Tag: Politics

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10558 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-05-15 19:59:48 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-05-15 19:59:48 [post_content] =>

Why intersex activists are fighting for constitutional protections in Ghana.

To get ahead of the odds against them—an unsympathetic media, a punitive legislature influenced by the American Christian right, and a public uninformed about biological diversity—the intersex movement in Ghana has had to get crafty.

In January 2025, the Ghanaian government announced a new constitutional review process, instituted by President John Mahama shortly after he was sworn in. Its main aims were to “propose reforms to enhance transparency, limit executive power, strengthen checks and balances, and improve judicial and local government structures."

In it, however, the intersex movement saw an opportunity: All of Ghana’s constitution could be reviewed. This included Article 17, which states that all are equal before the law and no one is to be discriminated against on the basis of race, place of origin, political opinions, color, gender, occupation, religion, or creed. If the movement could propose a review of Article 17, they reasoned, perhaps they could amend it to explicitly include that no one could be discriminated against based on their sex characteristics, or if they are of indeterminate gender (intersex).

It seemed like a solid plan.

After several strategy meetings, legal review, and input from constitutional law experts, however, the leaders of the movement realized it would not be so straightforward. Article 17 represented an “entrenched position," meaning a long-held view that was unlikely to change. As such, not only would it be difficult to convince the public of the importance of including intersex people for protection under the constitution, socially; legally, it would also require a referendum to pass.

The intersex movement already had only a few allies among the political class, and based on their findings, they also knew a majority of the public did not understand the concept of indeterminate gender—that someone may be born male with female sex organs, for instance, and should not be discriminated against for something out of their control. Making matters worse, the media also regularly conflated sexuality with gender in bad faith: A slate of investigations by friendly NGOs had revealed some major media organizations had even received funding from anti-LGBTQIA+ rights groups.

They changed tack.

Instead, the movement decided to seek an intervention through Article 28, which provides for the protection of children’s rights. They proposed that the provision be updated to explicitly ensure the recognition and protection of intersex children, who, in Ghana, are currently subjected to “corrective” and “forced” surgeries and medical procedures, according to firsthand accounts reported to Intersex Ghana, the country’s first intersex-led human rights organization.

Specifically, the group hoped to protect intersex children from “medically unnecessary, nonconsensual and irreversible procedures, intended to alter their sex characteristics.” These speculative procedures—sanctioned by doctors and parents without due consideration for the well-being of the child—can have lifelong physical, psychological, and even economic consequences, impairing the child’s ability to make a living in the future, says Lawrence Shone Edem Adjei, director of Intersex Ghana, over a video call.

"At age 14, I have undergone more than six surgeries after non-consensual procedures were performed on me at birth. I feel like the doctors used me for studies,” intersex advocate Emmanuella Kwarteng shared in one testimonial.

Kwarteng’s experience is not an uncommon one, and Intersex Ghana has had to intervene in a number of medical cases gone awry. In one particular case, Adjei recounts that a child had gone through up to eight surgeries over a span of ten years. Initially, their testes were removed, and the child was identified as female. Years later, doctors realized their initial procedure had caused the child to begin bleeding internally during menstruation. An additional surgery then had to be performed to remove the child’s womb.

“It's like just trial and error," Adjei says.

To make the case for intersex children in front of the constitutional review committee, and to prevent this from happening again, the intersex movement put together a murderer’s row of accomplices. Alongside activists like Adjei, this included two doctors, three lawyers, a High Court judge, and families with intersex children who could share their lived experiences.

It was a particularly precarious time: The intersex rights movement was working with significantly fewer resources than it had ever had. Intersex Ghana and other NGOs had been depleted by the U.S.-led funding cuts to pro-LGBTQIA+ rights advocacy groups all over the world, and philanthropic support had dried up.

The movement was throwing everything it had left at this case. Before the constitutional review committee, it had a few propositions. First, that the Ghanaian government provides an additional gender “I” (or intersex) on its Birth and Death registry upon discovery at birth that a child is not identified with one gender. Second, that the Ghanaian government outlaws and criminalizes forced surgeries to deter doctors from performing them, regardless of the demands of the child’s parents. Controversially, by Adjei’s own admission, “We are not in favor of the parents serving consent.” Instead, the movement proposed that the intersex individual be allowed to develop naturally. When the child is of age, they can then make an informed decision on their own bodies.

The advocates made their case to the constitutional review panel, drawing precedent from a case in Kenya. In the 2014 case, Baby A v Attorney General, an intersex child was denied a birth certificate because their sex had been marked with a question mark, effectively barring them from participating in civic life. The court, hedging, declined to admit a human rights violation, but still ordered the state to issue the birth certificate and begin the slow work of collecting data, developing medical guidelines, and contemplating a legal framework for intersex people. As a result of the case, the Kenyan government is now mandated to collect data on intersex individuals, and consider legal reforms and protections for them more broadly.

This landmark court case eventually resulted in an Intersex Persons Bill in 2024 which, among other things, guaranteed the “prohibition of harmful medical practices” against intersex people—including children.

The advocates argued that Ghana should follow Kenya’s example and recognize intersex people as a distinct legal entity, allow for intersex markers in civil documentation, include intersex persons in national census and data gathering, and establish a national commission for intersex individuals. They further argued that the condition of being “intersex” is not in conflict with Ghanaian cultural values by demonstrating support from religious and traditional leaders.

After months of deliberation, which included hearing from anti-intersex and anti-LGBTQ+ groups opposed to the proposed changes, Ghana’s constitutional review committee reached a decision. They recommended to the government that the constitution be amended to “provide for the right of every child to bodily integrity, including freedom from irreversible, non-consensual medical or surgical interventions that are not strictly necessary to preserve life or prevent serious and immediate harm; that the best interests of the child shall override social, cosmetic, cultural or expediency-based justifications for invasive medical procedures; for protection for intersex children, recognising their distinctive vulnerability to medically unnecessary ‘normalising’ interventions carried out before informed consent is possible.”

The movement was thrilled.

Their excitement, however, was short-lived. Soon after the committee submitted its recommendations, anti-intersex rhetoric started appearing in the press. On a national news show, Ghanaian legislator Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah called the proposed protections the “most crucial” part of the constitutional review, claiming the changes would “transform our constitution”—but not for the better.

“We know that these things can be the entrance of LGBTQ,” Awuah said, repeating a common trope widespread in the media that conflates sexuality with gender. “You want to sneak this into the constitution!”

Awuah was not accusing anyone in particular with his statement, but turned to fellow guest Oliver Barker-Vormawor, an activist and lawyer involved in the constitutional deliberations. In response, Barker-Vormawor defended the committee’s recommendations.

“We're saying that these are medical decisions that must be made, not parents using cultural basis to demand for surgeries to be imposed on children,” Barker-Vormawor said, reiterating their intentions.

In reality, the intersex movement in Ghana has gone to great lengths to distance itself from the LGBTQ+ movement as a safety and security strategy. It is also one of the biggest criticisms the movement faces from its potential allies. When an anti-LGBTQ+ bill was first introduced in Ghana in July 2021, intersex advocates campaigned tirelessly for the removal of intersex persons from the law, which included recommendations for surgery and hormonal treatments to “correct” them. Later that year, Intersex Ghana sent a memo to the Ghanaian legislature’s Committee on Parliamentary Affairs, asking for the bill to be thrown out in its entirety. But overall, the movement continues to tread the line between distinction and solidarity with its LGBTQ+ allies as best it can.

Still, some argue the two movements are ultimately inseparable because of their intersections: There are people who are intersex and trans; or intersex and gay.

“The movement has become too medicalized,” intersex and trans activist Awo Dufie Fofie says.

Dufie, assigned male at birth, later discovered she was intersex in her 20s, and initially went great lengths to reverse the growth of breast tissue in her body. At some point, she was taking fifteen pills a day. Upon meeting a queer elder—who had also been born a hypereffeminate male, but had socially transitioned to female in the 1950s—Awo stopped blocking estrogen in her body and instead let her body develop as it would without pharmaceutical intervention.

The intersex movement often has to make its case through visual aids of intersex bodies, Dufie argues, and as such, she believes it has created “a system that becomes a bit puritan about who can rightfully call themselves intersex and who is intersex enough to represent the community.” When Awo decided to transition, she was even advised by a fellow advocate that if she made it public, it would make the intersex movement “look bad."

"It is my sincere hope that intersex advocacy…adopts a much more decolonial framework and approach which embodies and centers the entire experiences of intersex people, such as their everyday lives,” she says. “Not only what medical conditions we have and how much intersexphobia we experience.”

Adjei acknowledges the catch-22 the intersex movement finds itself in, and understands why it believes it has to advocate for itself by providing distinctions between sexuality and gender. But she also believes it must also be in solidarity with the queer movement because of their overlap and intersections—including continued discrimination. “Ghanaians will not differentiate between an intersex person walking by and an LGBT person,” Adjei says. An effeminate but masculine-presenting intersex person is just as likely to be attacked—as has happened in many cases across the country—as a gay man expressing himself in a way that might be considered feminine.

“I was not seen as human growing up… because I had two genitalia,” Comfort Bugre, an intersex person, shared in a testimonial presented to the review committee.

“Growing up, I was isolated from people due to my intersex condition. I was relocated because people found out and started calling me names,” Elorm Enne, another intersex advocate, shared in a separate testimonial.

Currently, the hard-won constitutional review recommendation is in the implementation stage, and the Presidency has set up a committee to see how proposals may be effected.

The intersex movement is counting on seeing three things: First, large scale research on intersex people across the country, both to shed light on the quantitative heft of these protections, and to better understand the prevalence and diversity of intersexuality. Second, mass sensitization and public education across the country’s 16 regions on the harms of corrective child surgeries, in partnership with key institutions such as the Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Civic Education. And perhaps most importantly, the legitimacy of intersex as its own gender, and protection for all intersex people in the country.

The movement is tempering ambition with pragmatism. Advocates are also preparing for an outcome where the recommendation is struck down, or isn’t implemented, either in whole or in part. But if this comes to pass, the movement—with whatever funding it has left—plans to play its trump card. There are a number of government agencies and offices that should be involved in protecting intersex children: medical boards, the Attorney General’s office, the Ministry of Health, local government administrations.

It plans to sue all of them.

Additional Research by Nyameye Kiki Akumia.

[post_title] => "I Was Not Seen as Human Growing Up" [post_excerpt] => Why intersex activists are fighting for constitutional protections in Ghana. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => intersex-ghana-constitution-protection-lgbtqia-childrens-rights [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-05-15 20:00:07 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-05-15 20:00:07 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10558 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

May 15, 2026May 15, 2026

“I Was Not Seen as Human Growing Up”

by Ayodeji Rotinwa

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Nerima Wako Ojiwa on technology, youth-led democracy, and organizing at the speed of crisis.

Peacebuilding does not always unfold slowly.

Sometimes, it happens in moments of crisis—when institutions fail, when violence is imminent, and when the only thing standing between disappearance and survival is collective action.

This is where Nerima Wako Ojiwa enters the story.

As the founder and executive director of Siasa Place, one of Kenya’s most influential youth-led political organizations, Nerima represents a proactive and vital expression of feminist peacebuilding: fast, adaptive, deeply networked, and rooted in solidarity, showing how democracy must often be defended in real time.

From Distance to Determination

Nerima’s political awakening began far from home. In 2012, while interning in Washington, D.C. with Search for Common Ground, she watched conflict escalate in East Africa and felt the weight of distance—geographic and political.

“I felt removed,” she says. “And that made me question not just what was happening there, but what was happening at home in Kenya.”

When she returned, she noticed a gap between activism and politics that led to systemic change. Youth organizations existed, but few were willing to engage in or with politics directly, whether governance, policy, or power. Online spaces for serious political debate were rare.

So, she decided to help create one.

Siasa Place—siasa meaning “politics” in Swahili—was designed as an explicitly political, youth-centered, digital-first space. Its purpose was simple and radical: to give young people room to deliberate about their future, to organize collectively, and to reclaim politics as somewhere they belong.

Feminist Leadership in a Hostile Arena

Leading this kind of space as a young woman in Kenya came with immediate costs. Nerima was in her early twenties at the time—petite, outspoken, and operating in a deeply male-dominated political environment. She encountered disbelief, harassment, and persistent assumptions that a man must be behind her work.

“There has to be a godfather,” people said. Or a rich uncle. Or a political patron.

But Nerima was doing everything herself.

For years, she ran Siasa Place without funding, navigating precarity while building credibility. She also learned—like many women before her—how to protect herself, adapting her behavior to avoid advances from men in ways that reshaped her leadership and hardened her resolve.

Perhaps the most telling moment, however, came later, when Nerima was debating running for office herself—and a male colleague told her she should not run for a women’s political seat because she’d transcended gender entirely. (Kenya has constitutional female quotas in parliament, mandating that no more than two-thirds of members in elective or appointive bodies can be of the same gender. However, the country has struggled to meet this quota, with women holding about 23% of parliamentary seats as of 2022.)

It was meant as praise. It revealed the cost of legitimacy.

Organizing as Peacebuilding

Unlike many leaders trained through formal mentorship, Nerima learned to organize through crisis.

The most recent example still reverberates. In May 2025, activists Boniface Mwangi of Kenya and Agather Atuhaire of Uganda were abducted in Tanzania after showing solidarity with an opposition leader. Nerima helped coordinate a rapid-response network across borders—using encrypted messaging, social media amplification, and collective pressure.

Four days later, both were released.

“They couldn’t kill us because people were making too much noise online,” Agather later told her.

This experience underscored Nerima’s belief that if you are not involved in politics, if there is no good governance, you're not going to be able to have a good—or safe—life. “And that's what we translate in all of our Siasa Place forums,” she says. “This is why you should be engaged, because everything is a political decision.”

Technology, Deliberation, and Power

At Siasa Place, technology is not treated as a single solution but as a menu of tools, deployed intentionally at different moments:

TikTok to raise awareness and funds.
Messaging platforms to coordinate action.
Deliberative technologies like Polis and Remesh to shape policy outcomes.

What Nerima values most about these tools is their refusal of hierarchy. Influence cannot be bought or performed, and participants must think for themselves.

For a generation shaped by influencers and algorithmic culture, this kind of engagement carries real weight—and it works. One striking example: Youth participation through Siasa Place pressured the Kenyan government into withdrawing a proposal that would have cut funding for youth programming entirely. The outcome showed that when young people organize and speak collectively, they can shift policy directly.

Nerima sees her work as bridging the gap between mobilization and meaningful political participation. "We are channeling our people to understand how policy works," she explains, "and why inclusive involvement matters for the betterment of the majority—rather than allowing purely selfish actors to dominate these spaces." She also points to progress on more fundamental challenges, like making information accessible so that people can engage without feeling locked out of the process.

Mutual Aid as Feminist Democracy

Perhaps the most powerful shift Nerima describes is cultural. Kenyan youth—many disillusioned by the state—have begun to act as one another’s safety net. They have raised millions to bail out protesters, cover medical bills, and support families in crisis.

This is not issue-based activism. It is solidarity as infrastructure.

And it is being led, overwhelmingly, by young women.

Refusing Erasure

Before we end our conversation, Nerima raises a final concern—one that echoes across feminist history.

“These movements are being led by women,” she says. “And women get erased.”

Technology, she believes, gives us a chance to interrupt that pattern—to document leadership, to create an archive of memory as it happens, to leave digital footprints that future generations can trace. For Nerima, this preservation is through Siasa Place. But each of us is capable of participating in it—because the act of recording is itself a form of peacebuilding, as is the full spectrum of feminist democratic work today: patient and urgent, institutional and insurgent, grounded in care and driven by courage.

The first step is simply to choose to take part.

[post_title] => We Will Be Our Own Safety Net [post_excerpt] => Nerima Wako Ojiwa on technology, youth-led democracy, and organizing at the speed of crisis. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => nerima-wako-ojiwa-siasa-place-kenya-youth-democracy-movement-technology-politics-global-women-peacebuilders [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-05-15 16:46:48 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-05-15 16:46:48 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10477 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

May 6, 2026May 15, 2026

We Will Be Our Own Safety Net

by Lorelei Kelly

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Diana Dajer on community, technology, and the radical work of democratic care.

In a world increasingly shaped by political violence, authoritarian reflexes, and digital harm, peacebuilding can feel abstract—or impossibly distant. But for Diana Dajer, peace is neither theoretical nor inevitable. It is something that must be built carefully, collectively, and often quietly, through democratic practice.

Currently, Dajer is manager of citizen participation with Fundación Corona, a non-profit based in Colombia. We met in Barcelona after Build Peace, an international gathering of practitioners working at the intersection of technology, conflict transformation, and civic life. Among many compelling presentations, Dajer’s stood out—not because it promised technological salvation, but because it insisted on something more demanding: deliberation, care, and faith in people.

From Conflict to Participation

Dajer’s path into democracy work began not with innovation labs or civic tech, but with the social disruption caused by violence and loss. As a lawyer, Dajer worked on human rights cases for victims of Colombia’s armed conflict early in her career. Later, she joined the Ministry of the Interior during peace negotiations with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement.

While there, she listened closely—to victims, civil society leaders, and government officials. What became clear was unsettling. Violence in Colombia was not only the result of armed actors, but of long-standing democratic exclusion. When local communities lacked meaningful ways to influence policy or solve local problems, violence became one of the few remaining channels for human agency—the capacity to shape their own lives.

“That’s when I understood,” Dajer says, “that participation is the real name of peace in Colombia.”

Rather than focus solely on peace after violence, she turned toward democracy itself: how it is built, who it includes, and how power is shared.

Technology for Care, Not Control

Years later, that commitment would take shape in Bogotá through a rare experiment: a multi-year effort to embed deliberative democratic processes inside city government. Working with the City Council and civil society partners, Dajer helped create a “laboratory of democracy” to test new ways of engaging citizens—especially in a political culture where protest had become the dominant form of participation.

“Protest is essential,” she says. “But when there is no dialogue with institutions, real solutions don’t happen.”

Bogotá’s leaders made a strategic choice to move incrementally. Rather than treating technology as a standalone tool for deliberation, they used it to solve specific process challenges in order to make participation more open, inclusive, and effective. Drawing on behavioral insights to encourage constructive engagement, the team launched a public communications campaign across social media. City Hall’s chatbot, Chatico, helped scale participatory budgeting and created a more transparent, inclusive channel for the civic lottery process. The city also relied on practical, digital tools, which included building websites to support hybrid citizen assemblies and bring in voices beyond those physically in the room. An educational course delivered through WhatsApp prepared participants in advance.

These early pilots evolved into a citywide deliberative process backed by Carlos Galán, a leader shaped by Colombia’s history of political violence. The aim was never speed or one-off spectacle, but trust—built gradually through structured listening and collective reasoning.

In Dajer’s work, technology is never the starting point. It is a tool, carefully chosen, subordinate to context. Used strategically, it can help narrow the distance between governing institutions and citizens, opening new possibilities while respecting its limits. But she emphasizes it should never be the destination.

This ethic traces back to her mentors in the global peacebuilding community, who taught her to ask first: What problem are we trying to solve? And just as importantly: Should technology be part of the solution at all?

Leading as a Woman—with Awareness and Solidarity

Leadership, for Dajer, has always been gendered. “It is more challenging than being a man,” she says without hesitation. Like many women in public life, she learned early to manage others’ perceptions—how she dressed, how she spoke, how authority was read onto her body.

But she is also careful to name her privilege: Gender does not operate alone. Race, class, indigeneity, and access compound exclusion in ways that shape who is heard and who is erased. Conscious of this, Dajer sees her role not just as a leader, but as a bridge—using her position to elevate other women who face even steeper barriers.

What has sustained her is community: women working together across civil society, refusing isolation. Feminist leadership, she believes, is collective by design.

Faith as a Source of Strength

What is less often visible in conversations about democracy and technology—but central to Dajer’s life—is faith.

When asked where she draws strength and clarity, she speaks not of ambition or certainty, but of prayer. One prayer, in particular, guides her: Make me an instrument of your peace.

“I don’t always know where I’ll be needed,” she says. “So I pray for openness. That I can serve—whether the work is big or small.”

Her faith is not about control or moral superiority. It is about humility, discernment, and love—qualities she sees as essential antidotes to polarization. In moments of exhaustion or fear, prayer is a way for her to realign with purpose, especially as she balances leadership with motherhood and family life.

Resisting Authoritarianism with Love and Hope

Dajer is clear-eyed about the global moment. Colombia, the United States, and many other democracies are experiencing renewed threats to the rule of law and separation of powers. For women living through these pressures, she begins with solidarity.

“I see you,” she says. “I see the burden.”

Her advice is strikingly feminist: Resist not only through opposition, but through care. Much of her current work focuses on narrative—how language shapes emotion, and how perceived chaos blends with fear-based messaging to fuel authoritarianism. Facts alone, she notes, rarely counter hate. What does are stories rooted in hope, love, and a shared future.

This extends to digital life. She urges mindfulness about what we consume and amplify online, recognizing how social media can trap us in cycles of rage. The alternative is not withdrawal, but grounding—deep human connection, empathy, and collective action offline as well as on.

Youth, the Future, and Feminist Democracy

Despite everything, Dajer is hopeful, especially about young people. Her organization, Fundación Corona, has shifted its strategy toward youth engagement, informed by research showing that future-oriented democratic narratives can reawaken belief in collective power.

When democracy is framed not as a failing legacy but as a tool to shape the future, young people also respond. Deliberative spaces—especially when designed with care—can help further transform this hope into action.

Building Peace Together

If there is one message Dajer offers to feminists working for democracy, it is this: Do not do this alone. Authoritarianism thrives on fragmentation. Peace, by contrast, is built through collaboration—across differences, across sectors, and across borders.

Agreeing on fundamentals is hard, and deliberation is slow. But isolation changes nothing.

For Dajer, the work continues—not as performance, or branding, but as service. As manager of civic participation at Fundación Corona, she remains guided by faith, sustained by solidarity, and grounded in care. Her work and ethos is a necessary reminder that democracy is not only a system. It is a practice. And women are already doing the work of keeping it alive.

[post_title] => The Long Arc of Peace Is Built by Women [post_excerpt] => Diana Dajer on community, technology, and the radical work of democratic care. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => diana-dajer-global-women-peacebuilders-profile-fundacion-corona-colombia-democracy [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-04-30 23:00:14 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-04-30 23:00:14 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10457 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 22, 2026April 30, 2026

The Long Arc of Peace Is Built by Women

by Lorelei Kelly

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10428 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-04-10 23:52:48 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-04-10 23:52:48 [post_content] =>

How the archival work of librarians and other activists helps preserve more than just history.

In 1979, as the Iranian hostage crisis played on American television screens 24/7, the television producer, librarian, activist, and intellectual Marion Stokes began recording the news broadcasts on tape. The live coverage—across all channels, at all hours—launched what we now recognize as the never-ending, ambient flow of media. Simultaneously, Stokes recognized a shift in the narrative America was telling about itself, and the role of media manipulation toward pro-American policies. So, for the next 30 years, she recorded any and all TV news broadcasts, commercials included. All of it was then archived, stacks of VHS tapes quickly accumulating in her Philadelphia apartment, as portrayed in the 2019 documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.

This kind of project by an individual who operates outside of an institution was a radical endeavor: When Stokes began, broadcast channels didn’t archive their own material, often erasing tapes so they could reuse them due to cost. But Stokes’ project and its often innocuous content would also foreshadow the long-term value of guerrilla archives, both in preserving an accurate historical record and holding the media—and government—to account. Activist archives began as a practice in the 1960s, when organizers filled in the historical gaps where universities and institutions could not. These, however, were collective efforts; Stokes operated individually, until eventually, her son donated the recordings to the Internet Archive, where digitized selections are now available online. “By [Stokes] having that collection, it means the scholars, artists, and researchers have access to the information without paying for it,” says Shola Lynch, filmmaker and Professor of the Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College. “Because when our history is bound up in commercial hands, that's problematic.”

Stokes’ practice of recording any and all materials resembles the history of what is now called “memory work,” or individuals who preserve the photographs, documents, and ephemera of a community. A relatively recent tradition, this form of archiving has taken on new meaning in a digital era where data sets can be wiped and personal data sold, seemingly without consequence. Following the start of the second Trump presidency in January 2025, more than 2,000 datasets suddenly disappeared from Data.gov, the U.S.’s government's data portal. Since then, the Trump administration has overhauled even more data, including entire web pages and important coding tools for researchers and climate scientists.

Over the last five decades, open source tools and government data have been integral to preserving the historical record and maintaining public infrastructure in the United States. According to America’s Essential Data, New Orleanians received smoke alarms because fire departments used American Community Survey (ACS) data to identify neighborhoods most in need. School districts could (previously) make the case for increased teacher salaries using the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) to highlight underpaid teachers. Residents could avoid scams in their community based on federal Consumer Sentinel data. Now, these records are liable to disappear from the internet, possibly forever.

The government is ultimately responsible for preserving a record of its own actions. But when federal agencies are unable to preserve all their data, or willfully choose not to, it begs the question if this work is best done by civil society and those outside of the government. Guerrilla archives—whether digital or analog like Stokes’—are generally nonpartisan acts of preservation to serve the public good. There’s the Internet Archive, which has been archiving the web and other cultural artifacts since 1996, and Vanderbilt Television News Archive, which provides the most comprehensive chronicling of evening television news broadcasts in the world. There’s also the End of Term Archive—one of the largest of these projects in progress—which downloads all government information at the end of each presidential term. It’s a grassroots alternative to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which notoriously did not receive all of the presidential records from the first Trump administration in 2021 as mandated under the Presidential Records Act. (Trump promptly fired the head of NARA when he re-entered office in 2025.)

Despite having distributed its data more digitally over the last 20 years, the government has not issued any dedicated preservation or access strategy for its information. Additionally, the current laws and policies around government data preservation are outdated and inadequate. This hole in the system has compelled librarians to join the race to copy digital federal archives, beginning in 2016 with the Data Rescue movement, which drew over 1500 volunteers for dozens of hackathon-style events throughout the year. “Distrust re-orients care,” researcher Laura Rothfritz wrote in her analysis of these early efforts for Big Data & Society. When a public distrusts a system and a possible threat is identified, however, anxiety can be mobilized into producing future forms of infrastructure.

As the situation becomes more dire, these efforts have only expanded. Today, the Public Data Project runs within the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School, collecting and authenticating all federal datasets, more recently including the Smithsonian Institute’s public domain data. So far, they have downloaded the entirety of Data.gov, copied it, and digitally signed it with a provenance mark to authenticate its origins. The project launched in early 2025 as part of Harvard Law School’s repository system, which dates back centuries.

“I think a lot of us in the library and technology communities are sort of waking up to the fact that we need to have a strategy in place for the preservation and access of government data beyond what the government provides,” says Molly Hardy, the Project Lead for the Public Data Project. Their team also works closely with the Data Rescue Project, a grassroots nonprofit preserving massive data sets and consisting entirely of volunteers.

“Public data infrastructures have long been considered essential components of democratic governance, scientific accountability, and civic participation,” Rothfritz continues in her Big Data & Society piece. Much like our city’s infrastructure, however, we don’t recognize its value until it's broken. It is the invisible fiber that holds democracy together, from our roads and postal service to job numbers and environmental data. Increasingly, its preservation is also a task that has been left to individuals and communities. In October 2025, the nonprofit organization Internet Archive celebrated archiving its trillionth web page on its most popular service, the Wayback Machine, an initiative that allows users to find web page screenshots from specific dates. It has become an essential tool and digital service for independent organizations and guerrilla archivists alike. (The largest archive on the internet, dedicated to “universal access to all knowledge,” has not been without its setbacks however: In 2024, it suffered a data breach affecting millions of users and a copyright infringement case over its digital lending library.)

The Invisible Histories Project, a nonprofit organization based in North Carolina, has been preserving the digital history and cultural memory of LGBTQ+ life in the South using tools like the Wayback Machine. “We could no longer trust institutions to protect marginalized histories,” says Maigen Sullivan, the Co-Executive Director of Invisible Histories. She recalls a community effort at the start of last year to preserve government and university pages with references to diversity offices, along with flyers and photos. According to Sullivan, by August and September 2025, when universities returned to term, about a quarter of those pages were already gone. “This is the only evidence, other than what individuals might hold, that exists,” she says.

Invisible Histories has also built its own server because of mistrust in corporations like Google and Microsoft that store and hold onto their data, another issue facing digital archivists. The organization has endured two cyberattacks—one in 2023, and the other in 2025—since its founding in 2017. Because of this, they’ve considered cybersecurity training and increased security for potential threats against the archive. “If you feel like you're hopeless and helpless and have nothing to do, archiving is a tool of resistance and anyone can do it,” says Sullivan.

These examples of digital mutual aid have become essential for documenting history, and are one way to combat historical revisionism. Activist archives also continue to challenge which institutions have a say in the historical record, nationally and beyond. Zakiya Collier, a Brooklyn-based archivist, says individual archives preserve more than just data. “I think that memory work has a liberatory capacity to it,” she says. “I use that term because it calls on a legacy of people who dedicated their time and energy to preserving history in their homes, communities, churches, attics, and basements. They decided something was important to document and keep.”

Collier, who has worked as the digital archivist in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the New York Public Library, now works with the organization Archiving the Black Web, which trains archivists to document a more inclusive history of the internet. Its potential to create more live archives and documentations of the web aims to contribute to a more equitable historical view of how we catalogue our lives online.

As data and information is getting purposefully disappeared from the internet—an increasingly fertile ground for fascist ideology—archiving becomes increasingly necessary, or else, the public cannot bear witness to itself. In April 2025, the National Park Service erased references to Harriet Tubman on its webpages. The following month, Trump issued an executive order sanitizing federal cultural institutions by accusing the Smithsonian Institute of promoting “race-centered ideology” in its exhibit, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.” The USDA ended its annual survey of hunger in America two weeks before the government shutdown in October 2025, affecting the distribution of food stamps.

Data is information and has become a weapon in the digital age. But both individuals and communities are not powerless to fight back. With the rapid monopolistic takeover of media platforms, it’s no surprise that users are beginning to archive their own data and leaning towards physical media. Sales of vinyl are up, print book sales are rising, and DVD collections are in.

“All archives create futures,” says a voiceover in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, as news broadcasts and infomercials from Stokes’ archive flash in rapid pace onscreen. The organization of information by the lay person may help overcome barriers of the institutionalized index and history, as the threat of excessive online information and its disappearance still looms large for activist archives. But this work has become even more critical, not only for deciding how the past will be remembered, but how an imagined future might pull from its past to mobilize this kind of anticipatory care in the present.

[post_title] => On Guerrilla Archives in the Disinformation Age [post_excerpt] => How the archival work of librarians and other activists helps preserve more than just history. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => guerrilla-archives-activism-protest-history-preservation-politics-marion-stokes-media [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-04-23 15:59:16 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-04-23 15:59:16 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10428 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 10, 2026April 23, 2026

On Guerrilla Archives in the Disinformation Age

by Jessica Jacolbe

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10407 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-03-31 19:27:25 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-03-31 19:27:25 [post_content] =>

Unlearned historical lessons from Jacques-Louis David’s retrospective at the Louvre.

Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersections of art, capital, and politics with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.

Many of us have had enough of living through Interesting Times. As an American raised in the misguided, batshit optimism between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, I often feel as if my adult life has been lit by the glow of a global garbage fire no one conditioned me to anticipate—a garbage fire lit by the US government, and tended to with as much care as it lavishes on the Eternal Flame. For this reason, I was eager to see the monumental Jacques-Louis David retrospective at the Louvre earlier this year: David is, in many ways, the official court painter of Interesting Times. He lived through some of the most shocking regime changes in European history and both painted and propagandized them.

Born in 1748 during the ancien régime, David rose through the traditional, royally patronized ranks to become a painter known for his austere style and his focus on Neoclassical themes. Though socially connected, during the heyday of the salon, he was tormented by a benign facial tumor that impeded his speech, somewhat setting him apart from polite society. When the French Revolution kicked off, he dove into radical politics and befriended Maximilien Robespierre, the architect of the Reign of Terror, which saw some 17,000 public executions by guillotine. David served in government designing festivals, monuments, and uniforms; he also sat on the Orwellian Committee For Public Safety and voted for the death of Louis XVI. When Robespierre fell, David went to prison for the better part of a year, but kept his own head. A few short years later, he rose to prominence once more as the official court painter of Napoleon, outliving the empire, only to die in 1825 in exile in Brussels. Remarkably, this was a voluntary exile: the restored Bourbon King had invited him to serve as court painter, despite knowing David voted to guillotine his brother.

If this Louvre show was any indicator, the French curatorial class is still vaguely terrified of one of its most emblematic painters and unsure of what to make of him, the same way French elected officials are still afraid of an electorate that once managed to chop up its ruling class. The Internet likes to joke the White House would be covered in shit and on fire if Trump were governing France and, there is, perhaps, some truth to this. The French are known as feisty, indignant, and quick to strike or riot in a way that we Americans deem “bad for business.” Each time I’m in the country for any kind of civil unrest, it is not hard to imagine how they conceived of the guillotine, a sublime machine of both political horror and political theater concocted under the cynical pretense of science, democracy, and progress (cf., Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité).

"Napoleon Crossing the Alps" by Jacques-Louis David

A Neoclassical master, David’s most famous paintings include “The Oath of the Horatii” (1785), “The Death of Marat” (1793), “Madame Récamier” (1800), “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” (1801), and “The Coronation of Napoleon” (1807). The show was organized chronologically to chart the violent, winding historical path between these paintings, and David’s relationship to each regime he served. His evolution marks him at best as a cipher, and at worst, the most corrupt hypocrite. But David was hardly alone in changing alliances to survive: Talleyrand, the French statesman and contemporary political chameleon survived five regimes in succession, brazenly switching sides to do so. When he died, Metternich, his Austrian nemesis, sarcastically remarked, “I wonder what he meant by that?” In many ways, that question felt like the animating force of the David exhibition. One could easily assert he was an artist without scruples who went where the moment and money took him. But, that’s too simplistic. David painted the long, strange journey through the phases of one’s life, one’s country, and one’s era. He painted the life and death of ideas and the flesh-and-blood people who lived them; his works testify to the gap between espoused ideals and lived reality—between pulling the trigger and watching the body fall.

Hot-headed and famously difficult from the jump, David attempted suicide the second time he failed to win the Prix de Rome in 1772. His third time was the charm, however, and he proved to be a prescient artist: His themes of stoicism and self-sacrifice conveyed through Neoclassical renderings of Athens and the Roman Republic foretold a great deal of politics and fashion, from the empire waistlines to the rise of democracy in modern Europe. His earliest successful paintings, such as “The Oath of the Horatii”, are impressive, even as they are also re-imagined scenes from a mind untested by political reality. The 1784 painting is literally bloodless: men swear to die for a cause while their wives cry in a corner. Nine years later came “The Death of Marat”, a visceral masterwork of propaganda. Oddly, when I first came upon it in the exhibit, I said to myself, “Welp, there it is,” and meandered into the next room. It wasn’t until I re-entered the gallery, painted green to match the solemn background of the composition, that I realized I had seen a copy: The entire room was filled with painted copies that had been disseminated across France. I turned around to face the utterly electrifying Real One. You didn’t need to know a thing about art to figure out which one it was: a painting of the cold, calculated stabbing of a vulnerable man in his bathtub, the artist’s own murdered best friend, dead for the Republic.

"The Death of Marat" by Jacques-Louis David

David’s political journey is also evident in the gap between his stiff, slightly asexual representation of so many female figures in his earlier allegorical paintings, versus the real and vibrant women he painted with loose brushstrokes and incredible intelligence in his portraits, such as that of Marie-Louise Trudaine. David’s own wife, Marguerite-Charlotte, divorced him in 1789 for being a regicide, but they remarried after he was released from prison, raising four children together who sat for him often. For a painter often criticized as unfeeling, his portraits of married couples are a delight: “father of chemistry” Antoine Lavoisier and his wife (and underappreciated fellow chemist) Marie-Anne Paulze dominates his depiction of them together in the lab; he also painted a tender double portrait of Antoine and Angelique Mongez, simply because they were great friends of his, as an inscription attests.

That he eagerly chased an ideal (or three) is nothing novel or noteworthy, but his art became more compelling the more tested he was by events. The more shit spiraled out of control, the more David understood the power of the narrative—as well as when to turn it off completely. His self-portrait in prison is a high watermark of decontextualizing. It’s a testament to that ever-present gap between our personal political thoughts and our complicated, shared realities. Finding an authentic perspective on that gap is impossible: If the Renaissance painters taught us about visual perspective, David demonstrated that perspective on current events is a lie. In fact, his best use of literal perspective is a metaphorical one. In his great portrait of Comte Antoine-Français de Nantes he shows us the cost of living through Interesting Times: The count, once a fiery, young revolutionary, became a Napoleonic crony. David painted him from below, so he literally looks down his nose at viewers. His contemptuous face and saggy jowls are articulated with unsparing detail, a countenance juxtaposed with and choked out by finery—the lace, the velvet cape, and a medal for the ideals he betrayed along the way. Survival is an exercise in brutality. This sellout—the sellout—David says, is what winning actually looks like. This is the political happily ever after.

I came to this show as a citizen of a different empire presently running amok. France forged the United States’ first alliance and, like so many American allies to come, was left holding the bag. (This should have been a caveat emptor for future allies: Leopards do not change their spots, and Americans do not change their stars and stripes—but we Yanks are, if nothing else, fantastic at sales.) Funds sent to aid the American Revolution helped bankrupt the French crown and sparked a chain of events that cost the French king his head. All the while Thomas Jefferson meddled in The Declaration of the Rights of Man from his Parisian salon, Sally Hemings was enslaved in the next room. From this eventful early alliance, France and the US allegedly share ideals (cf., the Enlightenment), but we don’t exactly share historical roots. One major difference was reflected in a telling piece of wall text in the show: the role of the Catholic church. Next to the OG “Death of Marat”, the curator alluded to how revolutionary France needed martyrs to fill the void left by the abrupt banishment of the Catholic Church and the monarchy. Hours after Marie Antoinette was beheaded, “The Death of Marat” was unveiled at the Louvre, recently changed from palace to museum. That is to say, a cult of the state was invoked to fill the void of state religion.

Self-portrait by Jacques-Louis David

To this New Yorker, it often feels laïcité—the French principle of secularity—demands its own sort of worship. Religious freedom in France looks to me more like a hole in the ground where a Catholic church once was. Rather than a new structure where all are welcome and inclusion is additive, it’s one that demands the sacrifice or sublimation of all other cultural tenets for those wishing to be included. This creates toxic conditions as France wrestles with a number of postcolonial realities, including a large Muslim minority. Those limitations on the public imagination for an honest plurality were, to me, somehow reflected in this state-funded exhibit’s unwillingness or inability to reach final conclusions about David—and his attempts to fill that civic-religious void with new meaning. If America’s fundamental struggle is with equality, France’s is with diversity. Today, the French do not understand their secularity is exclusionary, much the same way we Americans don’t understand our democracy is a fiction.

Unlike France, we never have had a class revolution in the United States. In 1776, a bunch of rich lawyers told a king far away to fuck off, then immediately turned around and did business with him without changing all that much on the ground. That’s why the 13th Amendment is still, somehow, just sinking in. Ironically, white Americans scored many of their freedoms from Britain when the country was still a colony: Even the pope of the Enlightenment himself, Voltaire, envied the British their Parliament and the rights it accorded in the mid-18th century. From France, we may have learned exceptionalism, but we never learned real revolution. In America, the “revolution” was just another nice thing that only rich white people could have; in France, the revolution cost the upper class their heads.

If the French figured out how to stop deifying the king, maybe someday we can figure out how to stop deifying billionaires. And if we do, maybe someone will stay alive long enough to paint the whole drama as it unfolds. Doing so requires vanity, opportunism, gall, cruelty, and a profound degree of hypocrisy. However, it also requires bravery, and for that bravery, David was rewarded with awareness of some very modern dilemmas that keep his work relevant: of knowing it is impossible to portray a scene without altering it; of knowing all art is inherently political; of knowing the stories we tell control our realities; and of knowing that you will be judged as harshly as you judged others—and going through with it anyway, charging into The Void, no matter the cost.

[post_title] => Painting as It Burns [post_excerpt] => Unlearned historical lessons from Jacques-Louis David’s retrospective at the Louvre. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => jacques-louis-david-retrospective-louvre-art-cultural-curreny-history-museum-france-united-states [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-05-07 23:02:27 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-05-07 23:02:27 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10407 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 31, 2026May 7, 2026

Painting as It Burns

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9811 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-01-13 18:45:25 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-01-13 18:45:25 [post_content] =>

With my veganism and other important belief systems in my life, I've decided that being imperfect is better than abandoning my morals altogether.

Three months ago, I ate a cheese pizza. This isn’t exactly headline news, but it mattered to me, because it broke a streak of many months, maybe years, since I’d last eaten dairy. I had been traveling and felt exhausted and defeated, and for whatever reason, the only thing that would soothe me in that moment was a real cheese pizza. I ate it, my tummy hurt, I felt bad. Then, I woke up in the morning and went on calling myself a vegan.

It wasn’t the first time I’d faltered. Although I don’t make a habit of it, since going vegan seven years ago, I’ve eaten dairy a few times, including once, when a Shinto priest offered my husband and I two small cakes during a trip to Japan. (Vegan or not, it felt both rude and disrespectful to refuse.)

These minor incidents could have been opportunities for me to give up my veganism entirely; proof that I’d “failed” or that my efforts were meaningless. But surprisingly, they've instead shifted my perspective: While I’ll never formally reintroduce dairy back into my diet, I’ve decided that being imperfect is better than abandoning my morals altogether.

Recently, I’ve begun trying to apply this grace to other guiding principles and belief systems in my life. There are so many things I care about that it can be difficult to do everything justice: the environment, disability, animal rights, poverty. Because of this, sometimes, it can feel as if living by any kind of set belief system is pointless, that our individual choices make no difference in the much larger fight. We are up against capitalism, war, the meat industry, violence, and some of the most anti-planet government policies we have ever seen. When you feel as if the world is crumbling around you, how much damage is an errant cheese pizza or Starbucks drink or Shein skirt really going to cause? But I believe this absolutism completely dismisses the power of our collective efforts to enact meaningful change, and how much we lose when we abandon our principles altogether.

For me, my mistakes have become a recentering reminder of why I became a vegan in the first place: as a commitment to limiting any damage to the earth and its living things, beginning with what I eat. While I ate fish until I was 10, I have never eaten meat, something that used to shock people more than it does now. My mother was a vegetarian, and when I was four or five years old, I was given the choice to add meat to my diet, but I said no. By then, I understood that it came from the same animals I liked so much, making a stance of ethical vegetarianism feel easy: I loved pigs, refused to watch Bambi, and had never even killed a bug.

Throughout my teens and twenties, as I gained new knowledge and autonomy, my beliefs continued to evolve. I donated to animal charities regularly and started to learn more about the environmental issues we are collectively facing, including how the meat and dairy industries are accelerating climate change. I gave up eggs at 13 and dairy at 19. After seeing a plaice at an aquarium, I vowed to never eat seafood again. This was in the ‘90s and ‘00s, when being a vegetarian (let alone a vegan) was far more limiting than it is today, and not exactly a popular stance. Even within my family, my mother’s choice to raise me as a vegetarian was controversial. During these years, I was ostensibly quiet about my vegetarianism, and took a similar approach when I became a vegan in my twenties. Luckily, Leicester, my hometown in the UK, has a large Hindu and Sikh population, so there were many vegetarian restaurants and supermarkets where I could eat and shop. But elsewhere, I often found myself defending my dietary choices, even when I tried my best not to bring them up.

Over the years, when asked why I ate the way I did, I’d simply say that I did not want to eat animals. But inevitably, people would push back, probing, for example, whether I would eat grass-fed beef or free-range chicken, assuming that if animals had better living conditions for their short lives, I’d agree their consumption was more “acceptable.” But their logic always posited the rights of nonhuman animals in opposition to the rights of human animals, and to me, they’re inextricable: To reject violence and exploitation means to reject it against all living creatures.

My vegan philosophy is continuously changing, but this core belief has not, even as its parameters progress. Lately, for example, I’ve been worried that eating mushrooms might be cruel because of the growing evidence of their intelligence. I’ve also become increasingly aware that other animals such as insects die as a consequence of crop agriculture. It’s difficult to know where my boundaries are, because my veganism is about minimizing harm, which means as I garner information, I reassess my choices. Still, I’m not perfect, because nobody is—especially when our food and agricultural systems make it near impossible to make faultless ethical choices. But my imperfection is also what allows my beliefs to evolve and adapt: Without room to falter, we can’t have space to grow.

Of course, I didn’t always see it this way. In fact, knowing just how difficult and conflicting our moral offerings can be, for a long time, despite mostly living as a vegan, I shied away from the label. I didn’t think I could live up to its standards and I didn’t want to feel any more cast out than I already had as a vegetarian. I couldn’t imagine giving up certain foods like cheese and chocolate for the rest of my life, and I felt embarrassed at the idea of falling short. But as my vegan philosophy evolved to leave room for faltering, I realized that my veganism could be an ideal to aim for, rather than a set state that binds me to guilt when I fail to meet it. Soon after, I encountered a Vox article titled “Vegans Are Radical. That’s Why We Need Them,” that both illustrated and illuminated this very point.

The piece touched on something I have known my whole life: Vegans are unpopular. Part of the reason is because we shine a light on much of the general population’s cognitive dissonance when it comes to animals and food, which can be a slippery slope to exposing an individual’s broader moral hypocrisy. It also explains why, growing up, I pretended to be cool and apolitical about my vegetarianism, and later my veganism—despite both being inherently political. On the outside, I acted as if I didn’t care what anyone else ate or did, but I was lying. On the inside, I cared very much, and still do.

The Vox piece also refers to veganism as an act of solidarity, which it is. By taking the stance that “animals are sentient beings with lives of their own” and imbuing “it into one’s body and everyday practice,” veganism relies on one of the most universal activities we all participate in to enact its politics: eating. But this stance of solidarity can put you at odds with those who ultimately don’t want to feel bad about what they do or eat—especially if you forgo quiet veganism, as I now have. The louder you are about your beliefs, the more you identify yourself with them, and the more shameful it is when you misstep. When I was quietly vegan, I had no one to answer to if I ate a chocolate bar in a moment of weakness.

There is an assumption that, because I am loud about my ethical beliefs, I think that I am perfect and that everyone else should be, too. But this isn’t the case. Furthermore, this aspiration to an ideal while accepting your own shortcomings applies to other values or choices people may aim for, like eschewing fast fashion or boycotting particular brands or corporations. It’s also why our mistakes can so often inspire nihilism: If we can’t change the world on an individual level, why aspire to ethical principles at all? In the end, maybe it’s because our morals are personal, and when we stray from them, we have ourselves to answer to.

When you care deeply about something, as I do, you want to solve the problem completely. And while I do not expect everyone to be vegan, I do want everyone to do what they can to reduce our collective suffering, whatever form it may take. This can feel insurmountable against the tidal wave of people, corporations, and governments that not only do not care, but seem to be actively campaigning to make the world worse than it is. But the good news is that even when you feel defeated or nihilistic, holding steadfast to radical beliefs is how we can push back. Because for every corporation lobbying against our collective well being, there is an organization or movement gaining ground or a small group of people somewhere fighting to make it better. Consider the huge wins achieved by activists against odds that once seemed impossible: improving factory workers’ conditions, regulating Big Tobacco, banning CFCs, and so many more. Small actions build into bigger and bigger wins.

Within my movement, I am inspired by those running small animal rescues and large organizations alike, from World Animal Protection and WWF to Sea Shepherd and the Animal Justice Project. Following and supporting the everyday work of farm rescues like Edgar’s Mission in Australia and Coppershell closer to home always fills me with pride. The work is often thankless, even when these movements achieve big wins, like banning animal testing in certain countries, recognizing animal sentience in the UK or ending whaling for profit. But the love that humans can have for a single lamb rescued from a slaughter auction, despite knowing they cannot save them all, always stops me from giving up.

Reflecting on my own activism over the last 32 years, while I’ve never had the stomach to hold vigil at a slaughterhouse or put my body on the line in a protest, I have stood with people who do. Veganism is, at its simplest, an act of political boycott. I put my money where my mouth is, donating regularly to vegan charities and organizations and frequenting vegan restaurants, supermarkets, and brands. I’ve also co-founded an agency that supports vegan brands and non-profits with branding and copywriting. While it never feels like enough, it’s the only way I know to live my life.

These acts of resistance against the system may be small, but they’re also part of a larger global movement to enact change. The meat and dairy industries have needed to reimagine their advertising to reflect customers’ consciousness, sometimes even tapping celebrity sponsors to polish their image. Some companies have also released plant-based alternatives and reduced their meat offerings. Many others offer buzzwords like “grass-fed” or “regenerative” beef, attempting to tap into diligent meat consumers, despite evidence that it isn’t any better for the cow or the planet. Still, these changes reveal a transformation in societal thinking, and hopefully, there will be more to come.

When I take the long view, even of my own life, there are many more vegetarians and vegans today than there were when I was a child. What’s more, there are more vegan friendly options at restaurants and bars, and fewer eyerolls when you request something plant-based, because even non-vegans might enjoy their morning coffee with oat or soy milk more than they ever did with a cow’s. It isn’t only the availability of options, but shifting attitudes. It has been years since I have sat with a group of people in a restaurant and endured a probing about why exactly I’m ordering a plant-based burger. My choices just aren’t weird or interesting anymore, and that’s a wonderful thing.

When the world isn’t changing as fast as you’d like it to, and when you know the powers that be are against you and your politics, it can be so hard to try, and to keep trying. But the combination of relinquishing perfection, alongside pursuing community and solidarity with like-minded individuals, is how we fight on, slowly and clumsily, knowing there will be missteps. Staying on a path of reducing harm and aspiring to live by our ideals does far more for our individual and collective well-being than giving up after we’ve faltered. This is how we refuse to give into nihilism. This is how we refuse to let the corporations and militaries and lobbyists win. They want, or rather, need you to believe you can’t make a difference, and so you shouldn’t even try. But before we can begin or continue persevering in any radical change in earnest, we must first reject this lie, and continue to aspire to our ethics, each and every day.

[post_title] => Practice Not Perfection [post_excerpt] => With my veganism and other important belief systems in my life, I've decided that being imperfect is better than abandoning my morals altogether. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => morality-imperfection-practice-veganism-vegan-diet-lifestyle-belief-systems-guiding-principles-individual-collective-choice-food [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-01-14 22:38:55 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-01-14 22:38:55 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9811 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

January 13, 2026January 14, 2026

Practice Not Perfection

by Marianne Eloise

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9905 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-01-05 08:02:34 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-01-05 08:02:34 [post_content] =>

How door-knocking for Mayor Mamdani restored my faith in the power of organized people to defeat organized money.

The thought of knocking on a stranger’s door once filled me with dread. It sounded uncomfortable at best, and potentially humiliating, or dangerous, at worst. What if someone slammed the door in my face or said something memorably vicious? I’m a 43-year-old white woman, raised in an upper-middle-class home in Buffalo, New York. My parents, respectively descended from Eastern European Jews and Sicilian Catholics, discussed politics and occasionally attended protests, but knocking on strangers’ doors wasn’t a big part of my childhood.

Yet in the last eight years, as I’ve gotten older and more politically active, I've begun to grasp the value of pushing through that discomfort. In April, before the summer’s Democratic primary, I started knocking on doors for then-New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and continued through Election Day in November. Altogether, I knocked on approximately 2,000 doors, usually with a partner, which was more fun and comfortable, if less efficient, than going alone.

Door-knocking shifts for Mamdani regularly drew dozens of New Yorkers, even in terrible weather, and on Monday and Tuesday nights, when fewer people are motivated to go out after work. I mostly knocked on doors in Brooklyn, where I live, but my fellow canvassers came from all over the city. Some were ideologically motivated, while others had concrete, pragmatic reasons for showing up, like the woman I met who joined a canvass because “the bus I took to get here took 40 minutes to make two stops.” (Making buses fast and free was one of Mamdani’s signature campaign promises.) Or the 40-something Afro-Latino couple who said they came out for the sake of their children’s future, because “right now, things aren’t looking so good.” Other first-time canvassers I encountered included a soft-spoken young woman named Fatima, a heavily tattooed, outgoing 20-something Asian-American guy, a shy middle schooler with her immigrant dad, and a young white man who praised the campaign's “immaculate vibes.”

Together, we reportedly knocked on over 3 million doors.

One reason Mamdani means so much to so many New Yorkers is that he assembled a 100,000-person volunteer army—the largest in municipal history, and one of the most diverse. His volunteer base included young and middle-aged progressives of all stripes, and a substantial subset of Jewish New Yorkers, South Asians, and Muslims. Getting to know my fellow canvassers for hours and months at a time as we worked to expand that coalition was an extraordinary project in a perilous time for democracy. It demonstrated the hope that tens of thousands of us still feel, and how hard we are willing to work to make life better for ourselves and our neighbors.

Given how many doors we knocked throughout the city's five boroughs, the New Yorkers we reached were even more varied than the volunteers. During one general election canvassing shift in Kensington, a young Black woman opened the door to me and my friend Tania, who is Jewish. Although she didn’t initially recognize Mamdani’s name, as we went into our spiel, she realized he was the candidate her boyfriend had urged her to vote for. “Normally I wouldn’t tell a woman to do what her boyfriend says, but in this case, he’s right!” Tania said. (Our new friend smiled.)

Another striking moment came when an older man in South Brooklyn’s Sunset Park unsmilingly asked if I were Mamdani’s daughter. He seemed to be trying to determine why I was volunteering for a man to whom I had no apparent ethnic or religious ties. Why else would I be doing this? Mamdani was not, in fact, my father, I explained, but I believed so strongly in his agenda that I was volunteering anyway. The man kept his face blank. I wondered when someone had last knocked on his door.

Another day in Sunset Park, an older Spanish-speaking woman thanked me and my partner, who also spoke Spanish, for volunteering. She invited us into her home, where she and a small circle of relatives were celebrating her 90-year-old father’s birthday with balloons and cake. I’ll never forget the warmth and intimacy she offered us as total strangers.

In the last eight months, I’ve met Mamdani fans from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Australia, and Canada. None could vote or contribute to the campaign, but some shadowed canvassers and interviewed volunteers, most commonly because they belonged to left-wing political parties and hoped to reproduce his success at home. Although he often emphasized that he was running a local race to benefit New Yorkers, it was clear Mamdani was also inspiring admirers around the world.

In addition to many happy, surprising, and rewarding encounters, I had my share of the awkward, unsettling, and agitating. There was the woman who saw my “New York Jews for Zohran” shirt and pretended to retch; when I moved toward her, thinking she might need help, she screamed, “That was about you, because you want my children dead!” There was the super who ordered us out of his building because we were supporting a candidate who, he falsely believes, “wants to kill all the Jews.” Another woman called my friend Allie “Nazi scum” and said she should just “put on the burqa [Mamdani will require] right now.”

Moments like these were reminders of the ugly racism our politics so often exposes. They shook me: I am rarely around people who would speak this way to anyone, let alone a stranger. But they also strengthened my resolve to work for and with people who lead with love, respect, and decency, and model those traits for others.

As of last week, New Yorkers have made one such person our mayor.

Just before the polls closed on Election Night, Tania and I met a man with two little girls with him on the street in Park Slope. He hadn’t planned to vote and realized he couldn’t make it to his polling site in time with the kids. After he left, I joked that we should have offered to babysit: “We can start delivering on Mamdani’s promise of free child care right away!” We were giddy with pre-election anxiety, and desperate to turn out every last vote.

A short time later, once it was clear Mamdani had won, my friends and I experienced one of the happiest moments of our lives. We were weeping and hugging and singing and cheering at what we’d accomplished together. All the neighbors we’d met on the ground were reflected in the voting blocs he’d won: older, moderate Black voters; young voters, including but not limited to white socialists; and immigrants, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. I’d knocked on doors before, but Mamdani’s campaign showed me just how powerful it could be.

Later, I wondered if we’d ever find a way to recapture that feeling and use it to drive ourselves forward in less happy and hopeful times. Could we love each other enough to keep doing the work that only occasionally produces such moments, even in times when there’s no end, and no payoff, in sight?

I’m still not sure how we’ll navigate this fundamental challenge of organizing. But being part of a political project that attracted the passionate support of New Yorkers in all five boroughs, and sympathizers around the world, has restored my faith in the power of organized people to defeat organized money. And although a huge part of Mamdani's appeal is that he ran on improving New Yorkers' daily lives, he also showed that grassroots campaigning works—and that contemporary politics can be a joyful and loving project that brings people together, rather than an ugly spectacle that thrives on negative attention, exploits our fears, fills us with anxiety, turns neighbors against each other, and leaves us feeling empty, sad, bitter, and alone.

In canvassing for Mamdani and other DSA-backed candidates, I saw how much people are craving community, connection, and fun. We need to create more opportunities like this—to move joyfully toward something, rather than slogging through a sales pitch for a mediocre candidate who’s better than their opponent in hopes of slowing what feels like an endless parade of horrors. In the last year—still emerging from the long shadow of a global pandemic—I’ve embraced more near-strangers than I had in the previous five. Now, there’s a bracing sense of possibility in the air—the unfamiliar feeling that good things can still happen, and we can make them.

[post_title] => Knocking On Hope's Door [post_excerpt] => How door-knocking for Mayor Mamdani restored my faith in the power of organized people to defeat organized money. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => hope-week-door-knocking-new-york-city-mayor-zohran-mamdani-politics-election [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-01-13 18:46:44 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-01-13 18:46:44 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9905 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

January 5, 2026January 13, 2026

Knocking On Hope’s Door

by Raina Lipsitz

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How women play a crucial role in the country's struggle against dictatorship.

Andreina Baduel, a 39-year-old activist from Caracas, Venezuela, had a happy childhood. Growing up with 11 brothers and sisters, she fondly remembers the love and support she received from her parents—how her father frequently took all his children to the beach, or out to dinner at their favorite restaurant. From an early age, she says, her father also instilled in them an appreciation for education, allowing her, in her own words, to "cultivate an intellect and become a better human being.” But at 23, life as Baduel knew it came to an abrupt end when her father was sent to prison.

“My life came to a standstill,” she recalls. “It was a turning point in our lives that affected so many things.”

Baduel is the daughter of Raúl Isaías Baduel, a retired general of the Venezuelan armed forces and former defense minister under former President Hugo Chávez’s regime. In 2009, he publicly broke with Chávez over constitutional disagreements, and accused the then-president of becoming “increasingly authoritarian.” For his dissent, he was sent to prison for the majority of his remaining life, until his death in 2021.

After her father’s imprisonment, Baduel became her family’s main source of moral support. The Baduel family has now been considered dissidents for nearly 17 years, and she also acts as their public mouthpiece—speaking out on their behalf, and ensuring their stories continue to be heard, both in their country and beyond. This has included aiding two of her brothers over the years, who were respectively detained, arrested, and subjected to torture and ill-treatment in prison, under both Chávez’s and current President Nicolás Maduro’s regimes.

“We have been persecuted, harassed, silenced,” Baduel says. “[But] the truth cannot be killed, [and] faith cannot be extinguished. My father’s voice lives in every word we speak.”

Baduel’s story is not uncommon. Like many women in Venezuela, she is known both as the relative of a high profile political prisoner, and as an outspoken activist. Her advocacy on her family’s behalf also exemplifies how Venezuelan women play a crucial role in fighting against the country’s dictatorship, amid Maduro’s human rights violations and in the face of his “reelection” last year. (The win was deemed fraudulent by election watchdogs such as Transparencia Electoral, as well as the international community, including the U.S. and some of the country’s Latin American neighbors, like Brazil and Colombia.)

“Women have a very important role in the opposition movement; but also in sounding the alarm after last year’s election,” says a leader of a Venezuelan women’s rights organization, who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons. Referencing María Corina Machado—one of the country’s main opposition leaders, who recently won a Nobel Peace Prize for her democratic struggle against the country’s dictatorship—the organizer says Venezuelan women have long “been a leading force and a leading voice” in speaking out about the government’s infractions, both at home and abroad. “[Many] women in exile and in the diaspora are also playing a key role,” she says.

This includes women like Violeta Santiago, a Venezuelan human rights activist and journalist who was forced to flee the country after receiving death threats by government-led armed groups. She now continues to write about injustice and the state of human rights in Venezuela from Chile.

But at home, the risks are higher, both for those who speak out and those who don’t. Because of this, everyday women like Baduel have been forced to partake in this fight for their entire adult lives, defining the parameters of their existence from within the nation they call home.

First Arrest

On the day Baduel’s father was arrested by the Venezuelan military, he was shopping with his family. None of them could have known that, except for a brief period of house arrest in 2017, he’d languish in prisons for the rest of his life. This included spending time in La Tumba, or The Tomb, a prison infamous for inflicting white torture on its prisoners. This torture is comprised of, but not limited to, isolation, a lack of access to natural light, constant freezing temperatures, no access to water, and nearly no food.

In 2021, while detained in El Helicoide, one of Caracas’ most notorious penitentiary facilities, Baduel’s father died at 66, over a decade after his initial arrest. According to the official report, he died from “cardiac-respiratory failure” after contracting COVID-19. But his family believes his death was actually caused by neglect, torture, and ongoing health conditions sustained after years of imprisonment without medical care. Juan Guaidó, the main opposition leader at the time, publicly supported this claim on social media, and the United Nations called for an independent investigation. A separate UN fact-finding mission has since concluded that crimes against humanity have been perpetrated in the country, particularly in relation to political persecution and prison conditions.

Through all of it, the Baduel family has remained steadfast.

“We knew our father’s imprisonment and death would change us from within,” Baduel says, wearing a t-shirt that reads “Ser Baduel No Es un Delito” (“Being a Baduel Is Not a Crime”). “We understood it would either bring up the best of us, or the worst of us. And we decided to confront it with faith and hope.”

Brutal Torture

Years before Baduel’s death, two of his sons—Raúl Emilio Baduel and Josnars Adolfo Baduel—were also imprisoned over conspiracy charges. Raúl Emilio, now 45, was detained while attending a peaceful protest in 2014, and released four years later. Josnars Adolfo, now 37, was detained in 2020 and sentenced to 30 years in prison, which he’s currently serving at Rodeo Uno, also known for its brutal torture of prisoners.

“He is imprisoned in a cell of two square meters, where he only has a cement bed and a latrine,” Baduel says. “They physically torture [him]—they beat him, suffocate him, and use electric [torture] on him.” She also says she’s only able to speak to Josnars for 15 minutes each week, from behind a glass wall. “They want to annihilate him, and make other prisoners scared of what awaits them,” she says.

Despite facing an onslaught of harassment, death threats, and government surveillance, Baduel plans to keep fighting. Recently, she received support from The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, who granted her precautionary measures “in the belief that she faces a serious, urgent risk of suffering irreparable harm to her rights to life and personal integrity.” But while there is still no guarantee that her rights will be respected under the current regime, Baduel believes that she and the many other women stuck in the same fight as her are “a fundamental pillar” in defending human rights in Venezuela. “I am the voice of my family,” she reiterates, ”and of all the victims of this regime who are in prison, and who cannot speak for themselves.”

Constant Fear

Sairam Rivas, 32, is another Venezuelan activist fighting for a loved one who she says was unjustly imprisoned by the regime: Her partner, Jesús Armas, 38, has been imprisoned since December 2024.

Rivas is also a former political prisoner herself. In May 2014, while attending Caracas’ Central University of Venezuela for social work, Rivas, then a leading student organizer, was a part of a public camping protest in the capital’s streets. They were speaking out against the militarization of public space, and protesting the recent deaths of multiple young protestors at previous demonstrations. Along with 200 other young people, Rivas was arrested and later incarcerated at El Helicoide, the same prison as Raúl Baduel. With support from her university and international NGOs like PROVEA, Amnesty International, and Foro Penal, she was released after five months, unlike other young people detained that day, some of whom she says were imprisoned for up to three years.

“But the [political] situation then was different to what it is now,” Rivas says. “Back then, we could hire private lawyers, and there were no forced disappearances of dissidents.”

Sairam Rivas. (Photo courtesy of Sara Cincurova.)

She also says she believes the only reason she was not subjected to sexual violence and torture is because her imprisonment was “very famous.” “As a student leader, my case had a lot of visibility on social media among young people,” she explained. The notoriety of her case did not avert all ill-treatment, however. “We had to sleep handcuffed on the floor,” she says. “We were threatened to be transferred to harsher prisons and face torture if we continued to protest in the future.”

A decade later, on June 10, 2024, Rivas would experience a new horror: Her partner, Jesús Armas, was nowhere to be found. Neither she nor his family had received any information about him for seven days, only to discover he’d been “kidnapped” by the government.

Armas had been a part of María Corina Machado’s campaign team, and as punishment following the 2024 election, he was detained, interrogated, imprisoned, and then tortured by Maduro’s regime.

“At this moment, Jesús is still isolated in El Helicoide, and doesn’t have any contact with me or his family,” she says. “The feeling of fear is [constant] in Venezuela, but you cannot think about it because then you become paralyzed.”

Rivas is acutely aware of the pain many Venezuelan women experience, not only as prisoners, but often, as the caretakers and public resistors on their family’s behalf. But she also notes that many Venezuelan women are transforming this pain into action. As she sees it, beyond activism, women must also take on key roles in the opposition, as Machado has, and lead movements that will restructure the civil and political order destroyed by the dictatorship. “Women have a crucial role to play in the construction of a movement of families of political prisoners—a movement that not only fights for their freedom, but also for the creation of historical memory, so that justice can be done and [similar] crimes are never repeated,” she says.

A Venezuelan university professor of social sciences, who also requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, echoes Rivas’ assessment that it is a particularly scary time. She tells The Conversationalist that “every [new] day has become a possibility of chaos.” But despite the enormous risks, women across the country continue to fight however they can.

“After having spent my entire active life as a professor at the Central University of Venezuela, it is very difficult to keep my mouth shut when I see how [our] country is being destroyed,” she says. “But when you open your mouth, [the government] can come and look for you—regardless of whether you are young or old, or whether you live in a middle class or lower class area.”

According to the professor, women’s rights violations have a long, multifaceted history in Venezuela. “More covert at one time, more open at another, more hidden in some places, more open in others—it is permanent and constant,” she says, adding that political prisoners are always treated worse than other prisoners, especially those detained for democratic activism.

Still, fear of imprisonment has not silenced opposition to the government for some, despite the potential cost. As Machado recently wrote on X—while still living in hiding within the country's borders––in the face of a brutal dictatorship and the suffering, torture, and extrajudicial killings it has caused, Venezuelans have continued bravely forging a “formidable civic movement,” overcoming the barriers “the regime built to divide us.”

For Baduel, the years of persecution, and witnessing her family members being tortured, also forced her to confront a personal choice: “to become the best version of myself, or the worst.”

Despite her suffering, she says she deliberately chose to cultivate her humanity, something necessary in the continued fight. “I decided to transform my life for the better, not for the worse,” she says. “To fight for justice in Venezuela; to demand accountability, and to build a historical memory for my family and all those who were tortured.”

[post_title] => The Fight to Free Venezuela's Political Prisoners [post_excerpt] => How women play a crucial role in the country's struggle against dictatorship. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => venezuela-dictatorship-activist-adreina-baduel-raul-isaias-caracas-prison-political-persecution-sairam-rivas-jesus-armas [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-12-16 08:26:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-12-16 08:26:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9814 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

December 3, 2025December 16, 2025

The Fight to Free Venezuela’s Political Prisoners

by Sara Cincurova

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For these five artists, creation is an act of resistance, and anti-colonialism is the methodology.

Ask any serious artist about their methodologies, and you’ll likely learn about the techniques they employ in their work, as well as their daily routines and training regimens; about what inspires and motivates them to create the work they do. Ask these five musicians that same question, and you’ll recognize a pattern in their responses: For Anaís Azul, AV María, slic, Dania, and Amita Vempati, anti-colonialism is the methodology.

Since colonialism itself is actions-based, anti-colonialism is also very much about what one does, not simply what one believes. These artists are all politically outspoken. All come from cultures that have been colonized, but they are also citizens of the world’s most powerful imperial machine: the United States. To oppose colonialism can never just be ideological or intellectual, although those components are foundational. In their art and in their lives, these five musicians contend with that duality, and create as an act of resistance—against their oppression, and against the systems that make them oppressors, contrary to their will.

Anaís Azul

(Photo by Joma Geneciran, courtesy of Anaís Azul.)

Anaís Azul is a queer, nonbinary, Peruvian American vocalist, composer, educator, and activist based in Los Angeles, California. They speak three languages and write music in all of them: Spanish, English, and Quechua, the language of their indigenous Andean lineage. They have a B.A. in music composition and theory, a master’s in performance and composition, and are now pursuing a doctorate in digital composition. With a background rooted in academia, and a socio-political praxis rooted in an amalgam of leftist, populist ideologies, Anaís has developed a clear-eyed vision of who they are: someone who uses their gifts, talents, education, and connections to deliberately subvert the culture of fascism that has come to define the United States, both locally and abroad.

Anaís sings and writes about healing and resistance, and they emphasize the importance of tapping into one’s feelings, especially during bleak times such as the ones we live in. They described playing a recent Pride show, and being the first performer of the day to talk about Gaza on stage.

“It feels weird to just sit here and smile and pretend everything's okay at this sunny Pride celebration,” Anaís said to the crowd. “But there is no pride in genocide. I really hope that my music can bring people into their bodies; into the complexity of reality and into their emotions.”

Anaís believes their acknowledgement of the current genocide helped the audience engage with the layered nuance of the moment: A crowd formed around them in response, and after the show, a line of concertgoers stood waiting to chat with them offstage.

Over the past several years, through their reclamation of Quechua, as well as their learning to play charango, which they describe as “a colonial instrument with an indigenous twist,” the gravitational pull of Anaís’s music has become more and more explicitly oriented towards antifascism. Recently, they started a collective with some friends called RAWR (Rapid Arts Workers Response). The group takes vital information, such as migrant resources or local jail support numbers, and turns them into easy-to-remember musical jingles, which they then spread on social media.They describe their determination to use social media as a tool for subversion, rather than ego.

“In the music industry at this point, even in the indie music world, the obligation to use social media makes me feel like colonialism is at my throat,” they say. “I don't want to feel like I'm aspiring towards viral reels. I want my music to touch people. I want my music to be heard, because I do believe in the healing powers of it, because it has healing for me, and I believe that that will have healing for others.”

AV María

(Photo by Alana Serbiá, courtesy of AV María.)

An indigenous Puerto Rican trans woman, AV María spent her early adulthood studying photography in New York before returning to Puerto Rico in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane María in 2017.

“I was just really disturbed the whole event,” she says. “It was hard to see my family struggle, queer folk struggling on the island, and I chose to come back. I've been here for seven years now.”

Hurricane María’s aftereffects were horrendously compounded by the supreme neglect of the colonizing U.S. government, both in Washington, DC, and through locally installed politicians; some of which the island still deals with today. Once home, AV María began to pursue music, in part with the goal of lyrically confronting these same oppressive power regimes. In 2020, she worked with renowned reggaeton producer, Eduardo Cabra, to release her first single, “Casablanca,” which is an indictment of colonial government structures as a whole. She was invited in 2024 to perform “Casablanca” at Transmission, which is New York City’s premiere trans music fest.

Since then, AV María has become known for her catchy, feminist, political music and videos, such as the sapphic anthem, “TOTONKA!" She’s now working on an album that focuses on her internal landscape, which, she says, these days, often looks like rage, depression, and sadness, largely due to the state of the world.

“It's very hard to feel helpless when such brute power is in control,” she says. “I have my own personal powers, you know, but as a Puerto Rican trans woman I feel like I don’t have any real systemic power. That's been really, really, really hard; to balance out hopelessness and hope. Sometimes it's difficult to imagine a future in which we all still exist.”

To cope with these feelings, she communes with nature, and with other trans and non-binary people, something essential to her well-being.

“I also feel like having a non-binary philosophy is very important in decolonizing our systems, so I definitely try and really embed it into my music and my writing,” she says.

slic

(Photo by Corey Jermaine, courtesy of slic.)

Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, slic grew up in Florida before attending Amherst College in Massachusetts. At school, they had a political awakening while participating in student protests during the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2014, and after graduating, moved to New York City, where they’ve remained politically active ever since.

“In 2020, between COVID and the uprisings, I shifted what matters to me, what I pay attention to, and what kinds of relationships I have with people,” slic says.

These days, slic is a hyperpop musician, producer, DJ, and video editor. They spend a large amount of their time organizing for tenants’ rights in New York City, as well as using their performances and social media platforms to draw attention to Israel’s U.S.-funded genocide of Palestinians and to raise money for their friend in Gaza. They say that, both as an artist and a person, community is what keeps them going.

“I have a lot more people in my life now than I did in 2019 who share my values; share my politics,” slic says. “Now, if I see an opportunity to act on something politically, I have the ability to do something about it because I've built relationships with people who will join me.”

Lately, slic has been turning to traditional Venezuelan music as blueprints for both communal creativity and strength. They are drawing inspiration from Afro-Venezuelan tambores, which arrived to the Americas with enslaved Africans and is used as a tool for communication, community, and spirituality; and tonadas de ordeño, a style of Venezuelan “work songs,” which are traditionally sung communally to calm cows during the milking process.

“I was always looking for a way to feel less alienated. The way that we organize life [in America]—the individualism of it, the commodification—I think art can do things to break that,” says slic.

Dania

(Photo by Adam Ginsberg, courtesy of Dania.)

Based in New York City, Syrian/Croatian American singer/songwriter Dania used to spend her summers in Syria before the war. But ever since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime last year, she’s been feeling a lot of mixed emotions about what the future holds for Syrians, as a whole.

“I don't think anyone truly understands what Syrians went through over the last…however many years,” she says. “I’m happy Assad is gone. He destroyed so many families, including my own; so I feel a cautious hope, [but] then also worry. ‘Tumultuous’ is the best word to describe what I’m feeling.”

To counter feelings of hopelessness, Dania uses her growing career and platform to amplify the causes that matter to her. She prefers to perform at community events, including solidarity and aid fundraising efforts for places like Palestine and Syria. But, beyond that, she says that her music helps her cope with her feelings about the world; it also helps her process her emotions and contextualize them, and herself, within her various cultural identities.

Arab femininity factors heavily into Dania’s highly aestheticized music, videos, and performances. Influenced by the 1970s, she makes use of rich, traditional color palettes and vintage fashion motifs from throughout the Arab world. On her Instagram, she talks about being a curvy woman, and the importance of valuing cultural beauty standards beyond Eurocentric thinness. In 2024, she released a song called “Listen,” whose main refrain contains the line, “Arab girls always pretty.” She performed “Listen” at a recent block party in Queens, and was overjoyed at the response from the crowd.

“There were these young Arab girls there. And when I performed the song, I got to see them dance around to, ‘Arab girls always pretty,’ and it was so affirming,” she says. “I was like, ‘This is what I want to do. This is the moment that I'm working for.’”

Amita Vempati

(Photo by Benjamin Loveless, courtesy of Amita Vempati.)

Amita Vempati is an Indian American singer and the Development Manager for Artistic Freedom Initiative, which is a nonprofit that helps refugee artists throughout the world in their relocation efforts.

For several years prior, she worked as a program coordinator for the Brooklyn Raga Massive, a collective of musicians focused on creating events, albums, and education within classical South Asian music. Through her recent work with the collective, Amita helped produce several series showcasing artists from marginalized South Asian communities, an experience that she says helped her understand her own identity as a descendent of a more privileged Indian caste.

“I think many people don't know this, but the dynamics of castes, and the system of socioeconomic segregation, really follow people into the diaspora and become trends here, too,” she says.

In addition to her community work, Amita describes undergoing a personal evolution rooted in music. Born with a natural love of performing, she was raised to believe that in order to be worthy of getting on stage, she had to be a nearly “perfect” musician. They were also confronted with devaluations of non-Western art.

She recalls a time when her parents encouraged her to quit Indian classical music. “They said that colleges would prefer [if I played] Western classical violin,” Amita says.

Amita says that she internalized capitalist and colonialist standards of perfection that hindered her from being able to see their true artistic potential.

Now in her thirties, Amita is a very serious student of folkloric musical traditions from the Balkans, Turkey, and India, and travels the world to perform in various festivals and choirs. She is passionate about advocating for folkloric art as an incredibly valuable human asset: a site of both cultural preservation, and an opportunity for cross-cultural connection. As an artist and someone who works in the industry of folkloric performance arts, Amita stresses the need for both individual artists, and arts institutions, to be consciously anti-colonial.

“It’s really critical that when you engage in an art form, you strive to become aware of everything that that art form brings in its practice,” she says. “That can include anything, down to the composition, the form, the space that you're performing in, the audience that you're performing for.”

[post_title] => How to Be an Anti-Colonial Musician [post_excerpt] => For these five artists, creation is an act of resistance, and anti-colonialism is the methodology. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => anti-colonialism-musicians-artists-anais-azul-av-maria-slic-dania-amita-vempati-music [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-11-25 23:14:23 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-11-25 23:14:23 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9778 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

November 25, 2025November 25, 2025

How to Be an Anti-Colonial Musician

by Delilah Saul

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9582 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-11-11 01:01:14 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-11-11 01:01:14 [post_content] =>

Three trans service members speak out on the military ban, and the rise of transphobia in the United States.

I met Commander Emily Shilling in April 2024 during a Lesbian Visibility Week panel celebrating LGBTQ+ women in leadership. I immediately found her both warm and intriguingly different. When I asked if she had ever flown upside down, the absurdity of posing such a question to a Navy test pilot sparked laughter, and a friendship.

After Trump’s reelection and his vow to reinstate a ban on transgender military service, my filmmaking partner Rivkah Beth Medow and I knew we had to respond. The growing anti-trans narrative wasn’t just a culture war skirmish, it was a symptom of something deeper and more dangerous: a coordinated effort to undermine democratic norms by turning vulnerable groups into political targets. We reached out to Emily, who saw our project as a way to turn a dark moment into a new mission: protecting her troops. When she shared that she’d voted for Trump in 2016 before coming out as trans, we all recognized how potent—and powerful—her story arc could be.

We initially intended to make a short film centered on Emily’s experience, but it became clear that there was a bigger story to be told. Emily has always understood the power of storytelling, and through her leadership role and deep respect in the trans military community, she connected us with several compelling voices across all branches of service.

Alongside Emily, we cast Navy Petty Officer Paulo Batista and Army National Guard Chief Warrant Officer Jo Ellis for a feature documentary, Fighting Forward. The film follows these three trailblazing transgender service members as they continue to navigate career threats, legal battles, and rising political hostility. And yet, despite this constant onslaught, one of our most interesting discoveries as the project has progressed is that each of our heroes remains completely committed to serving their country. Each, too, has taken a completely unique path in moving forward.

This kind of service—steadfast, principled, and often invisible—is precisely what democracy requires to survive. But the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, especially within government institutions like the military, are not isolated. They are part of a broader attempt to consolidate power by eroding the rights of those who don’t conform to a narrow, exclusionary vision of America. Efforts to push trans people out of public life, out of service, and out of legal recognition are not just discriminatory—they are anti-democratic. They chip away at the very idea of equal citizenship.

Equally chilling is the growing political rhetoric around using the U.S. military to "fight crime" in so-called "Democrat-run cities." Deploying the military against our own citizens, especially in diverse urban areas that overwhelmingly vote for progressive policies, is a direct threat to democratic governance. It weaponizes fear to justify the erosion of civil liberties and the silencing of dissent. This is precisely why it matters who serves in the military, who leads it, and whether or not they believe in the rights of all Americans: When the military is redirected to silence dissent at home, it stops defending democracy, and starts dismantling it.

Rivkah and I believe wholeheartedly in everyone’s right to belong. While we chafe at the military’s hierarchical system, feel appalled by their budget allocations, and are devastated by the environmental and human cost of war, if we have a military, then we want it to be representative of the country that military is fighting for. Not because of “woke ideology,” but because inclusion reflects democracy; and without it, we risk losing the very principles this country claims to defend.

The best way we know to shift culture is through telling nuanced stories amplified through impact campaigns that spark transformative conversations, policy change, and solidarity. While making this film, we’ve been surprised to find a strain of patriotism rising in us. It’s of an abolitionist and civil rights provenance, aligned with hope of what our democracy can possibly be. With the world around us on fire, both literally and figuratively, Fighting Forward has offered us a concrete way to challenge stereotypes, clarify misconceptions, and seed the culture we want for the United States.

Disclaimer: These interviews have been edited and condensed for length and clarity. The opinions expressed reflect the personal views of those interviewed, and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Military or Department of Defense.

Navy Commander Emily "Hawking" Shilling

Photo courtesy of Emily Shilling.

Why did you first enlist?

The Navy’s motto at the time was “A Global Force for Good,” and I believed it, wholeheartedly. I believed in service, in being part of something bigger than myself. I couldn’t imagine sitting on the sidelines when I had the ability and the drive to make a difference. So I chose adventure, to stand and fight for all those who couldn’t. Maybe it was naive, or self-aggrandizing for the scrawny nerd I was, but I believed the worst sin of all is to do nothing in the face of evil.

What does it signal more broadly that trans people are now banned from joining the military?

It’s a betrayal of the very ideals the military claims to uphold. We say we’re a merit-based force, one where what matters is your capability, your integrity, your commitment. When we start disqualifying people simply because of who they are, we’ve abandoned that principle. If identity, not performance, is grounds for exclusion, where does that line stop? It's not just unjust. It's dangerous. The military must be made up of the people it swears to protect; otherwise, those that are different tend to become the unprotected.

What do you want people to know about the ban, how it’s impacting you, and what it means for the U.S.?

I want America to understand this isn’t abstract, it’s affecting real people, with real lives, families, and responsibilities. I’ve worn the uniform for over two decades. I’ve deployed in combat. I’ve led teams and flown missions that mattered. And now, people like me—qualified, capable Americans, patriots—are being told we’re not welcome, not because of performance, but because we were brave enough to say who we are. That should alarm every citizen. This ban doesn’t just hurt trans people, it undermines the strength of our military and the values we claim to defend. A country that believes in liberty and justice for all shouldn’t be in the business of telling patriots they’re not allowed to serve if they don’t match the reigning political party’s “perfect mold”.

Emily (foreground) with her wife, Amanda. Photo courtesy of Emily Shilling.

What, if anything, is giving you hope right now?

I find hope in those who refuse to accept silence as safety. People are organizing, speaking out, pushing back against the narrative that some of us are less worthy of dignity or service. Your voice matters.

I find hope in my fellow service members and veterans, who are standing together in solidarity. Many of them have seen what leadership really means, and they know it has nothing to do with gender or politics and everything to do with integrity, skill, and trust.

I find hope in how many people outside of uniform are waking up to what’s happening. They’re realizing this isn’t just about trans people, it’s about whether we will be a nation that honors its promises, and continues to fight for the dream of a more perfect union.

And personally, I find hope in simply still being here, able to speak the truth out loud, to show up for others, and to remind people that we’ve been through dark times before and when we have organized, when we have stayed loud and connected and human, we have never lost. And, if we have the moral courage to fight, we will win this time, and every time.

What can readers do to support trans service members?

1. Raise your voice. Contact your elected officials. Let them know you oppose discrimination in the military and support open service. They do pay attention to public sentiment, and silence helps no one.

2. Challenge misinformation. Whether at your dinner table or your workplace, don’t let transphobia or fear-mongering go unchecked. Educate yourself, then share accurate, humanizing stories, especially about those who serve.

3. Support organizations doing the work. Groups like SPARTA, Modern Military Association of America (MMAA), and Minority Veterans of America (MVA) are fighting daily for the rights, recognition, and safety of LGBTQ+ service members and veterans. Donations, signal-boosting, and volunteering all help.

4. Connect and care. If you know a trans service member, reach out. Let them know you see them, support them, and appreciate their service. It’s not always about grand gestures; sometimes, the quiet affirmation that we’re not alone gets us through.

Army National Guard Chief Warrant Officer Jo Ellis

Photo courtesy of Jo Ellis.

Why did you first enlist?

I wanted to serve my country. Service is in my blood. I’m a patriot and I come from a family of military service.

What does it signal more broadly that trans people are now banned from joining the military?

It means our country will lose out on patriots like me who volunteered to sacrifice for the country. It means instead of a military based on meritocracy, it’s now a military based on political ideology. Instead of selecting the best person for the job, we are excluding an entire category of people for no justified reason. It’s pure animus. Service members were told they could serve openly and now we are being punished for coming out under a previous administration.

What do you want people to know about the ban, how it’s impacting you, and what it means for the U.S.?

Thousands of deployable service members are being purged from the military without regard to readiness, cost, or experience. Service members are being sent home from deployments, command positions vacated without replacements, and no plan to recoup qualified personnel. We can’t shortcut a decade-plus of military experience.

Photo courtesy of Jo Ellis.

What, if anything, is giving you hope right now?

I believe in the great experiment that is the United States. We can be better. It’s not big percentages that make the difference in this country. It’s in the margins. 1%. 1% better each day. It’s the aggregation of marginal gains that lead to exponential results. Maybe that’s quixotic, maybe I’m the greater fool. I’ll wear those as a badge of honor. This country was founded by greater fools.

Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Paulo Batista

Photo courtesy of Paulo Batista.

Why did you first enlist?

I enlisted because it was a dream since high school to serve in the military, inspired my by older brother who served for 20 years in the Air Force. Due to the "Don't Ask, Dont Tell" policy and me becoming my father's caretaker after high school, I could not join right away and had to wait until later in life.

What does it signal more broadly that trans people are now banned from joining the military?

It means military readiness will be affected. Many transgender military service members play a vital role in all branches. We are enlisted to officers, and removing us from our jobs will leave gaps in many areas, including deployments. The military will lose great leaders with experience in their areas of expertise that cannot be replaced easily.

What do you want people to know about the ban, how it’s impacting you, and what it means for the U.S.?

That being transgender in the military does not affect military readiness. We meet the requirements and standards implemented to service our country. However, more importantly, transgender service members have been serving for decades in the military, making our military more effective.

Unfortunately, per the new policy, thousands of effective service members, including non-transgender members, will be affected. It's a domino effect when the gap is created. Pulling a transgender service member from their job means that other service members will have to cover down for that unmanned position, ultimately causing more stress on the other service members by making them work longer or go on longer deployments, thus taking service members away from their families and causing more strain on other service members and their families, declining military readiness instead of increasing it.

Furthermore, the ban causes harm to all the transgender service members due to the DD214 [Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty] rating that the policy implements, giving a rating that ultimately labels transgender service members a national security threat, thus affecting our futures and ability to continue our careers, even though we all served our country with honor, courage, and true bravery.

Photo courtesy of Paulo Batista.

What, if anything, is giving you hope right now?

The one thing that gives me the greatest hope is my community and trans siblings. Seeing others standing tall and seeing the ones who tell me they get hope from seeing me stand loud and proud against the current environment instead of going quiet.

What can readers do to support trans service members and veterans?

If allies and friends are looking to help, the best ways start with reaching out to their representatives and congressional offices. Helping influence their decisions is vital, as that is the way to make the changes we need. Otherwise, I would say be a voice for transgender service members when we cannot speak. We are a limited number of voices, and need a vast audience to spread the correct information and hopefully educate the ones who are willing to listen.

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November 11, 2025November 11, 2025

“I Find Hope in Simply Still Being Here”

by Jen Rainin

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9177 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-09-02 20:19:11 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-09-02 20:19:11 [post_content] =>

How one word has birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance.

A few months ago, I was at a protest in Washington, D.C. This was not unusual. Gaza burns. The president deports with impunity. Respect for the rule of law—notably and especially by the government—now seems like the nostalgic artifact of a more innocent era, an era merely months ago. Unsurprisingly, for those of us moved by these simultaneous horror shows, expressing our anger through protest has become almost unremarkable. I’ve lost count of the number of protests I’ve attended, the catchy homemade signs I’ve crafted and seen, and the clever chants I’ve memorized. But at that particular march, something unusual happened: a chant-leader exhorted us to cry a word in my mother tongue, Urdu.

“Azadi!” she called.

“Azadi!” the crowd responded in unison.

Suddenly, the word seemed everywhere: scrawled in chalk across sidewalks and columns; emblazoned across signs. In the heart of the nation, the seat of its power, everywhere, that old watchword of uprising—Azadi.

Azadi, or freedom, is a small word. A scant five letters in both English and its original Farsi (آزادی), these five letters have birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance, having been shouted by students in Srinagar and Tehran, whispered in prison cells in Ankara, and sung by women in Kashmir and Delhi. A cry familiar to all children of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diaspora, myself included, Azadi is hymn, music, and lifeline. It’s a demand for dignity from its callers and from all those who answer the call.

This demand is expansive in scope and depth, inclusive of the dignity of life, of identity, and of the ability to govern your own political destiny. Azadi evokes our collective memory that freedom is claimed, not given, while narrating a people’s unified struggle for systemic social change. For those who seek the protection of the most vulnerable while preserving the dignity of all, Azadi is always within reach.

Still, for all that Azadi is, we must be clear about what it is not. It is not a slogan to be selectively invoked. It is not a justification for state violence. Azadi cannot mean the protection of innocent life only when politically convenient. Moreover, it becomes meaningless when uttered by those who do not uphold a politics grounded in human dignity. Nowhere was this distinction starker than in a recent televised address, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu briefly switched from English to Farsi while commenting on Israel’s bombing of Iran. “Women, life, freedom. Zan, zendagi, azadi,” he said—invoking the slogan of the Iranian women’s rights movement. In that moment, the language of liberation was co-opted to justify the machinery of war. It was surreal to hear a feminist chant—professed often by Iranian women defying authoritarian rule—repurposed by the very man overseeing the brutally indiscriminate bombing of thousands of women and girls in Gaza. The slogan, stripped of its radical roots and repurposed as rhetorical cover, stood in direct contradiction to the grassroots movements that had once breathed life into it.

Creeping autocracy in the United States has for too long been ignored and shrugged off as a dysfunction that happens only in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Global South—the lawless other. But this careless, arrogant posture can no longer be supported, nor can the dangers of autocracy be reduced to a foreign export; and so, Americans chant Azadi now, because America needs it now. The past 100+ days have exhibited what the marginalized in this country have always known: that the greatest repression within America’s borders remains homegrown. Despotism collapses the political distance between nations and times, and just as fascism is rising globally, it has risen here. The myth of American exceptionalism falsely preached that our democracy was immune to the spell of demagoguery. But we know that Americans are just as capable of voting themselves into tyranny as any other people. White supremacy, toxic masculinity, and violent inequalities in rights and liberties were always part of the country’s domestic architectures. Now, from the streets to digital silos, they are plain for all to witness.

From Hungary to India, Israel to the U.S., authoritarian regimes the world over are in conversation, looking admirably upon each other. They swap notes in class, sharing tactics of repression, like aggrandizing executive power and politicizing independent institutions. But just as authoritarian regimes learn from each other, so too must we build solidarity across movements. The rhymes of history—from the surveillance of Black radicals in the U.S. to the targeting of Kashmiri students in India—demand collective study. And along with any new lessons that may arise, we must continue to echo the lessons of some of our most beloved visionaries. From Angela Davis to Edward Said to Arundhati Roy, we are reminded that global resistance is strongest when deeply rooted in local struggle.

In fact, therein lies Azadi’s greatest power: It crosses borders, languages, and faiths, moving between nations without itself becoming nationalized. It is a global grammar of defiance.

Language lives. It breathes, grows, reproduces. Azadi has done so, too, absorbing every movement and tongue it touches: Farsi, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashto, Punjabi, English. The precise journey of the word is contested; after all, linguistic borrowing is never an isolated event. Still, it carries an expansive genealogy of struggle through its travels: against gendered violence, against settler colonialism, against religious nationalism.

While I heard cries for Azadi in D.C. for the first time this year, in Indian-occupied Kashmir—the most militarized zone on earth—Azadi has been invoked for decades, having been part of the Kashmiri liberation movement since its inception. Yet as Modi’s India forbids conversations about the region and brands it as sedition, as students and organizers are arrested for expressing their desire for freedom, as the indigenous Kashmiri struggle for self-determination persists—Azadi remains the movement’s heartbeat.

Long serving as the anthem of the Kashmiri separatist movement, now that Azadi can no longer be expressed in the open, it hides itself in art or in niche digital spaces not yet subject to state discipline. Digital speech, however, is increasingly policed. On platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Indian authorities now block, geofence, or suspend accounts that challenge its narrative. Content from advocacy groups like Stand With Kashmir is censored using the same tools of repression that platforms in the U.S. deploy against pro-Palestinian activists—algorithms, shadowbanning, keyword suppression. Surveillance and censorship, previously characterized as exclusive to so-called illiberal regimes, are now a feature of the liberal democracies just catching up.

As all this occurs, state actors escalate their repression of dissent in the United States. Trumpism has made it clear what can and cannot be said: speech critical of the Trump administration is met with swift retribution; and speech challenging domestic and foreign policy is quickly vilified, as seen by the vicious response to ICE protests in California earlier this summer. Meanwhile, students protesting for Palestine in the U.S. now face the same brutal state retaliation we’ve long associated with authoritarian regimes abroad—even though the U.S. has always had its own archive of violent suppression, from the surveillance and silencing of civil rights activists and abolitionists to the the crackdown on anti–Vietnam War protesters after them. Today, much to Trump’s delight, some of the most prestigious law firms have capitulated to executive pressure, agreeing to perform approximately $1 billion worth of pro-bono labor for Trump’s retributive pet projects. Activists and pro-Palestine advocates have been doxxed, fired, expelled, and/or blacklisted. All the while, institutional liberalism bends the knee: DEI offices that once promised safe harbor for marginalized voices now fall silent or side with power; liberal media outlets fire staff who speak out against atrocities in Gaza. The suppression of speech, criminalization of protest, surveillance of dissent—these are global patterns, and we are not exempt. Arguably, if American exceptionalism matters here at all, it will be in its ability to normalize this authoritarian bent worldwide.

And yet resistance continues. The same dignity Azadi rallies for abroad is now demanded here. On the steps of American universities. In its hallowed institutions. At the foot of the Capitol.

For all that Azadi gives, it demands something of us—namely that we do more than simply bear witness. When we chant Azadi, we are not just echoing other movements, past and present, but entering into dialogue with them, from Kashmir to Kabul to Tehran. This is not mimicry, but lineage, as Azadi reminds us in every generation that our rights are not guaranteed and must be renewed through struggle.

It is not enough, then, to be the appreciative, passive inheritor of a tradition of resistance; one must mobilize. This means texting rideshares, learning how to administer basic first aid for those whose names you don’t yet know, and tracking jail releases of those who you just met and marched alongside. This means disagreement without collapse, and accountability without exile. This means spending hours in rooms with bad lighting and too many opinions, trying to move toward consensus anyway.

If Azadi is to continue to mean something lasting, we’ll need to carry it beyond the chants—into policy fights, mutual aid networks, protective kinship, and more. Because Azadi is not metaphor, it is mandate, and requires all of us to answer its call.

Call and Response:

Hum kya chahte? Azadi!
What do we want? Freedom!

Chheen ke lenge—Azadi!
We will snatch it—Freedom!

Hai haq hamara—Azadi!
It is our right—Freedom!

Zor se bolo—Azadi!
Say it louder—Freedom!

Hai jaan se pyaari—Azadi!
We love it more than life—Freedom!

Tum kuch bhi kar lo, hum leke rahenge—Azadi!
Do what you want, we will still win it—Freedom!

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September 2, 2025September 3, 2025

America Needs Azadi

by Safiyah Zaidi

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8525 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-06-05 18:35:51 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-06-05 18:35:51 [post_content] =>

We don't just need more women in office. We need a culture shift.

I once believed that the presence of a female leader signaled real progress—a sign that gender equality had taken root. As a girl growing up in China, I watched with admiration as women like President Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan and President Park Geun-hye in South Korea rose to the highest offices in their respective countries. Their success seemed to promise a future in which women’s voices would be equally heard, equally respected—that perhaps women might finally be seen as equals.

But as I began to study gender and politics more deeply, particularly across East and Southeast Asia, that initial optimism gave way to unease. Representation alone, I realized, does not guarantee change. Even more alarmingly, the symbolic presence of women in power can obscure the systemic barriers that continue to shape—and often silence—most women’s participation in political life.

Globally, this problem has proven surmountable. In Scandinavia, gender quotas and institutional reforms have helped elevate women to between 40% and 50% of parliamentary seats, reflecting not only a shift in numbers but a broader cultural embrace of women as political leaders. Similar gender quotas in Mexico—which elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, last year—have led to women making up 50% of seats in congress, after gender parity was enshrined in the country’s constitution in 2014.

In contrast, however, East and Southeast Asian democracies continue to lag behind—not only in representation, but in the structural support needed to close the gender gap. Japan, for example, despite being one of the world’s largest economies, has seen little progress in this area. Women occupy roughly 16% of seats in the national legislature—a statistic that reveals not just electoral imbalance, but deeper societal expectations about leadership, gender roles, and public legitimacy. As of April of this year, the percentage of women who hold parliamentary seats in India (13.8%), Cambodia (13.6%), Malaysia (13.5%), Sri Lanka (9.8%), and Bhutan (4.3%) remains even lower. And in China, there have been no women in the politburo since 2022, something the United Nations has flagged as a matter of great concern.

So, are women truly gaining power in Asia, or are they simply there to make politics look more gender equal?

Analyzing data from the Asian Barometer Survey suggests the reason women’s political participation remains low in Asia is as much a numbers problem as it is a cultural one. Founded in 1971, the ABS is a cross-national survey that aims to gather “public opinion data on issues such as political values, democracy, governance, human security, and economic reforms.” In a 2020 academic paper from the University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Sarah Liu, one surprising finding from the 2010–2012 survey was how the gender of the interviewer affected women’s answers. Faced with female researchers, women opened up about their political beliefs. With male interviewers, many of them hesitated. This suggests a much deeper problem with Asia’s gender divide, rooted in women feeling both uncomfortable with and unwelcome in politics.

Across many societies, not just in Asia, politics is still seen as a man’s domain, where women are expected to support, not lead. But in East and Southeast Asia, where traditional gender roles continue to shape public and private life, this attitude is amplified. Even in modern cities, women are constantly told that politics is not their space. For me, it wasn’t that anyone said I couldn’t be a leader when I was growing up—it was that no one ever expected me to be one. And when women are constantly told that something isn’t an option for them, it makes sense that, eventually, they might actually start to believe it.

When women do step forward to lead, they also face a very different kind of scrutiny to their male peers. Their private lives are often judged more harshly than their professional ones, and given as much attention, if not more. When Tsai Ing-wen became Taiwan’s first female president, critics focused on the fact that she was unmarried—as if being single made her unfit to lead. But when it comes to unmarried male leaders, no one ever even thinks to question it.

The media frequently contributes to this double standard. I remember watching coverage of Shoko Kawata, a 33-year-old woman who became the youngest female city mayor in Japanese history after winning her election in Yawata, Kyoto Prefecture in 2023. I was furious that the story’s focus was not on what she’d said in her speech, but on what she was wearing. Other reports also emphasized her love of tea ceremony and traditional kimono attire—while barely mentioning her actual policy goals. Her agenda had been reduced to its aesthetics: her clothes were that day’s headline news, while her policies went overlooked.

Even within political institutions, this bias persists. In Japan, a young Tokyo assemblywoman was once heckled by her male colleagues while speaking about the need for better childcare policies. This incident occurred in 2014, when Ayaka Shiomura, a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, was addressing how the government might better support mothers in light of Japan’s drastically decreasing birth rate. During her speech, several male lawmakers interrupted her with sexist remarks such as “Go and get married!” and “Can you even have children?” One of them, Akihiro Suzuki, later admitted to the heckling and publicly apologized. But the incident sparked widespread outrage, and served as another stark reminder of the entrenched gender bias in even the most formal of political spaces.

Fueling all this is the deeper issue that women are still expected to prioritize the family above all. This problem isn’t singular to Asia, but nonetheless, it feels especially pervasive here: Even in the public sphere, women are still trapped in private expectations. When a woman chooses public service, some see it as a betrayal of her “real” duty. The media asks, “Can she have it all?”—a question they’d never ask of a man, and one that has never been asked of a father.

These attitudes don’t just make the job harder. They make women question whether the space was ever meant for them. And in many ways, it still isn’t—something that keeps women out of politics, and keeps everyone, regardless of gender, chained to the status quo.

Yet, despite persistent challenges, women politicians in Asia have continued to make remarkable strides. President Tsai and President Park both shattered historical barriers to ascend to the highest levels of national leadership in their respective countries, proving that women are more than capable of leading. They also both drove meaningful social and economic change during their terms—even in systems not designed for them.

As the first woman president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen and her administration actively pushed for gender-equal policies, earning Taiwan the top spot in Asia—and one of the highest rankings globally—for gender equality. One particularly meaningful initiative was an amendment requiring companies with more than 100 employees to provide childcare facilities—helping to ease the burden on working mothers. Tsai also supported policies that loosened loan restrictions for women entrepreneurs and promoted female participation in the economy as a path to structural change.

Beyond legislation, she repeatedly called for dismantling gender stereotypes and encouraged women to participate in public life—raising both the visibility and legitimacy of women in leadership. Under her eight-year tenure, Taiwan’s economy grew steadily, with an average annual GDP growth rate of 3.15%, and even reached 6.6% in 2021—a rare achievement during global economic uncertainty.

Park Geun-hye’s presidency, meanwhile, offered a different but equally important approach to leadership. While her administration made more modest progress on gender-specific reforms, it recognized the challenges faced by working mothers and proposed expanding childcare services to support female employment. More broadly, Park’s role as a woman navigating a traditionally male-dominated political landscape was also deeply symbolic.

Under her leadership, South Korea expanded its global economic footprint by signing free trade agreements with 52 countries, including China and Vietnam—bolstering South Korea’s export markets and international competitiveness. These policy efforts, though not always framed through a gender lens, reflected a broader vision of national growth, with women as increasingly visible participants.

Tsai and Park’s contributions—each shaped by their own context—highlight the transformative power and potential of women’s leadership. For millions of women across Asia, seeing them in positions of power—on television, in parliament, in international headlines—continues to deliver an enduring message: women belong here. And their presence alone continues to inspire others to imagine what is possible when women are no longer the exception.

Change won’t come overnight. Cultural shifts take time. But every honest conversation, every woman who speaks up, every moment of resistance matters—so hopefully, one day, girls growing up in East or Southeast Asia will see women in power and think: “That could be me.” Not because it’s rare, but because it’s normal.

To achieve this, we don’t just need more women in office. We need political systems that respect their leadership, media that reports on their work—not their wardrobe—and societies that stop measuring women by outdated standards. We need women in Asia to not just be seen in politics, but truly heard.

[post_title] => When Will Women in Asia Be Seen as Leaders—Not Exceptions? [post_excerpt] => We don't just need more women in office. We need a culture shift. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => women-leaders-asia-politics-tsai-ing-wen-taiwan-park-geun-hye-south-korea-government-gender-parity-equality [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-09-12 17:06:55 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-12 17:06:55 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8525 [menu_order] => 14 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 5, 2025September 12, 2025

When Will Women in Asia Be Seen as Leaders—Not Exceptions?

by Sun Youyang

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