Learning from a community organizer in Montreal + book reviews
Scott Neigh
Hello supporters of Talking Radical,
In my latest interview about learning in, from, and for social movements, I talk with Nathan McDonnell. He is a community organizer with (among other things) the Milton Parc Citizens Committee in Montreal, a neighbourhood group that emerged out of a struggle against displacement and gentrification in the late 1960s and that is still going strong. Nathan talks with me about learning from history, building our capacity to govern ourselves, and making our movements caring and welcoming.
I also want to share a shift in my work practices that is relevant to this list. Those of you who have followed my work for a long time are likely aware that I first started blogging more than 20 years. That practice largely fell to the wayside when I was doing Talking Radical Radio. But I have decided to start blogging again, in a limited (and perhaps temporary) way, now under the banner of "Creating Through the Crisis." I'm not sure yet how that work is going to relate to this email list. For the moment, it probably won't amount to more than including links to a few posts when I send out a published piece, like today. Or sometimes I might send an update just sharing new posts, if I've accumulated a few that feel like they might be of interest. In any case, I expect the frequency of emails on this list to increase only slightly, at least for now.
One of the most common elements of my blogging in its earlier incarnation was substantive reviews of movement books and scholarly books that felt to me to have some relevance to movements. I seem to be picking that practice up again – have a look, for example, at my recent reviews of Jane McAlevey's No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, David Palumbo-Liu's Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back, and Jonathan Crary's Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World.
Thanks for reading!
Scott 8)
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