence of the shrinking of the welfare state, resulting in the loss of benefits for many workers, along with chronic unemployment and underemployment, created new forms of social marginalization and exclusion. Gradually, a post social state with more focus on the market economy than on welfare replaced the revolutionary state of the 1980s. Furthermore, the USA’s antagonist policy and international sanctions against Iran, partly still in force, have resulted in a drastic deterioration of the domestic economy.

One aspect of this precarious life is the predicament of waithood.  Young persons are waiting for employment, moafi (exemption from military service), marriage, emigration, a good business, or change. Iranian youth imagine themselves as “just waiting.” The protracted waiting as the condition of belataklifi makes young Iranians believe they have no control over their lives. Yet their waiting is collective. The predicament of “waithood” is what a whole generation is suffering from.

However, this book explores, at the same time, the daydreaming and hope, intense civility, and solidarity during political protests and street carnivals. The book deals with these paradoxes in Iranians’ everyday life.

Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

SK: I wrote Precarious Lives in an Iranophobic atmosphere supported by a huge apparatus of “mediawork” that has been producing anti-Iranian sentiments in the world. It is not easy to write about Iran or the Middle Eastern societies generally.

I share Farha Ghannam’s concerns, in her book on Egyptian urban masculinity, about “how to write [about Middle Eastern societies] in a way that is intellectually honest and politically responsible.”

I hope that this book show complexities of Iranian society, and I hope that non-Iranians can better understand the socio-political condition Iranians live in. I hope that this book can counter Iranophobia a little bit.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SK: My current research project is the study of post-deportation. It is a study of what happens to young Afghan asylum seekers after deportation to Afghanistan from Europe. I have been interviewing deportees, and, hopefully, I will visit Afghanistan later this year for a short fieldwork. 

 

Excerpt from the Book:

Abbas was born in 1965 in a small village in the Bakhtiari region. He is the second of seven children and has two brothers and four sisters. Abbas started helping his father on the small land they owned when he had not even reached school age. He was only ten when his father died of a stroke at fifty-five. And then drought came, and with it their revenue vanished. Drilling a deep well required a lot of money they did not have. So he and his brothers started a circular migration lifestyle. They went to near and far places in search of jobs, always short-term, low-paying ones: day labor on construction sites in nearby cities during the winter, cleaning potatoes for plantations in late spring, work- ing on irrigation projects in summer, or harvesting on farms in early autumn. One late fall day in 1984, he was going to Borojen, a small town about one hundred kilometers north of his village, where his brother, who was working in Borojen, had found a job for him on a construction site. The job was to last several months, his longest so far. Early in the morning that day, he paid his fare to a driver and found a place next to other men and women in the back of a pick-up truck. Some were going to work, some to visit a doctor, others to obtain a dowry for their daughter. Approaching Borojen, the vehicle was stopped by the police. It was sarbaz giri (literally, soldier catching, arresting runaway soldiers and those who have not done their military service). Abbas was nineteen years old and had, like many other young men in the region, ignored call-ups from the military. The war with Iraq, now in its fourth year, was harvesting lives. The police asked for his papers. Abbas had none. Conse- quently, he was detained and soon sent to a military base in Isfahan to start his compulsory military service. After only ten days’ training, he was sent to

the war front. He got some instructions and became a deminer at the front, where he served for twenty-eight months. People were dying incessantly in the war. In the winter of 1986, the Iraqi army, facing heavy losses, used chem- ical weapons in large quantities. Abbas remembered details, confirmed by the documents in his medical dossier. It was a Monday, 17 February 1986, around noon, when the gates of hell opened. The mustard gas paralyzed the unequipped Iranian soldiers. The chemical weapons used by the Iraqi army killed around 20,000 and damaged 120,000 others. Survivors developed se- vere chronic complications. Many faced a slow and painful death. Others are still suffering. Abbas is one of them. He, like other soldiers, got primary treat- ment first after one day. Abbas says he still smells the gas, “like rotten eggs.” According to official sources, there are 550 000 janbaz (disabled veterans), of whom 120,000 are registered as chemically injured veterans.

The medical files he showed me said that his lungs are seriously damaged, his skin is burnt, and he suffers from depression. The Foundation for War Veterans classified him as the lowest rate of war-disabled veteran (janbaz), that is, at the 10 percent level. For 10 percent, he received an insignificant compensation. To feed his four children, Abbas became once again a circular laborer, moving from one informal job to another. His damaged lungs force him to sit down to take a breath after a short walk; his eyes get more irritated when working in dust; and his burnt skin makes working in the sun unbearable. Working long days on farms under the sun and in dust means incessant, insufferable pain. For more than two decades he has been engaged in negotiation with various military organizations and medical institutions to raise his percentage of disablement and suffering compensation to 25 percent. He said,

”If I had an inside connection in the system, I could get it. I was told there are people in Tehran who fix it for 10 million toman [about US$6,000 in 2011]. If I reach 25 percent, I get 600,000 toman [US$375 in 2011] per month for the rest of my life. I could get a bank loan without interest, and my family would be insured. ”

Abbas said that he knew many who had been injured just like him, on the same day, at the same place, from the same bomb, but received 25 percent disability. They were, however, Persian-speaking, literate residents in large cities with access to information. Abbas’s class and minority status denied and delayed his access to the citizen rights enjoyed by his peers. I witnessed this once when I accompanied him to a medical institution in Isfahan. He was sent back and forth between different floors and offices. When he opened his mouth, unveiling his status as a “villager” with Bakhtiari accent, he was ignored and treated badly. When I involved myself and talked on his behalf, in Tehrani-accented Persian, the situation suddenly changed for the better. His struggle is for rights to benefits in the form of social welfare. Abbas indeed is struggling for his citizenship rights, for the right to have rights. The first time I met Abbas was in the summer of 2002, and for thirteen years I have witnessed his struggle with the intricate and corrupt bureaucracy. Doctors, officers, bureaucrats, and individuals took his money to give him a signature, a letter, a name, an address, advice. All to no use. Every year I met him his dossier (parvandeh) was thicker than the previous year’s. He collected documents over documents; that made him even more dependent on brokers. In the governance of papers he is lost, abandoned, and extorted. As an illiter- ate poor man from an ethnic minority, living at the fringes of a remote prov- ince, Abbas has no chance against the state apparatus. His physical and

psychological suffering is not observed, registered, or recognized. Neverthe- less, like “biological citizens” in Petryna’s study, Abbas’s suffering and pain are the sole way for him to be included in the realm of the state. The last time I met him, in June 2016, he was still “10 percent,” 10 percent included, 10 per- cent citizen.

Abbas has access to only 10 percent of his citizenship rights.

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.