A few thoughts on what is Radical Kinship, prompted by Joy Mariama Smith, who hosts this summer’s WERK programme at Ponderosa
I think radical kinship is … forming and holding communities … made of unique intersectional individuals who work and struggle together, each of us with special and differing needs. It is about forming chosen families to create spaces of empowerment, lifting each other up, supporting each other in our “failures” and in our contradictions. It is about choosing to live with unchosen family members, choosing to live together in spite of what and who and how we would choose. It is about choosing to work across our struggles and differences and to hold space for disagreement. It is to share work, grief, joy and reproductive labor together. It is about active listening and active negotiation of the space that we personally take up and the space that we create for others. It is about working in the present for social justice not only in the future but in the now. It is about understanding ourselves as unique and paradoxically fully integrated … not only in human society but in the natural world; that ecological sustainability is about accepting ourselves also as “non-unique,” that is, fully integrated as beings of the natural world.