Friday August 23
1pm Welcoming Table — Firestorm Books 610 Haywood Rd
1:00pm-2:00pm Veganism in Anarchy & Non-violent Direct Action in Social Justice Movements @ Firestorm Books
2:15pm-3:15pm Siwar Mayu, a river of hummingbirds @ Firestorm Books
3:30pm-4:30pm Appalachain Anti-Racism @ Firestorm Books
4:45pm-5:45pm Burn Down the American Plantation @ Firestorm Books
6pm-7pm Anarchism in Puerto Rico @ Firestorm Books
7pm-12am Pansy Fest @ Sly Grog
12am-4am Pansy Fest Dance Party @ Static Age
Saturday August 24
Tabling @ Mothlight 11-5pm
10:00am-11:45am Stop the Bleed @ Kairos
10:30am -11:30am Read Aloud for Anarchkids @ Firestorm
11:45am-1:15pm Co-ops, technology, & Existential Dread @ Firestorm
1:00pm-2:00pm Lunch Break – Potluck @ Mothlight Patio! Bring Snacks if you are able!
2:00pm-3:00pm Lucid, Passion, Love and Rage: notes from the Underground Atlanta Dance Scene @ Firestorm
2:15pm-3:45pm Self-Managed Abortion: Practical Considerations Seminar – Knoxville Abortion Doulas @ Kairos West
3:15pm-4:30pm “No One Will Be Free Unti Everyone Is Gay”: Queer and Anarchist Histories in the 20th Century United States @ Firestorm
4:45pm-5:45pm Their Statue, Our Blood: History at Hand – Maya Little @ Firestorm
6:00pm-7:00pm Pan-African Social Ecology – Modibo Kadalie @ Firestorm
7:00pm-12:00am Pansy Fest @ Sly Grog
12:00am + Pansy Fest Noise Show @ Mold House
Sunday August 25
Tabling @ Mothlight 11-5pm
10:00am-3pm Pansy Fest BIG GAY BRUNCH & LGBTQ Prisoner Letter Writing w/ Tranzmission Prison Project
10:00am-11:30am Tech Security @ Firestorm
12:00pm-1:45pm Roundtable discussion on DIY repro care @ Kairos West
11:45am-1:15pm The Radical Potential of Kitchen Medicine @ Firestorm
1:30pm-2:30pm Nationalisms @ Firestorm
2:00pm-3:30pm Meaningful Discomfort as Liberatory Practice @ Kairos West
2:45pm-3:45pm Perspectives of anarchists organizing in Rojava @ Firestorm
3:45pm-4:45pm The history and future potential of failure as a strategy of revolt @ Kairos West
4:00pm-5:30pm Building Alternative Worlds @ Firestorm
5:00pm-6:30pm Relationship Anarchy: Increasing Autonomy and Reducing Entitlement @ Kairos West
Workshop Descriptions Alphabetically
A Kissing Booth An ecstatic experiment. An invocation of Eros. An exploration of the ambiguous cartography of desire. Logistics: One at a time behind the curtain, please. Each interplay will last for approximately 10 minutes. Kissing is absolutely not required. SAT & SUN 11:00am-5:00pm @ Mothlight
Appalachain Anti-Racism I really want to have an open dialogue conversation with the Appalachian community about immediate and sustainable ways we can be in solidarity with our black and brown family. With 2020 elections coming up and especially with ICE continually breathing down our backs, I think this should be one of the things we’re really focusing on. I want to talk about what to do if you see ICE as a white person, resources, reparations, and bridging the gap between white anarchist punks and the communities that need radical white bodies to protect them. FRI 3:30pm-4:30pm @ Firestorm
Building Alternative Worlds – glo merriweather + ke’ala lopez Divesting and imagining a different world SUN 4:00pm-5:30pm @ Firestorm
Burn Down the American Plantation..Revolutionary Abolition The Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement is a political movement dedicated to freeing people from bondage and building resistance in the United States. We situate our political movement in the context of the abolitionist struggle against slavery and continue in the tradition, from Nat Turner to the Black Liberation Movement. We will be discussing these political foundations and talking in detail about our on the ground organizing within prisons, against ICE and towards an international strategy. FRI 4:45pm-5:45pm @ Firestorm
Co-ops, Technology, and Existential Dread
At a time when capitalist technologies play a pivotal role in dividing, surveilling, and targeting our communities, how can we contest our relationship to tech and develop tools to further our own liberation? Along with and in relation to physical technologies, this presentation will explore economic cooperation and structures that tap into our individual ingenuity and collective capacity for solidarity.
Nikki is a NC-based anarchist who organizes around immigration. She currently works for Mijente and has previously done worker co-operative development, particularly with immigrant women. SAT 11:45am-1:15pm @ Firestorm
The history and future potential of failure as a strategy of revolt: a talk by James T. With intersections in queer theory, disability justice and conflict resolution, there is a lot we can learn from embracing and practicing failure. This talk with overview the history of failure as a political strategy, failure as a logic embedded in restorative justice, as well how failure can be enacted in the contemporary (digital) age. Failure encompasses so much of what it means to participate in anti capitalist movements and By bringing more understanding of what failure looks like- more possibilities, and destructions, can occur. SUN 3:45pm-4:45pm @ Kairos
Their Statue, Our Blood: History at Hand I hope to survey the activism taking place in Chapel Hill. This has been cast as a movement around white supremacist monuments when the movement has strategically used the white supremacist landscape to reveal truths about the racism of the university, town, and institutions of Chapel Hill. Black, women activists have primarily led this fight forcing Chapel Hill to confront its racist past and present while actually grounding and writing in blood often coopted concepts such as “intersectionality.” Antiauthoritarian, direct action and a broad coalition of autonomous actors, many typically privileged enough to ignore racism, came together through the collective dedication to rescue imagined futures that were repressed in the university’s past. I hope to inspire others to use their own landscape to reveal truths about and take action against systems of oppression near them. SAT 4:45pm-5:45pm @ Firestorm
Lucid Passion, Love and Rage: notes from the Underground Atlanta Dance Scene The Atlanta-based underground collective No Lite is bringing dance music back to its rebellious roots by throwing wild parties in abandoned buildings.No Lite is a collective of roughly a dozen people who throw parties together in Atlanta, GA. This presentation will discuss our desired intervention in the Atlanta dance scene, what we’ve learned since our formation in 2016, and tips on how to throw your own squat party. SAT 2:00pm-3:00pm @ Firestorm
Meaningful Discomfort as Liberatory Practice A workshop for leaning into the edges of meaningful discomfort with oneself and others to support a rich inner life and increase intimacy with others. Sort of awareness exercises meets meditation meets relational group play that culminates into an act of insurgence against the disembodied culture & resistance to the reproduction of psychic violence with a mind that denies & rejects vital parts of who we are. For those into somatics (or curious about it!), people who loathe small talk (or want to break out of it!), people who get freaked out by looking other humans in the eye (or who are really into that!) and buds who tend to think way more than feel (or feel way more than think!)…for everybody, really. SUN 2:00pm-3:30pm @ Kairos
Nationalisms: No nations, no states? What does it mean for anarchists to confront nationalism in and across localities and contexts? A conversation and self-reflection around anti-imperialism, cultural identity, xenophobia, and diaspora. SUN 1:30pm-2:30pm @ Firestorm
No One Will Be Free Unti Everyone Is Gay: Queer and Anarchist Histories in the 20th Century United States “In today’s United States, where LGBTQ people legally marry, serve in the army, and take part openly in the upper ranks of corporate and political power, the days when queerness seemed a disruptive threat to established authority seem to be vanishing. Yet examining the history of homosexuality in the United States reveals a little-known story: the central significance of anarchist ideas and activists within the struggle for sexual liberation. Anarchist sex radicals offered the first public, political defenses of same-sex love in the United States, decades before the emergence of the gay liberation movement. Likewise, anti-authoritarian currents have long swirled through lesbian and gay culture, with insistence on individual freedom and autonomy alongside a fierce critique of the state common not just among activists but throughout the fabric of everyday queer life. Even after the classical anarchist movement declined in the 1920s United States, queer anarchists exercised a significant influence – not just among other political or sexual radicals, but in the cultural avant-garde of literature, poetry, and music, among public intellectuals, and within gay liberation, feminist, bisexual, and direct action movements. Exploring the hidden history of queer resistance to all forms of authority opens a window into the capacity of dissident sexuality and politics to provoke profound cultural and political change – a capacity that radical queers today, in an age of triumphant assimilation, can and should reclaim.
If you’re interested in history, radical politics, sexual liberation, LGBTQ communities, or underground and outlaw culture, this talk will appeal to you. Regardless of your current political beliefs or sexual orientation – YOU WILL BECOME A QUEER ANARCHIST BY THE END OF THIS PRESENTATION! Come out – we dare you. SAT 3:15pm-4:30pm @ Firestorm
Puerto Rico’s anarchist resistance I aim to talk about the struggles for liberation within the context of being an U.S. colony, and the resistance on colonialism and imperialism of young (queer) puertorricans. FRI 6:00pm-7:00pm @ Firestorm
Pan-African Social Ecology In the middle of the twentieth century, the civil rights, Black power, and Pan-Africanist movements forever altered the shape of human social existence as millions of people organized in a world-wide struggle for freedom that continues into the present day. In this community conversation, scholar-activist Modibo Kadalie will reflect upon his nearly six decades of participation in social freedom movements, from Atlanta’s lunch counter sit-ins, to labor organizing in Detroit, to student protests for Black studies, to anticolonial support networks for African liberation and beyond. Kadalie will offer a new way to understand history by recasting these movements as remarkably leaderless revolutions and connecting Black freedom struggles to ecological activism in the era of climate change. Kadalie calls upon present and future generations of activists to reconnect with the spirit of past revolutions and our own intuitive capacities for cooperation and directly democratic self-governance. SAT 6:00pm-7:00pm @ Firestorm
Perspectives of anarchists organizing in Rojava We hope to have a secure video conference call to be shown on a projector, wherein we can talk about our collective, the state of the revolution in rojava, armed struggle, broad self defense, internationalism, and more. Our local contact would moderate such a discussion. SUN 2:45pm-3:45pm @ Firestorm
Radical Potential of Kitchen Medicine In this class we will discuss ways that we can harness the accessibility and affordability of kitchen medicine to keep ourselves and our communities healthy. Herbalism should be available on a food stamp budget rather than marketed as a luxury item only available to those who can afford it. SAT 10:00am-11:45am @ Kairos
Read Aloud for Anarchkids The final event in Firestorm’s “Reading, Recycling, and Radicalism” summer event series, exploring ecology through books and nature crafts! For this event we’ll be reading anarchist picture books for kids ages 0 to 8. Snacks provided. SAT 10:30am-11:30am @ Firestorm
Relationship Anarchy: Increasing Autonomy and Reducing Entitlement This workshop invites participants to look at interpersonal relationships as a domain for interogating and dismantling domination and ownership culture. It serves as an introduction to applying an evaluatory anarchistic lens to relationships, especially those traditionally framed (at least nominally) as “romantic/sexual.”
This is an opportunity to discuss both basics and best practices for challenging conditioned entitlement, and supporting one another’s autonomy in caring community.
We benefit from an outline of some pratices developed by those whove spent years developing ideas about liberatory relating in community, as a jumping off point for activities and discussion in this workshop. SUN 5:00pm-6:30pm @ Kairos
Roundtable discussion on DIY reproductive care Our collective wants to invite the community to discuss ways they have provided various aspects of reproductive care for themselves in resistance to a medical industrial complex rooted in white supremacy and capitalism. We hope to share stories, exchange ideas, offer recipes and resources to one another to strengthen our collective ability to provide autonomous pelvic care. SUN 12:00pm-1:45pm @ Kairos
Self-Managed Abortion: Practical Considerations Seminar – Knoxville Abortion Doulas Discussing practical considerations in providing community-centered abortion is crucial, given the landscape of abortion access in our region. This seminar covers the legal and technical considerations that ensure community providers and clients are accessing Self-Managed Abortion resources in safe ways. Given the criminalization of SMA in our country, special attention is given toward protecting marginalized populations. All of our workshops are trans and queer friendly and suitable for those who are interested in providing, advocating, or otherwise supporting abortion access. SAT 2:15pm-3:45pm @ Kairos
Siwar Mayu, a river of hummingbirds “Siwar” and “Mayu” in the Quechua language (currently spoken by eight million people in the world) translate into hummingbird and river, respectively. This website is conceived of as a river of hummingbirds. ‘Siwar’ symbolizes the bearer of messages, the ancestors, the ones who cross borders, and is in-between, just as our project is, just as contemporary indigenous writers and artists are. FRI 2:15pm-3:15pm @ Firestorm
Stop the Bleed Review of basic techniques to control simple bleeding followed by demonstration and practice with advanced techniques for life-threatening bleeds grounded in situational awareness.
Tech Security This workshop will look at digital security culture w/r/t different threat models: fascists, the state, big data, etc. Some parts will be interactive && participants will get more w/ space phone || computer but everyone should come. SUN 10:00am-11:30am @ Firestorm
Tranzmission Letter Writing Party “Hey y’all! Come join Tranzmission Prison Project (TPP) for a letter writing party. Based in Asheville, NC, TPP is one of a growing number of LGBTQ-focused prison abolition/advocacy groups in the US. We are a volunteer-run, non-hierarchical organization, and provide free books, zines, prisoner resources, and various other means of support to incarcerated folks nation wide.
This is a great opportunity to begin a pen pal relationship or just send a one-time letter letting someone know they are not alone. Writing to folks who’ve been taken by the state is a vital act of support. Until every prison burns, until every wall of the state falls, we must show up for our siblings and comrades on the inside! We hope you’ll join us!
Veganism in Anarchy & Non-violent Direct Action in Social Justice Movements An open discussion and forum about how the plight of human and non-human animals are connected in the fight for total liberation and freedom from a state of oppression. What strategies can we use to advocate for change? How has non-violent direct action been used successfully in the past and how can we continue to use it in the future? What are our basic rights when demonstrating and protesting and how do we handle the police? FRI 1:00pm-2:00pm @ Firestorm