Tag: Beautiful Trouble
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Shift the Spectrum of Allies (Beautiful Trouble – Essay 8)
In sum: Movements seldom win by overpowering the opposition; they win by shifting the support out from under them. Determine the social blocs at play on a given issue, and work to shift them closer to your position.Activists are often good at analyzing systemic social problems, but less good at thinking systemically about organizing.Activism is…
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The Political Identity Paradox (Beautiful Trouble – Essay 7)
This is an adapted version of an earlier, longer article by the same title, which was part of series on evolutionary logics of collective action. Any serious social movement needs a correspondingly serious group identity that encourages a core of members to contribute an exceptional level of commitment, sacrifice and heroics over the course of…
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Floating Signifier (Beautiful Trouble – Essay 6)
by: Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Andrew Boyd, and Dave Oswald Mitchell The American flag inspires extreme passions . . . but what exactly does it stand for? To different people it means freedom, justice, imperialism and terror — its meaning shifts wildly depending on context and observer. This emptiness, into which observers can pour almost any…
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Expressive & Instrumental Actions (Beautiful Trouble – Essay 5)
by: Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Joshua Kahn Russell, and Zack Malitz Sometimes activists will take an action without much thought to how others receive it, or what precisely the action will achieve. Many people participate in actions because it’s meaningful to them, or simply because it feels good to do the right thing. We call this…
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Seek Common Ground (Beautiful Trouble – Essay 4)
When disagreeing with someone else’s ideas, it can be tempting to engage in narrative attack; to make a direct attack on one narrative from the vantage point, and in the language, of your opposing narrative. For example, when someone wraps climate change-denial views in the rhetoric of creationist beliefs, it is tempting to directly attack…
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We are all leaders (Beautiful Trouble – Essay 3)
What is the difference between saying “none of us is a leader” and saying “we are all leaders”? At first glance these two phrases may seem like two ways of saying the same thing, which is essentially, “We believe in organizing in a way that is more horizontal than vertical. We believe in equalizing participation…
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Welcome New Folks (Beautiful Trouble – Essay 2)
Bringing in new participants is essential to any activist group that wants to grow in size and capacity — but recruiting is only the first step. Integrating people into an established group can be a much bigger challenge, and it helps to be intentional about it. Getting good at involving people requires some deliberate attention…
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Escalate Strategically (Beautiful Trouble – Essay 1)
There is a tendency within highly cohesive political groups to want to turn up the heat. It seems to be written into the social DNA of oppositional political groups: when group members’ level of commitment increases, they want to go further. They want to be a little more hardcore. This tendency toward escalation and increased…
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Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution – Party Tonight
It’s out! And there’s a party tonight (April 5th)! After months of sweat and tears, Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution has hit the shelves! Huge props to Andrew Boyd for herding about 70 cats into writing a whole lot of short, outstanding essays about activism, organizing, creative action, and social change. Beautiful Trouble is…
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Help Us Make Beautiful Trouble
There’s some beautiful trouble brewing, and Beyond the Choir has got caught up in it. We’re part of an exciting collaboration called Beautiful Trouble. It’s a collaboratively-written (and collaboratively funded!) guide for trouble makers. Check out the new video about the project:
Beautiful Trouble is an important new resource for people who…
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 