Dear academic-activists, I wanted to share with you my newly published peer-reviewed article, "Learning to ‘sit in the fire’: Staying with the discomfort of transformative learning". https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EE8IUQ2UND7EJ5MGFUTM/full?target=10.1080/... This article is based on my doctoral research, carried out following a participatory action research approach within two online activist networks. The aim was to explore forms of radical collective change that might emerge in such settings by means of social/informal learning processes, in order for these findings to be useful to social change agents in various contexts (mainly within Global North settings). You can read more about this PhD research, including summaries of my thesis chapters, here: https://madocollective.org/connecting/ In this text, I discuss the transformative learning that appears to have taken place in a social learning space / group that I was part of for 3 years: the Deep Adaptation Forum's Diversity and Decolonizing Circle. In particular, I outline some of the factors that seem to have enabled us, as participants, to undergo important personal and collective changes, while staying with the discomfort of difficult conversations (esp. concerning anti-racism/decolonial practice, and conflict transformation). Some of us played an important role in making this happen, as "key enablers" of group learning - so this text also seeks to visibilise and honour the care work that helped to keep us going through the storms, and the wise and courageous women who played an essential role in this regard. If you have an interest in these topics, and find the time to read this article, any feedback would be deeply appreciated. Please direct your comments to my email address ([email protected]), and not to the whole list. All best, Dorian