Every first and third Thursday from August 2020 until September 2020
Inspired by Walidah Imarisha’s visit to Firestorm, the Visionary Readers Group is designed to engage with “literature that helps us understand existing power dynamics, and helps us imagine paths to creating more just futures” The group is for anyone wanting to explore avenues of increased community engagement, relationship building, and collective visioning.
This round of the VRG will explore two exciting titles. For fiction, we’ll read and discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic sci-fi anarchist utopia “The Dispossessed.” For nonfiction, we’ll check out Cindy Milstein’s “Deciding For Ourselves,” an exciting new anthology detailing contemporary projects in direct democracy across the world.
We’ll meet over Zoom on a bi-weekly basis starting Thursday, August 6th. The full schedule for the reading group can be found below.
August 6th: Meet & Greet, Overview, and Intention Setting
August 20th: This Dispossessed Discussion
September 3rd: Deciding For Ourselves Discussion Part I
September 17th: Deciding For Ourselves Part II
To register, please email [email protected] with the subject title “Visionary Readers Group.”
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The Dispossessed
By Ursula K. Le Guin
A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—a civilization of warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to reunite the two planets, which have been divided by centuries of distrust. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart.
To visit Urras—to learn, to teach, to share—will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. But the ambitious scientist’s gift is soon seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change.
https://www.firestorm.coop/products/761-the-dispossessed.html
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Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy
By Cindy Milstein
In a time of social and ecological crises, people everywhere are looking for solutions. States and capitalism, rather than providing them, only make matters worse. There’s a growing sense that we’ll have to fix this mess on our own. But how? Deciding for Ourselves, in the spirit of the Zapatistas, demonstrates that “the impossible is possible.” A better world through self-determination and self-governance is not only achievable. It is already happening in urban and rural communities around the world–from Mexico to Rojava, Denmark to Greece–as an implicit or explicit replacement for nations, police, and other forms of hierarchical social control. This anthology explores this “sense of freedom in the air,” as one piece puts it, by looking at contemporary examples of autonomous, directly democratic spaces and the real-world dilemmas they experience, all the while underscoring the egalitarian ways of life that are collectively generated in them.
https://www.firestorm.coop/products/14685-deciding-for-ourselves.html
The Battery Park end of the Grove Arcade is home to the Makers Market, an outdoor bazaar with a dozen stalls filled by artisans selling their craft directly to the public. The market is now accepting vendor applications for local artist to sell their wares, and the application fee is currently waived due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
