A book launch with Chris Dixon
In our time of widespread crisis, how do we keep going in the struggle for a more just and sustainable world? Join us for a talk and book launch with longtime activist and writer Chris Dixon to explore practical answers to this question. Drawing on organizing experiences and movement histories, Chris will talk about developing transformative movements that endure. He will focus particularly on collective conditions – such as modes of organization, practices of care, and methods of planning – that enable people to stick around, fight, and build together.
Following the talk, there will be lots of space to think and talk together about challenges our movements face today and what we are learning together as we grapple with them.
Tuesday, September 22
6:30pm (doors open at 6:00pm)
Parlour Room, Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre
290 Lisgar Street
Ottawa, on unceded Algonquin territory
Hybrid Event Info:
This event will be held both in-person and online via Zoom. If you wish to attend virtually, please register by clicking the ‘Reserve a Spot’ button on the Eventbrite page. If attending in-person, there is no need to reserve a spot.
Accessibility Info:
The Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre (CDCC) is accessible via a ramp with railing on the Lisgar door side of the building, with automatic door-openers, and washrooms with open doors and a large stall with handrails on the first floor. Chairs in the room will be moveable, and there are chairs available with no armrests as well as couch/upholstered chairs. The Parlour Room is accessed via elevator or stairs, and there are gender-neutral washrooms on the same floor. The room has both florescent and non-florescent lights.
We will not have separate childcare for this event, but kids are welcome to attend and be present in the space. We will have drawing supplies, books, and puzzles on site.
This event is in English. Please contact us by September 12th if you need live captioning for access.
Paid parking is available in the CDCC lot on Lisgar.
We request all participants refrain from wearing scents to better allow people with chemical sensitivities to attend. If you are feeling sick, sneezing or coughing, or have been exposed to covid or the flu, we ask that you attend remotely or wear a N95 mask. We will have masks on hand, two air filters running in the space, and the windows open if possible.
This event will not be recorded.
Please email punchup@riseup.net if you have accessibility needs not identified here.
Sponsors:
Punch Up Collective, Between the Lines, Octopus Books, and the Carleton University Department of Sociology and Anthropology
About the book:
For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World addresses the question of how to sustain long-term involvement in transformative social movements. It takes up this question with a particular focus on our time of compounding crises and widely-felt urgency. This urgency, the book argues, is absolutely warranted; creating a just and habitable future requires dramatic social transformation on a massive scale.
But we can’t make this happen instantaneously. Instead, changing the world will require large numbers of ordinary people moving into action, bringing more and more people along with them, and constellating powerful new collectivities. To win in significant ways, we will have to build and sustain movements, propelled by urgency, that move at a pace that we can maintain, collectively, for years to come. This is the long haul.
Written in a compact and accessible manner, For the Long Haul takes up the question of activist longevity through five chapter-length propositions. Each chapter names a key obstacle to movement durability and then elaborates practical tools for contending with the obstacle and nourishing long-haul organizing. Focusing on the U.S. and Canada, For the Long Haul is based on interviews with and writings by seasoned organizers, experiences of past and present-day political formations, and a broad range of movement histories.
About Chris:
Chris Dixon is an activist, writer, and educator with more than three decades of experience in radical social movements in the U.S. and Canada. Originally from Alaska, he now lives in Ottawa, on unceded Algonquin territory. Dixon is a member of Punch Up Collective and serves on the advisory board for Upping the Anti. Formally trained as a scholar of social movements, his writing has circulated widely and he speaks regularly about strategy, radical organizing, left history, and movement-based research. His first book was Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements. Find him at writingwithmovements.com.