New Book! Out January, Pre-Order Now

Cover image of Love in a F*cked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell, Together

My new book will be out January 14, 2025!

Around the globe, people are faced with spiraling crises, from the pandemic and climate change-induced disasters to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, genocide, racist policing, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. More and more of us feel mobilized to fight back, often dedicating our lives to  collective liberation. But even those of us who long for change seem to have trouble when it comes to interpersonal relationships. Too often we think of our political values as outward-facing positions again dominant systems of power.  Many projects and resistance groups fall apart because people treat each other poorly, trying desperately to live out the cultural myths about dating and relationships that we are fed from an early age. How do we divest from cultural programming that gives us harmful expectations about sex, dating, romance and friendship? How do we recover from the messed up dynamics we were trained in by childhood caregivers? How do we bring our best thinking about freedom into step with our desires for healing and connection? Love in a F*cked-Up World is a resounding call to action and a practical manifesto for how to combat cultural scripts and take our relationships into our own hands, so we can stick together while we work for survival and liberation. Pre-order through Bluestockings and get 15% off with the code F*CKED<3.

Click here to watch the webinars I did with Fireweed Collective over the last four Valentine’s Days about dismantling the romance myth, which capture some of the themes of the book.

Videos: Romance Myth Webinar Series Updated with 2024 Video

I had the pleasure of collaborating with Fireweed Collective again to put on a fourth installment of my Dismantling the Romance Myth webinar series. The fourth webinar focuses on how we get caught in fears of abandonment and engulfment and what we can do to act in alignment with our values when those fears show up. Below you’ll also find the prior years’ videos and links to the slide decks from each year’s webinar.

Fourth Webinar with ASL:

Fourth Webinar with Spanish Interpretation:

2024 Webinar Slides

2023 Webinar:

2023 Webinar Slides

2022 Webinar:

2022 Webinar Slides

2021 Webinar:

2021 Webinar Slides

EVENT: Should Social Movement Work Be Paid? January 5, 2023

Should Social Movement Work be Paid?

Thursday, January 5, 2023

7PM EST/ 4PM PST

Sponsored by the Patricia Wismer Professorship in Gender and Diversity at Seattle University, and BCRW

REGISTER HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dean-spade-should-social-movement-work-be-paid-tickets-483783729157

Picture of a button on a shirt that reads “I was gonna fight for liberation but we didn’t get the grant :(“

The COVID pandemic and George Floyd/Brionna Taylor rebellion of 2020 brought new attention to the role of mutual aid work in surviving crises and organizing resistance. People started thousands of projects giving out food, rent money, and bail money, doing errands for each other, providing childcare, emotional support, transportation, and other essentials. Many people learned more about the histories of mutual aid in social movements as vectors of survival and mobilization. The long-time critique of non-profitization of social movements reached newly politicized people as debates surfaced about whether to register mutual aid projects as non-profits. 

In this talk, Dean Spade will explore a vexing question being discussed in many movement groups: should people be paid to do this work? Should groups should seek funding to create staff positions or stipends for people participating in the work? Is it a matter of racial, economic, gender and disability justice to pay people to be part of movement groups? Does the process of raising money tie groups too closely to philanthropists or governments? Does paying participants limit the potential growth of movements? Is payment the best way to recognize labor in groups? Is paying people a good way to reduce barriers to participation? How does paying people impact the culture of social movement work? Does it institutionalize the work? These questions have immediate practical significance, and also unearth larger themes about what it means to do resistance organizing within capitalism where people are demobilized, isolated, and struggling to meet basic needs. 

This event is a continuation of the Building Capacity for Mutual Aid Groups workshop series, which started as a series of four online workshops led by Dean Spade:

Workshop 1 – No Masters, No Flakes! (October 28, 2021)

Workshop 2 – Decision-Making (November 11, 2021)

Workshop 3 – Skills for Abolitionist Practice (December 9, 2021)

Workshop 4 – Bringing New People into the Work (January 20, 2022)

ACCESSIBILITY

ASL and live transcription will be provided. This event is made possible by the Patricia Wismer Professorship in Gender and Diversity at Seattle University.

Workshop Series: Building Capacity for Mutual Aid Groups

October 2021-January 2022 I am offering this series of four workshops about how to meet common obstacles facing mutual aid groups. For each of the posted workshops, you can find the slides, links to resources mentioned, templates of proposals I discussed in the workshops, and other tools in the links below each video here. The last in the series is coming up January 20. Register here.

WORKSHOP 1: No Masters, No Flakes

Group culture, capacity, overwork, procrastination, and perfectionism in mutual aid groups.

Presentation slides (PDF)
Results from the live polls (PDF)

Resources
Dean Spade: Facilitating Conversations about Capacity in Mutual Aid Groups (video)
Dean Spade: Burnout in Mutual Aid Groups (video)
Building Capacity for Mutual Aid Groups (Workshop 2): Decision-Making (video)

WORKSHOP 2: Decision-Making

Slides
Poll results

Resources
Dean Spade: Facilitating Conversations about Capacity in Mutual Aid Groups (video)
Dean Spade: Burnout in Mutual Aid Groups (video)
Building Capacity for Mutual Aid Groups (Workshop 1): No Masters, No Flakes! (video)
Consensus (Direct Democracy @ Occupy Wall Street) (video)

WORKSHOP 3: Skills for Abolitionist Practice

Live transcription is available here.

A workshop with Dean Spade about giving and receiving feedback in mutual aid groups.

Resources

WORKSHOP 4: Bringing New People Into the Work

More videos from this series:

Resources about the Role of Lawyers in Social Movements

People who are considering going to law school are already started or finished law school ask me about this question a lot. Here are some of the things I have put together over the years that may be useful.

Here’s a captioned video from a recent presentation at Northwestern: “Fighting to Win: The Roles of Lawyering and Law Reform in Liberation Struggles”.

Here’s a captioned video of a May 2021 conversation with Stanford Law students about the role of lawyers in movements and how people who are in law school or have graduated from law school can be of service to movements. Here is a captioned video recording from an event titled “What Every Activist Should Know Before Going to Law School” hosted by the University of Washington’s Legal Pathways program in April 2020.

And finally, about ten years ago I published this short essay in the lefty law journal Unbound about the myths that mislead a lot of people who want social change to think they should go to law school, and the realities people should know before going. I think it is still a pretty good summary of the issues.