John Kim – Donna Maeda – Harry Waters Jr – Alya Ansari – Nicholas Henderson – Zosha Winegar-Schultz – Confluence Studio – Sam Gould – Duaba Unenra – Monique Verdin – Antonio Roman-Alcala – others

The Covid-19 pandemic, structural racism, and climate change are crises that have laid bare the failures of governance in the United States to provide for the basic human needs to ensure life. The public response to these failures have been violent demonstrations and uprisings witnessed across the United States, especially focused on the Twin Cities. 

We require forms of solidarity to provide social infrastructures until the creation of political platforms that can sweep aside the hollow shell of government. Consensus building must be at the center of these activities, and for it to be an effective response to these crises, it must be built on a foundation of anti-racism, environmental justice, and global thinking. In the United States, there are two incipient consensus-oriented mobilizations that suggest an alternative: mutual aid and municipalism.

From Emergency to Emergence is a series of conversations and workshops on mutual aid, solidarity, and municipalism that situate their recent rise in the United States as social and political platforms in response to these crises. The series consists of public conversations, community building projects, and workshops with a focus on recent events along the Mississippi River, which have seen a convergence of these crises. Potential case studies and respondents include the Twin Cities Uprising, Hurricane Katrina, insurgent Municipalist movements along the Mississippi River, Another Gulf is Possible, BIPOC-led food sovereignty movements, the American Indian Movement, Workers’ Defense Alliance, Southside Harm Reduction, and Common Ground Relief (Nola). Drawing from the network of artists, activists and researchers formed through our work on the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project, From Emergency to Emergence seeks to form mutual aid and municipalist solidarities as regional and national in scope.

Topics:

• Community / neighborhood / self-defense
• Health and harm reduction
• Arts and activism
• Food sovereignty
• Alternative education
• Municipalism

To learn more, visit:
www.emergencecommunity.org