Negotiating our Words: Co-Building a Glossary for Anti-Imperial Study, facilitated by kimi malka hanauer and Katie Giritlian

A workshop hosted by ungovernable study and Paper Cameras Press at the Los Angeles Koreatown Tenants Union on Sunday, August 9th from 5:30 – 7:30pm 

Negotiating our Words: co-building a Glossary for Anti-Imperial Study invites cultural and community organizers, educators, information workers, and practitioners engaged in anti-imperial [1] efforts to gather and co-build a working glossary of terms as a tool for shared study [2]. Drawing on the facilitators’ interwoven pedagogical and publishing practices, this workshop holds capacity to rehearse the collective negotiation of defining and redefining the terms that ground our work. While this workshop will be limited in its english-language facilitation, participants are encouraged to share the many languages they may carry as part of the collective glossary-building process. We hope to extend the ways this workshop may be engaged and iterated on in the future toward a multiplicity of tongues and points of access. As the facilitators, our role is NOT expert, but co-learners with participants who felt a calling to organize the container in which we still study together.

Co-Building a Glossary 

So often, when political alignment is assumed, groups forego the process of clarifying shared definitions of common terms. While this bypassing often happens in periods of increased repression and urgency, it can water down the intentions and impacts of our shared work. This workshop emerges through the understanding that the negotiation [3] process itself is a fractal of the larger whole: through discussions around our various entry-points into the language that grounds our work, we learn about the contexts that shape our collaborators’ lives and come to deeper understandings of our own. Drawing on lived experiences, hyper-local histories, embodied knowledge, personal relationships and textual references, the glossary we will co-build reaches toward practices of relational citation [4] and language justice [5]. Rather than cementing rigid definitions, our conversations aim to clarify the multiple contexts that inform our words and build capacity to hold their divergent meanings while energizing the intentions of our actions. 

Together, workshop participants will collectively develop a set of key terms and working definitions that may aid in their/our work within our respective contexts. Contributors will be invited to share their terms as part of a wider-reaching collective glossary in the weeks that follow, while the facilitators will support the process and invite contributions from our broader communities. With rigorous consent, communication, and crediting, the final collection will be published as a resource for shared study that can be used and iterated on by other groups. 

This workshop is organized as part of “on the land … in the poem,” ungovernable study’s curriculum of conversations, gatherings, and practices initiated alongside the 59th Carnegie International and organized autonomously in dispersed locations by a myriad of groups and practitioners.  To learn more about “on the land … in the poem,” please visit the curriculum’s webpage ungovernable.study, and to learn more about ungovernable study’s other initiatives, please visit liberatorypractice.org.