“Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation” (AK Press), by adrienne maree brown, has a very specific mission, audience, and focus. Building on her earlier book “Emergent Strategy,” this is a guide for groups doing the work set forth there. There are meeting templates, mediation guidelines, and details as small and fiddly as suggestions for appropriately healthy snacks to make available at a day-long seminar. This could easily be as dry as a PowerPoint display narrated by Ben Stein; instead, brown has used an approach that is part anthology, part structured guide, which results in a fascinating guide to activism and group dynamics and ways to strengthen the bonds they create and do the work wisely and well.
The book has a capsule description of brown’s Emergent Strategy at the beginning. Rather than the business strategy you may have heard of by the same name, this is more of a rooted spirituality, or maybe a mycelium politics, combining science with science fiction, particularly that of Octavia Butler. (If you have not read “Parable of the Sower,” go read it now and tell me we’re not currently living through it. It’s a profound guide to our current moment.) There is now an institute devoted to this practice, and numerous groups doing the work, so “Holding Change” offers some points of common reference for them to work with.
The title is a variation on/expansion of the notion of “holding space,” and is not the only term that gets tweaked to be more specific in its meaning. I’ve attended talks where we were told, “This is not a safe space, it’s a brave space,” without enumerating what that meant. Lacking further explanation, I was intimidated about participating. Was the intent to encourage us to be intentionally confrontational, or to be willing to hold one another’s pain? It turns out the concept of brave space is the brainchild of Micky Scottbey Jones, and their essay describing it is included here.
A concept introduced here that knocked me back on my heels was the suggestion that prioritizing common sense in facilitation is a tool of dominance and, ultimately, white supremacy. Emergent strategy in justice-driven work asks that you facilitate toward the needs of the people in the room and the current moment you all share, not the agenda (there’s a lot in here about the ways time, and timekeeping, can be leveraged as a tool to silence people). Yet, there are still many suggestions for how to keep a group in forward motion and not spiraling out into individual crises.
Brown consistently threads and weaves positivity into this discussion of activism that is often rooted in grief and trauma. Even in a discussion of difficult “types” who are common to activist circles, she can find things to value and even celebrate. (This is the part of the book where, regardless of your history with “Emergent Strategy,” you will most likely find yourself nodding in recognition and recalling various group experiences of your own that blew up or melted down.) Whether it’s passive-aggressive behavior, narcissism, being a “leech,” or other undesirable qualities, brown defines what she means by the label and then immediately suggests we “notice the strengths.” Each of these negative aspects of a person contains positive and helpful potential; nurturing that can sometimes direct a person back to focused work with the group. And if that doesn’t work, there are practical suggestions for gentle interventions that may be better suited to a particular case. “Mediation” is as much a part of the book as facilitation, and there are guidelines for bringing people together and creating a contained environment for them to work through conflict.
If any of this sounds appealing or at all relevant to your own work, start by reading “Emergent Strategy,” then move on to this guide. It has an abundance of practical information, from Brown and a cohort of Black women active in various forms of transformative justice work. I picked it up out of curiosity (and as a fan of brown’s book, “Pleasure Activism”), very quickly felt I was in over my head, then found it full of buoys and touch points to follow.
A quick note: This will be my last review for The Progressive Populist for the foreseeable future. I’ve really appreciated the opportunity to engage with such good books and avid readers, and while new adventures beckon, I will miss this space a lot.
Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California.
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2022
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