R. Shareah Taleghani, Readings in Syrian Prison Literature: The Poetics of Human Rights (New Texts Out Now)

R. Shareah Taleghani, Readings in Syrian Prison Literature: The Poetics of Human Rights (New Texts Out Now)

R. Shareah Taleghani, Readings in Syrian Prison Literature: The Poetics of Human Rights (New Texts Out Now)

By : R. Shareah Taleghani

R. Shareah Taleghani, Readings in Syrian Prison Literature: The Poetics of Human Rights (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2021).

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

R. Shareah Taleghani (RST): Although I was originally planning another topic for my dissertation, I had taken a seminar on Arabic prison literature and also became involved in a collective project to translate Faraj Bayraqdar’s poetry collection Dove in Free Flight. I became interested in the topic as I read more works written by authors who had endured and survived detention in Syria. I also had the opportunity to meet with several writers who very kindly and generously answered my questions and provided me with copies of their writings (before digital publishing was prevalent). In large part, I wrote this book because I found these texts, and the life stories of the writers powerful, inspiring, and moving.  

I had also always had an interest in human rights issues, including detention, particularly in Iran where part of my family is from, and as a high school student and undergraduate, I had originally thought of becoming a human rights activist or lawyer. Yet, I also developed an awareness of the critiques of human rights, especially the US government’s exploitation and manipulation of the language of human rights, and the human rights regime that was even more blatantly apparent in the early 2000s in the massively destructive and lethal trajectory of the so-called “war on terror.” At the time, there was not much scholarly work in English on Syrian “prison literature” or “prison writing” (the terms are problematic ones as I discuss in my book)—just a few articles, including those by Miriam Cooke and Isabella D’Afflitto. Also, very little of the literature had been translated into English. In the process of writing the book, I also drew inspiration from other scholars’ work, such as Alexandra Moore and Joseph Slaughter, on the relationship between literature and human rights or the humanities and human rights that developed in the US academe in recognition of US human rights violations in the aftermath of 9/11, as well as US-based critical carceral studies. In the process of my research, I found that Arab literary critics had made this connection between literature about prison and human rights discourse much earlier than the post-9/11 emergence of the subfield of literature and human rights in the United States.

... my study examines how particular works of prison literature both echo and challenge the generic conventions and limitations of human rights discourse.

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

RST: Using an interdisciplinary approach, my book focuses on works of literature produced in, about, and through the experience of detention in Syria from 1970 to 2015. It analyzes the intersections of prison narratives, political opposition, Arabic literary experimentalism, and global human rights discourse. I provide a series of close readings of literary texts in tandem with human rights reportage. Rather than focusing on how such texts act as a literature of witnessing or counter-history (and, of course, it can and should be read as such), my study examines how particular works of prison literature both echo and challenge the generic conventions and limitations of human rights discourse. It also explores the ways in which individual authors experiment with literary form to depict the experience of detention and the detainee as a speaking subject. The book is organized thematically, with chapters on the genre of prison literature as a problematic construction, vulnerability and recognition, representations of torture, depictions of prison space and life, and the relationship between carceral metafiction and exile. There is also a separate chapter on the notorious Tadmur Military Prison.  

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

RST: Generally, much of my research has centered on examining the intersections of political opposition and dissent, forms of cultural production, and aesthetics. While my other work does not really address how forms of cultural production relate to human rights discourse, I have always been interested in exploring how particular cultural producers and dissidents generate creative interventions against regimes of power through their artistic works.  

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

RST: It is my hope that the book will reach both an academic and more general audience—particularly those with an interest in Syria and the culture and the history of political dissent there. I would like for it to be read by students and scholars interested in modern Syrian and Arabic literature and cultural production, comparative literature, and the subfield of literature and human rights, as well as critical carceral studies. I also hope it will be read by those who have an interest in politics and cultural production in the Middle East generally and Syria in particular. I plan to publish an Arabic translation of it as soon as possible. Because it addresses a limited number of texts in a vast body of literature produced by detainees in Syria in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I hope that it sparks more interest in the topic, more studies of these works, and more translations into English of these texts, especially since so few have been translated so far. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

RST: Currently, I am finalizing a co-edited and co-translated collection of poetry by Faraj Bayraqdar’s Dove in Free Flight, which will hopefully be out in the winter or spring of 2021. A colleague and I are also planning a special issue for CLC Web Comparative Literature and Culture on humor and the absurd in Middle Eastern cultural production. In my new larger research project, I am returning to the topic of my master’s thesis, and I am focusing on examining the intersections of satire, nostalgia, and dissent in works of Middle Eastern cultural production—not just literature, but also film and drama. I want to explore how particular works fuse satire with a nostalgic rather than utopian impulse.

J: Why do you use the terms “Readings” and the “Poetics of Human Rights” in the title?

RST: First, with the term “readings” I wanted to convey the sense that the focus of the book is precisely that—a series of readings and textual/thematic analyses of particular works of literature about prison. In the introduction, I point out that the book is not intended to be a history of Syrian prisons, human rights movements in Syria, oral histories of former prisoners of conscience, or the autobiographies of very important figures in the Syrian opposition and human rights movements. All of those are very important topics, and while many of them have been the focus of critical study in Arabic, the field of Syria studies in English is still very small. Additionally, the book only addresses a limited set of texts in a vast and varying body of literature that can be approached and read through many different angles and viewpoints. In using the phrase “poetics of human rights,” I wanted to indicate the connection between these works of literature and human rights, but also evoke “poetics” in the sense of a systematic study of literature, as well as the notion of understanding how texts achieve certain effects on readers.

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 5: “On the ‘Kingdom of Death and Madness:’ Sousveillance and Surrealism in Tadmur Military Prison”)

Several organizations, from Human Rights Watch to the Syrian Human Rights Committee, have made Tadmur Military Prison the sub­ject of special reports since the early 1990s.  These reports follow the con­ventional patterns of the human rights reportage. Using as much verifiable detail as possible, drawn from mostly (and necessarily) anonymous wit­nesses, these reports document, chart, measure, and map the total number of prisoners held, their names and ideological or party affiliations when available, and the official length of their sentences. They also describe the measurable structures and architecture of the prison; the size and specific numbers of detainees crammed into overcrowded communal cells, where prisoners are forced to take turns standing, sitting, or sleeping sword-style due to lack of space; the lack of food to the point of starvation; the hor­rendous conditions prisoners live under, including poor sanitation and freezing and blisteringly hot temperatures; the rapid and deadly spread of communicable diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera; the myriad forms of daily torture improvised by guards; and the number of prisoners killed in a given time period—whether arbitrarily through torture or by execution. Most of these conditions have existed at other prisons in Syria, but at Tadmur they were more frequent, more systematic, more intense, and more lethal than at any other prison until its reported closure in 2001. Now, after the 2011 Revolution, Tadmur Military Prison’s notoriety has been surpassed by that of Saydnaya and other detention centers.

In the same way that it has been the distinctive concern of human rights organizations, Tadmur Military Prison occupies a haunting, nearly mythical position in Syrian prison literature, much like that of Abu Ghrayb in Iraqi prison literature. Tadmur’s infamy is highlighted by the common saying: “The one who enters it dies, and the one who leaves it is reborn.” As al-Haj Saleh writes: “Let us imagine a prison without visits, without books and pens, without means of entertainment and without ‘tools of production’ of any sort, without domestic facilities—kitchen fix­tures, stoves—without hot water . . . just a closed place that doesn’t open up except for food and . . . punishment. That is Tadmur prison: the Syrian shame that is indelible. In this prison, time does not pass. It accumulates over the prisoners and suffocates them.”

Other former detainees echo al-Haj Saleh in the numerous memoirs composed about the prison, in addition to essays, novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. They continue to publish works even now, with some who were detained there in the 1980s and 1990s being motivated to tell or publicly circulate their stories since the 2011 Revolution.  Though much of the writing produced about Tadmur shares traits in content and form with texts about other prisons in Syria and the Arab world, the literature about the prison is unique not only in its emphasis on the level of the state’s grotesque acts of depravity perpetrated against detainees there, but also in its reflections on the incomprehensibility of, absurdity of, and difficulty of describing of such acts. Authors of such works are generating a body of testimonial literature and producing a collectively written, mosaic-like history of the prison. They are also making Tadmur Military Prison and the forms of suffering they endured there visible to their reading publics, an act and process that have become even more imperative in light of the prison’s alleged destruction by Da‘ish and the fact that the Asad regime has retaken the city of Tadmur and remains firmly entrenched in power.

But how, then, do former detainees make Tadmur visible? How do they reconstruct and revisualize their experiences of surviving the prison? In writing of their own and others’ survival in detention, how do they see the prison and how do they make it seen for their audiences? These questions are complicated by the fact that in Tadmur, as in other prisons, making oneself visible meant making oneself vulnerable, with often lethal consequences. Prisoners were under constant surveillance and threat of torture and death, in addition to being confined in the same dark, usually windowless cells for years. They were often forced to wear blindfolds or hoods, including when they slept. When in the yards, they were also con­sistently ordered to keep their heads bowed in a display of abject submis­sion and humility, including when they were forced into stress positions for hours at a time. Guards forbade them to glance around their environ­ment or to look up unless specifically ordered to. For prisoners to dare to meet the eyes of their jailers and torturers, to peer around them, or to stand out in any way meant risking becoming marked (mu‘allam) for additional brutal punishments by the guards. Being marked would result in, at the very least, some form of degrading or excruciating physical tor­ture and, at the very worst, being tortured to death. As Bayraqdar notes of his experiences at Tadmur, “To raise your eyes would be to raise your own casket and prepare to march at the front of the funeral.” In some prisoners’ descriptions of their inability to see and their con­stant awareness of being under the guards’ unending visual and aural scrutiny, the system of discipline and punishment at Tadmur enacts a kind of panopticism, albeit with variations, especially the incorporation of the daily physical torture inflicted on prisoners. Under persistent threat of death, Tadmur prisoners were ordered not to look in certain directions and not to speak, and such commands would diminish the detainees’ agency and subjectivity, especially considering the fact that vision is of “central importance for an inmate’s attempt to ‘make space’ within the prison environment.” 

Despite all of the limitations on prisoners’ field of vision, most authors describe the physical structures of the prison, or at least the parts of the prison they encounter in visual terms during their detention. Especially in nonfiction works, authors such as Muhammad Salim Hammad, Bara Sarraj, Ali Abou Dehn (‘Ali Abu Dahn), and Khalid Fadil describe the spaces they are forced to dwell in with minute detail and exact measure­ments, much like the documentary style of human rights reports. Yet once writers have described the physical attributes of the parts of the com­pound they have seen, usually upon their entry, the material, architectural spaces of Tadmur Military Prison are effaced, except for brief references. Authors of the prison literature about Tadmur document everything from obscene acts of torture, to the names and numbers of those executed, to the consistent, often minute forms of resistance they enact. They describe the emotional ties they establish with one another, and the multiple ways prisoners created to survive despite the harsh regime of the prison indi­cating “how people cope, how they carve out spaces for themselves in the space of the prison,” even in a site of extreme deprivation and violence, like the desert prison. For other writers, making Tadmur visible for their audience means inaugurating and inscribing a mode of countersurveil­lance or sousveillance, like the “hidden observer” protagonist of Mustafa Khalifa’s novel The Shell (al-Qawqa’a, 2008). At the same time, there are those, such as Bayraqdar in his memoir, The Betrayals of Language and Silence (Khiyanat al-Lugha wa-l-Samt, 2006) who make Tadmur visible by interrogating the possibility of ever fully capturing what he and others experienced there. 

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.