Organizers in Space: What Movement Organizing & Space Exploration Can Learn From One Another
How to Survive the End of the World
How to Survive the End of the World
4.9 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2021
⏱️ 83 minutes
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Summary
Autumn was recently invited to take part in a really fun, mind-bending panel called Organizers in Space. The event was co-hosted by Annie Weinberg, electoral organizer, coach, and strategist for progressive campaigns along with The Movement School and the Forge.
You can watch the entire event HERE.
Building a more just, reflective democracy and landing a spacecraft on another planet are both epic, deeply collective human endeavors - and practitioners of both crafts faced huge tests in 2020 and 2021. In the midst of a global pandemic, a reckoning around white supremacist violence, racialized capitalism, and what it means to have a truly reflective democracy - what can movement organizing and space exploration teach each other right now? With the recent successful Mars Perseverance Mission Landing as a jumping-off point, and pulling from some of the ideas of Octavia Butler, the visionary writer and now the namesake of the official landing site on Mars, we discuss what these crafts have in common.”
We talk about predictable emergencies, radical imagination, and contingency planning; about creating structures that unearth collective genius, to do things that may have not been done before; about scalability, effective metric-setting, and competing priorities; about holding on to a sense of awe, in the face of challenges and unknowabilities, and about what it means to, as JPL’s slogan says, “Dare Mighty Things”.“
Anoa Changa moderates this amazing conversation featuring Cj Giovingo and Autumn Brown. CJ is an organizer-turned-rocket-scientist and Jet Propulsion Lab systems engineer, who served as NASA/JPL’s Entry, Descent and Landing Activity Lead for Perseverance.
TRANSCRIPT: - https://www.dropbox.com/s/jz01r9ntltvdaqv/HTS_Organizers%20in%20Space.pdf?dl=0
Music by Tunde Olaniran and Mother Cyborg
HTS ESSENTIALS
https://www.patreon.com/Endoftheworldshow
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello beloved survivors. This is Autumn. A few weeks before the historic landing of |
| 0:24.2 | the Perseverance Rover on Mars, I got a message from an old friend and electoral organizer Annie |
| 0:32.1 | Weinberg. It turns out that Annie knows an extraordinary person named CJ Jivingo, a union organizer |
| 0:40.9 | turned rocket scientist. One of the leads on the Mars Rover mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion |
| 0:47.6 | Lab. Annie had this wild idea that it would be cool to host a conversation between |
| 0:53.8 | me and CJ to talk about what space exploration and movement organizing have to learn from |
| 1:00.9 | one another. The audio you are about to hear comes from that magical night, an event hosted |
| 1:08.4 | by the movement school and moderated by movement journalist and badass nerd Anoa Changa. |
| 1:16.5 | In the week leading up to the event, we all learned that the landing site on Mars was named |
| 1:21.7 | in honor of Octavia E. Butler, which added an entirely new dimension to our conversation |
| 1:28.0 | about exploration, colonization, ideological rigor, relationship, and imagination. I hope |
| 1:36.9 | you enjoy listening to this event as much as we enjoyed creating it. A video recording |
| 1:42.5 | of organizers in space is also available on YouTube. If you want to see our blissed out |
| 1:47.8 | science fiction, nerd faces, in full blossom. |
| 1:52.4 | Hello, hello, and welcome to organizers in space, a virtual conversation about what |
| 2:06.0 | space exploration and movement organizing can learn from each other right now in honor |
| 2:11.3 | of the Perseverance Mars rover landing. This conversation was recorded on March 11, sponsored |
| 2:18.4 | by movement school and co-sponsored by the Ford Journal for organizing strategy and practice. |
| 2:24.5 | And we have here CJ G. Avingo, former union and environmental organizer, now a systems |
| 2:30.4 | engineer for the Jet Propulsion Lab, where they served as the entry, descent, and landing |
| 2:35.1 | activity lead for the history making Perseverance mission, which means that just a couple |
| 2:40.7 | weeks ago, they and their team at NASA landed an actual rocket ship on actual Mars in a site |
... |
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