Steve Marshall argues that activists often skip the inward work of self-awareness needed for real change. He says true transformation requires personal change first, and that activists need diverse, supportive communities to sustain their work over time.
Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, if I think about, um, well, maybe Nell's version of, you know, the parameters of change, if you like. Um, and I think this came up in Richard's stuff as well, which is, you know, that this me, we, and the world is an interesting framing. And I've heard that there's a charity that I work for that they, they would say I I, we, planet. You know, and in action research we talk about first, second, and third person action research. And first person is basically looking inwards, what's going on here. Second person is, so how are we relating in, or how do I now relate to others, would be the question there. And third person is, so what might the wider consequence of that be? So, and I guess the, the part that's always resistant for people is the inward dive. You know, people want to go out there to change things rather than in here to change things. So, you know, picking up on Rudy's point earlier, the notion that we need to transform ourselves such that we can be transformational is pretty key to the way that we think about things. And I guess one of the joys for me of working with people as they go through that iteration of self-awareness, research, coming to know themselves, is is that they realize that there are other people out there. And from my position, I think, as a doctoral supervisor, I supervise a range of doctoral— well, a number of doctoral cohorts, the same questions are basically arising, which is something like, how can I be consequential in my work? And what is— so I'm going to generalize massively, but there's something else out there that we don't understand.. And I would think that's, that's almost an holistic way of understanding the world. So our education does kind of break, break everything down, you know, fragments everything. We become rationalist and we don't get a sense of agency, or we're not encouraged to have a sense of agency in terms of empathic connection or something like that. So I think the community building part of activism or holding difference, if you like, or something like that. You know, finding people who are akin to you, kinship, I think suddenly feels like a very important and significant jump to people as they move into that phase. I was just at a meeting yesterday, and I think one of our guiding principles was we're all— so firstly, diversity. We weren't all that diverse if you were to look at us from outside of the room, but you I think cognitively quite diverse. And then the question becomes, well, how are we then making kin as a group? How do we support each other? Because if you're being radical, if you're being an activist, you're kind of positioning yourself on the periphery of social systems in many ways. And how can we join and support each other in that, I think becomes a really critical question. I don't know if others have views on that.
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