Please read this carefully: this course is not for everyone. And not everyone is invited.

This assertion might seem inhospitable and exclusive, but it is a humble acknowledgement of limitations and a modest rejection of an easy, modern, context-less universalism that includes “everyone” or invites “everyone” in without noticing that the very formulation of the invitation, this inclusivism, is already an enactment of exclusions. Moreover, there is no such thing as “everyone” per se; there are specificities, bodies and contexts, needs and desires, commonalities and stories, openings and gifts. This course-festival, a celebration of openings, a conjuring of descent, a sharing of fugitive strategies, is not about telling the truth or channeling pre-formed universal ideas, and it does not try to wield answers for all; instead, our pedagogical-spiritual undertaking is a rejection of such suspiciously cohesive and totalitarian notions like “Truth” or “World”. This is inquiry at the edges of the recognizable, practice at the speed of child-like play – not a gathering to confirm what we already know, but a quest to sit with the shocking unthought.

Even more critically, sanctuary (the core concept that continues to be central to the imagination of the course) is for those on the run, those who need to move, those who must leave the familiar behind, and whose bodies have been rendered incapable of proceeding with the current state of affairs. This course is for fugitives – black identified bodies, brown identified bodies, white identified bodies and people all over the world who identify in other ways.

Please visit the We Will Dance with Mountains Care Statement and Ethical Considerations pages in order to better understand and feel into the ethos and principles we will co-create in this experience.

THIS COURSE IS FOR YOU:

• If you know the irony of victory and feel something ‘outside’ our ways of making sense of things is being called for
• If you sense a need for flight from the discourse, politics, and activisms you’ve experienced
• If you can weather the storm of edgy provocations that may eat at your sense of the appropriate
• If you are working with an organization, and can be supported in a local cohort to explore the themes of this course
• If you feel called to sit with others in experimental indeterminacy and possible failure
• If you are willing to be hospitable to the uncomfortable, to the bewildering, and to look again at subjects within the confines and clutches of your critique
• If you are willing to listen to other worlds outside your own
• If you feel desirous of participating in an active research assemblage that makes you more than an audience member at the feet of presumably wiser persons
• If you want to bring new questions and provocations to your social justice work and your understanding of today’s politically polarized world through paradigmatically different frameworks
• If you feel politically homeless, and you’ve come to appreciate the limitations of the promise of representation
• If you are clear on where to go and what to do about a perceived crisis confronting your community – but are still capable of entertaining (and willing to sit with) a suspicion that your clarity may occlude other modes of engagement
• If you have questions, lots of them, and would love to contribute these questions to create a commonwealth of fugitivity across the planet
• If you can permit yourself to be gifted the rich and emancipatory hospitality of Blackness as excess, then this course just might be an invitation to you
• If the prospects of co-creating a local/decolonial sanctuary as a way of becoming response-able to and with/in colonial frameworks nurtures your desires for trying the impossible and calls to you.

THIS COURSE MAY NOT BE FOR YOU:

• If your energies are entirely devoted to or substantially invested in forms of resistance and critique that characterize even well-established strands of social justice thought and practice that are of issue in this course
• If you are clear on where to go and what to do about a perceived crisis confronting your community – and find no pressing need or urgency to explore other modes of engagement
• If your constitution cannot withstand any challenge to your views
• If you require professional care and support that cannot be reasonably provided during an online course, given its limitations
• If you expect certain ethical formulations, practices, assumptions, identity-based discourses, and gestures unique to your part of the world (or to the politics that you are used to) to be unreservedly adopted by others across cultures, orientations and cosmologies – and if you countenance a refusal of these proposals as traumatizing or evidence of pathology on the part of the ‘refusing other’.

WARNING: We’re serious about this course being an exploration that intentionally includes exploring provocative ideas outside the bounds of what’s considered appropriate or acceptable especially in some social justice circles. The hope and purpose of exploring beyond these boundaries is to find new or different ways of orienting ourselves and/or to uncover insights in our disorientation. Please do not join this class if you think this could be more than you want to hold or if it could touch traumas in ways that aren’t good for you. By joining this course, you are agreeing to question your reactions, opinions, and attachments. Please come at your own risk. Please also read our statement further down regarding ethical considerations and frames.