New feature: resources
Helping you help yourself. To learn more, and do better
A key mission of A Different Drum is to empower our readership. To act, or become activists, for and within their communities. This doesn’t necessarily mean big protests or being arrested. Activism can mean many things: it can often overlap with charity, or just ‘being a good neighbour’. Our hope is that we allow people to take small, incremental steps to make the world around them better. Not just for themselves, but for their communities. Some might like to point to the Christian exhortation “love your neighbour as yourself” (as well as other similar sentiments in other religious or humanist traditions). Our neighbours are not just those who look like us and live like us, not just those in our immediate surroundings. We think that our neighbours are anyone with whom we can find common cause.
We’re not just activists, though, even if it’s a big part of our public facing mission. We come from both activist and academic mindsets. We want to learn and teach – and take that knowledge into the real world, to create real change.
However, the mindsets of academia and activism often conflict.
In academia, novices are introduced to material and given guidance. What are the complexities and contradictions within a particular discipline, the pitfalls you might fall into? What are the various directions in which an enquiry might lead? If you come in at the right point, it can be incredibly accessible and beginner friendly. But of course, there’s often a big divide between thought and action. Honing your thoughts is very important in academia. And it’s a profound privilege to come into academia as a guided novice (student): impossible for many, and cost prohibitive for many more.
Activism often doesn’t have time for many of those questions. There are changes we need to make. You’re expected to be up to date with the news, the lingo, the complexities. There’s often little tolerance for misunderstandings, even suspicion when people aren’t fully informed. This is understandable given the number of bad faith actors and methods out there – and the urgency that almost always underpins activism. There just isn’t time to hold your hand.
We need to both learn and do. To access the knowledge that empowers us to make a difference, and to not be held back. And we need help doing so – which means opening ourselves and our movements to more people. But neither academia nor activism are equitable spaces for those coming, looking to improve themselves and do better.
Sadly, we’re mere mortals. It’s not a problem we can fix. But we draw from the camps of activism and academia, and we find enormous value in both. We’d like to create a dent in this problem.
Over time, we aim to do two things. One is to provide various resources to improve your skills around critical thinking. Not what to think. How to approach problems. Even in fields where you lack background knowledge (let alone expertise), how do you find reliable sources? What makes a reliable source? How do you check your biases, and the biases of the material you read? What role do social media algorithms play in these biases? It’s not easy, and it’s not always fool-proof, but it’s a skill you can work on.
Critical thinking is one of the most valuable resources we have, to make sense of this world. Where communities have fractured and there’s a widespread sense that authorities have betrayed our trust, We share that sense of betrayal. A world where barriers to publication are in constant flux and may no longer be an indicator of quality or reliability.
The second thing we want to do is to offer you some resources that we’re curating. One of the challenges of our activism – and a lot of the activism we’re aligned with – is that it’s intersectional – that is, we recognise that a person’s life is affected by numerous facets of their identity and experience (such as, but not limited to, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and religion). Trying to only consider one of these issues increases the artificial nature of the exercise. Either we only deal with a subset of a group (such as middle class white women), or we strip essential elements of people’s experience, risking creating meaningless analysis.
But obviously, trying to consider so many facets of identity is quite complicated and requires a lot of background reading. We consider it the lesser of two evils. A form of feminism dedicated to a 1960s American middle-class woman will do little to help Brazilian women in favelas or indigenous women dealing with generational trauma following the violence of colonialism. “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit!”
We can’t quite hold your hand as you come to grips with all of this – like all activists, time is somewhat of the essence and we’ve got a lot we want to achieve. But we believe that our goal is also, in large part, education. So in the spirit of our academic underpinning, we can give you the tools, to help you get there yourself.
We will be gradually adding resource pages for you, our readers, to use to educate yourself. On different aspects of intersectionality, critical thinking, and similar topics. These will be separate from, and in addition to, our regular posts.
These resources are absolutely not exempt from critique. On the contrary.
Both academia and activism are iterative processes. We learn, we act, we improve, we grow. As we do that, our positions might change, or we might learn more about particular positions or sources. We might come to this with training, experience, and having spent time actively engaging with materials, but that doesn’t mean we’re perfect, that we’ve seen everything, or that we don’t have room to grow ourselves. We welcome constructive critique and suggestions.
What resources do you think are important for people to read to learn more about the world around them, particularly in the context of social justice, critical thinking, and/ or marginalisation? Please do comment below (we’ll always give priority to online resources that aren’t behind a paywall, so that more people can access them).
If you appreciate what we’re doing here, and would like to support our work, please subscribe, and consider supporting our work on our Ko-fi page.
Thanks for providing tools to help people be more effective change makers.
As a long time activist, I find respectfully listening to others is a great way of learning. Knowing that we're all equals who help and educate each other is an attitude that helps me.