[P2P-F] Fwd: Love-Driven Politics Pop-Up Conventions

Tue Jul 19 02:43:44 CEST 2016

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Kyuman Kim <dkkim at conncoll.edu>
Date: Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 3:48 AM
Subject: Love-Driven Politics Pop-Up Conventions

Hello everyone.

Hope all’s well! I’m writing to update you on the activities that the
Love-Driven Politics Collective will be undertaking during the DNC next
week in Philadelphia. As a reminder, some background on the Collective.

The election season has heightened feelings of bitterness, anger,
resentment, and cynicism about the role of politics in American common
life. A prevalent sense that everyday citizens are unable to participate in
the political process––the elections and otherwise––in any meaningful way
has become a pathology of our American moment. Regretfully, we have been
witnessing a widespread sense that politics is a wholly separate realm from
the values and sources of meaning in people’s lives. These conditions need
to change, and we believe a profound source for that change is love.

The Love-Driven Politics Collective (LDPC) is a shared project dedicated to
exploring the possibilities of love-driven politics as a response to
political evil, acrimony, anger, and cynicism.  We are promoting
conversations that draw on diverse political, intellectual and ethical
traditions. We anticipate that these conversations will emerge as we stage
intellectual, artistic, and spiritual exchanges that will enable us to
accompany one another as we fight for social justice in the difficult days
that clearly lie ahead, and really are already with us. As such, our aim is
to devise and divine strategies to respond to the callous, cruel, and
cynical contempt that dominate much of our contemporary political discourse
and political practices. How do we rediscover underused archives,
traditions, and imaginaries from the past?  How do we create new practices,
polities and politics? In an age of cynicism, defeatism, and resignation,
how do we assess efficacy and relevance of what Dr. King called “the
strength to love”?

The members of the Collective are scholars, activists, teachers, students,
visual and performing artists, curators, social innovators, and religious
leaders. By design and intent, the Collective is working with and across
generations and traditions. The Collective is dedicated to an educational
mission, one that flows in and out of conventional classrooms and
coordinates with a wide-variety of public teaching spaces, partners, and
opportunities.  The Collective dispatches its work through meaningful
invitations to partner and to be in solidarity in cultivating a political
culture animated by love and marked by compassion, forgiveness, mercy,
generosity, grace, and empathy.

The ends and aims of the Collective are non-partisan and, at this early
stage, largely interrogatory. We are seeking to assess and determine what
role, if any, love plays in people’s political lives. Which is to say, the
Collective is inviting everyday people and institutions to talk about love
and politics. Through scholarship, teaching, the generation of forms of
public engagement (public dialogues, new media), and the construction of
curricula, the Collective seeks to productively disrupt the cynicism and
incivility that have been hallmarks of American political life for the last
half-century. We aim to do this by catalyzing the constituents of our civil
society––ordinary citizens, civic and religious organizations, institutions
of higher education and K-12 schools, arts organizations––to join in the
regeneration of the love-driven common good. This is the work of
love-driven politics.

At the DNC, the Collective is partnering with arts, civic, and religious
organizations from different regions of Philadelphia to host what we are
calling “pop-up conventions”. The idea is to gather a relatively intimate
group of everyday people in a common space in your institution for a
dialogue about love and politics. The prompting questions will be “Why
Love? Why Now? Why Us?” Our hope is that these pop-up conventions will
serve as catalysts for further dialogues and work in your community in the
coming months and years. There will be one pop-up taking place for each day
of the DNC. The schedule and sites are as follows:

Monday July 25, 6:30-8:00 pm Colored Girls Museum (Germantown)
http://www.thecoloredgirlsmuseum.com/
Tuesday July 26 1:30 - 3:00 pm Fleisher Art Memorial  http://fleisher.org/
Wednesday July 27 6:30-8:00 pm Church of the Advocate
http://www.churchoftheadvocate.org/
Thursday July 28 1:30-3:00 pm Eastern State Penitentiary
http://www.easternstate.org/

The sites are distributed in different regions of Philadelphia. Our hope is
that the dialogues at the pop-ups about love-driven politics will engage
everyday folks from the respective regions.

Note: Derrick Harkins mentioned that Union Theological Seminary might be
willing to reach out to the its alumni base about the pop-ups. (We
recognize that the final pop-up overlaps with the Union-sponsored panel. We
can look into moving up the time of the pop-up to avoid scheduling
conflicts.) We  hope that each of you will be willing to reach out to your
respective networks and let them know about the pop-ups.

The other major activity that the Collective is organizing are an array of
impromptu interviews in and around the DNC site as well as around the city.
We plan to record and archive these interviews. In addition to the “person
on the street” interviews, we also will be conducting a smaller number of
Facebook Live interviews with folks at the DNC site. We are partnering with
Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Lab, the blog *Refinery29.com
<http://refinery29.com>,* and the love-based consortium
*WeStandwithLove.org* <http://westandwithlove.org> to distribute curated
versions of the interviews and other findings from Philadelphia.

The organizing questions for the interviews are as follows:

** How might we transform an American political climate and culture that is
increasingly marked by anger, self-interest, cynicism, and the pursuit of
power? *
** And what does love have to do with it? *
** Why Love? Why Now? Why Us?*

We are very excited to announce that we are partnering with Hosan Lee and
the empathy-based start-up social media app *TableTribes* for the
interviews. TableTribes is designed to bring people into
face-to-face, empathy-based dialogues about pressing issues of the day such
as racism and sexuality rights.

Please let us know if you have any questions. We deeply appreciate your
partnership and solidarity.

Take good care,
David

☸   ☼   ☸   ☼   ☸   ☼   ☸   ☼   ☸   ☼   ☸   ☼   ☸   ☼   ☸   ☼   ☸   ☼   ☸   ☼
  ☸   ☼

david kyuman kim
Professor & Chair, Department of Religious Studies
Core Faculty, Program in American Studies
Connecticut College
860-439-5075; dkkim at conncoll.edu
Twitter: @qmanpvd

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