Pathway Reflections & Progession
Pathway Reflection
I hope that this output packet of itself in its entirety has illustrated what I have learned and how I intend to redesign both my learning and life pathways.
To make this more explicity in terms of new goals and next steps, you can see my pathway re-design below as a timeline, and my pathway re-design in terms of goals here.
My key decisions are to:
- Move the output around livelihoods & regenerative economics forward, as I am currently in the midst of business planning for Feed Avalon and my own self-employment. I intend to make this output ‘short and sweet’, as to experience the challenge making a more focused, containerised output still at MSc pre-capstone year level.
- I will then focus the majority of 2014 on my fourth output which will focus on anti-speciest agroecology. Following the outcomes of this work, I intend to approach my capstone year with increased attention, potentially crowdsource funding for a research project connected to my aims.
Pathway Connections: Political Agroecology
When I first designed my output packets I thought I would be going off-topic by focusing on prison or repression because I couldn’t see the connections between them and agroecology. This almost amuses me now!
I have come to realise that repression affects everything. It is probably one of the largest determinants of social change - repression informs our decisions of what we will do and not do on a daily basis and in communities of resistance this is no exception.
Four months into this output work, In the Nyeleni July Newsletter the theme was repression and criminalisation of food sovereignty, and I realise that resilient responses to repression are necessary worldwide, something I hope my output packet can contribute towards.
It is clear also that becoming more autonomous over our food supply can increase resilience to repression and oppression (see this article about the Black Panther Breakfast Club’s here). State and corporate violence is a necessary part of maintaining industrial-agricultural food systems and the only way capital can continue to shape how we eat.
In terms of prison abolition it is clear that meeting our food, energy, shelter and economic needs through regenerative practices such as permaculture are a necessary part of creating cultures of healing and harm reduction. As illustrated in one of my first article linking permaculture and prisons, permaculture and community food projects can play a role in decarceration. The Zoe Hammer article in Beyond Walls & Cages also looks at how prison placement affects food sovereignty and how resistance and alternatives to prison can link with economic relocalisation as a way of building regenerative local economies not dependent on profiting from caging human beings. 
Furthermore, it is visible to me now that access to land is the ultimate repressed struggle as its success determines the redistribution of wealth more than any other. A realisation that has propelled me to write this book proposal.
Finally, the heart of my MSc is looking at the oppression of animal agriculture and this output has only increased my understanding, through emotionally processing my own imprisonment, that the horror of encagement spreads to billions of animals across the planet, and their liberation links with my own and every other human being in a prison today. We are all commodities for capital.
However through documenting political resistance worldwide, defiance in the face of repression and learning from my own experiences I know that healing is possible - of ourselves and of the land, through practices such as permaculture and agroecology.
Picture from Via Campesina
Conclusions
Conclusion
In conclusion, I feel this has been an incredibly powerful and life-changing six months of my life. The personal healing work undertaken has been necessary and empowering, and I hope high yielding in terms of supporting me for the rest of my life. My community organising skill flexes have been massively stretched as my ability to manage complex and diverse amounts of information, people and promises has extended over and over, as each time I do, reflect and learn.
My political literacy and worldviews around repression, the prison system, resistance and community organising have been challenged, triggered and re-designed over and over. On a personal level I have grown from being barely able to sit through a prison-related conversation without bursting into tears, to now organising a whole year of events and resistance in 2014 to build a movement for prison abolition in the UK. My learning around repression has completely changed my own relationship to imprisonment and the world-leading campaigns that I grew up in. I can see now the power of the state and that we weren’t ‘failures’, merely another group in history that challenged the privileged few one step too far.
Through this output work, through the support of Gaia U I am continuously growing, learning and changing as I become aware of my own power and the ability to create change in my own life and the communities around me.
Output Reflections
Output Process Reflection
This output has been the most challenging yet, since beginning my learning journey with Gaia U in August 2011.
The readings and thinking around prison and repression have been constantly re-stimulating, triggering and testing. It really has felt like a huge mountain to climb where I can use these terms, tell these stories and organise from my heart, without wanting to burst into to tears, hide away or generally feel so angry I would be out of control. I’ve had nightmares, panic attacks, I’ve awoken believing my bedroom was a cell and that I was enclosed again. The counselling and healing work have wrenched me inside myself and spat me out again. And yet I’ve persisted, and for that I am proud. It is like through learning about repression I am un-repressing myself. I feel like I’m finally facing the prison system not as a traumatised girl, but as a strong, defiant woman determined to tear down its walls.
Committing to documenting, to reading, to processing in the midst of a hugely busy period of organising has been challenging, but I feel like it was probably the best way for me to do it. When I felt re-stimulated, I could either collapse/avoid the world, or I could manage my time and promises and keep going. All the events I had responsibility for in some way were part of this healing journey, to save myself from drowning in emotion and to offset despair/fear with healthy action and resistance.
I’m sure making more time for processing would have been ideal, however I also wanted to see what I was capable of when engaged in complex, demanding projects with high collaboration and engagement. I found myself journalling on trains in tears from prison visits, snatching minutes on buses for reading, listening to podcasts while driving to meetings, sneaking web searches into lunch breaks at work, scribbling on post-it notes in the middle of the dreams, aiming to read, even just for a twenty minutes before turning the light out and passing out asleep. I committed to taking constant notes of feedback and observations during events I was engaged with and I carved out three days at the end of June and hibernated in a caravan with no internet access to process, write and write and write.
So in conclusion, I’m sure this output packet only scratches the surface of what has been an incredibly moving, exhausting and empowering few months. Where I have befriended my demons, started to find healing and discovered tools that will hopefully support me for a lifetime in resisting the prison industrial complex until all are free.
Managing this Output
This output has expanded beyond my original design mainly through the following patterns:
- The sheer volume of work to process in time for an OP Review bus
- When I miss a bus, this then created a window of space for myself & other things surfaced in my life and the time to work on the actual output packet creation on Mahara became too stretched
- This pattern then repeated itself twice
I have used one pause month in August which was when I was engaged in many activities away from home.
The output itself is quite congruent with my design of the OP, which can be read here. The main differences are around finishing my Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design, which I renogotiated to after this output packet submission. The second is the length of time I had expected this output to take. I originally designed it to take two months & have taken seven!
I feel working through my personal healing work has slowed the output packet, as pivot points for growth were not necessarily in my control, and it would mean that at times documentation was easy and accelerated, and at other times, I was incredibly emotional and struggling to interact with my computer or material. As can be seen in my output process reflection, it has been extremely emotionally challenging to engage in both the subject of repression and prison.
Combined with a huge amount of community organising, challenges at work, and emotional trauma through supporting friends in prison and with serious illnesses I have had to act compassionately with myself and occasionally put Gaia U work second. Fortunately with action learning, they are beautifully stacked and each experience is a learning opportunity.
What I would do differently:
- Type more feedback notes, workshop designs, journal entries on to my computer as and when/immediately after or during my engagement with projects & file them better so that creating this output would be a case of assemblage rather than a huge amount of post-event processing
- Be more realistic about length of time to give myself, especially in output creation work online
- Be more realistic about volume of work e.g. More manageable reading lists, fewer goals that are SMARTER
Following the submission of this output I intend to have an Advising Session focusing on how I can create a more streamlined system for output creation.
Advisor feedback has played a key role in this output creation. I have recieved two dedicated feedback sessions from my Main Advisor before submission and touched on the creation of this output during nearly every advising session (see my advising notes here). I have created a tracker for output feedback and advisor input here so that I can continue to use feedback toward future output packet design.