---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Kyuman Kim <[email protected]> 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; [email protected] Twitter: @qmanpvd -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lovedriven" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/lovedriven. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lovedriven/1E59FB2E-6537-40B3-B270-E849737626E6%40conncoll.edu <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lovedriven/1E59FB2E-6537-40B3-B270-E849737626E6%40conncoll.edu?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> . 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