ALEXIS SHOTWELL on Resisting Purity Culture /298

For The Wild

Philosophy, Society & Culture, For The Wild, Anthropocene, Story Telling, Religion & Spirituality, Decolonization, Progressive, Liberation, Land, Media

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2022

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week we are joined by guest Alexis Shotwell to discuss how we might turn from the purity politics that govern many of our lives and this hurting world toward collective struggles for transformation and liberatory futurisms. Rather than forfeiting our complicity and implication in a world with mounting problems, we learn of a helpful heuristic for transforming inaction or the urge to be the perfect activist to a ground where we might be better- equipped to stick around for the long hall in struggles for social justice. According to Alexis, this practice calls for admitting our mistakes and centering repair. In this episode, we dive into the relationship between purity culture and white supremacism, our complicit locations and implications in violence, and the importance of showing up to repair our broken and harmed relations inherited or otherwise. Alexis elucidates that it is only through the messy process of owning up to these broken relations throughout time and seeing how we might participate in and take on culturally appropriate relations of repair, responsibility, friendship, and comradeship in the struggles for liberation that we can survive these times. We hope this episode inspires your curiosity and (re)activates your commitments to this world. Alexis Shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. A professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin land, she is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times.Music by Anne Carol Mitchel and Daniel Cherniske. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

Transcript

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0:49.1	Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ionia. Today I'm speaking with Alexis Chateau.
0:58.0	And since you're definitely going to make big mistakes, it's much better to be one of many,
1:05.6	many, many white people who are good enough doing our best, definitely going to mess up,
1:13.2	better going to stick around and be available for repair and further responsibility.
1:20.3	Alexis Chateau's work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation.
1:31.2	A professor at Carlton University on Unceded Elgonquin Land,
1:35.8	she is the co-investigator for the AIDS activist history project,
1:40.4	and the author of Knowing Otherwise, Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding,
1:46.4	and against purity, living ethically and compromised times.
1:53.7	Well Alexis, thank you so much for joining us today on For the Wild. I really look forward
2:00.4	to speaking with you and diving into some of these complex and nuanced topics.
2:07.6	That's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
2:10.0	So to begin our conversation, I'd like to discuss the ways in which your work finds impurity
2:19.9	and imperfection as a foreground for political, social, as well as personal and collective
	...

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