This body of work is for people who are deeply interested in how culture lays the foundation for liberation.
This Cultural Strategy Toolkit can help you navigate and explore four elements through high-level questions that you can return to again and again. They are starting points for conversations with yourself and in relation to others.
They aren’t a cultural strategy – they can help you create one.
Social Relations refers to the structures and values that guide a collective of people.
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What are potential systemic outgrowths from local community?
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What deems a community? What are the tangible examples of interconnectedness?
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What is valued? How do we understand value?
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What are measures of accountability? To whom? Why?
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What mechanism for living and learning rely on generational engagement? Where and how does this happen?
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What modes of communication with self and others are recognized and accessible?
Economic structure invites us to think about how resources are distributed.
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What is the relationship to property and private ownership?
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Who owns/determines the means of production?
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Who authorizes/makes possible for people to care for self, loved ones
and live a life that feels purposeful? -
What types of labor are visible, valued and compensated?
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How do we build a reparatory relationship with the Earth?
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Is there exploitation present? If so, who and why?
History is an important component because it doesn't let us only move forward without a reckoning of past injustices and other cultural influences.
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What are key moments in history that have shifted means of production and social reproduction?
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When reviewing any canon with a race, class, power analysis, what voices are missing?
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What does that mean about how people engage with each other?
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How are people able to engage, given the systems and structures that govern their society?
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What role has violence, coercion, and complicity played in development and maintenance of the conditions?
To have imagination as an element for cultural strategy is asking to keep boundaries fluid and make room for complexity and multiplicities.
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What do you believe is impossible and why?
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How do you know when it is time to pivot or reimagine?
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How does what we imagine shift current oppressive material conditions?
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What is an active engagement with Nature and other living beings that goes beyond “do no harm?
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How is imagination given space in all sectors of living, not just the creative industrustries?
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What is centralized in our living?