Even if we don’t get to see it, we’re gonna die trying: Radical organizers dreaming of liberation within a late stage nightmare

Abstract

I curate a collage of excerpts from conversations with community organizers about their wildest liberation dreams, i.e. their most expansive desires, aspirations, and imaginings of liberation. This is a part of a larger oral history, archival, and auto/ethnographic research project in which I amplify approaches to community organizing that aim toward transformation and intentionally build connections across fronts of struggle. I make sense of this dreaming process through poetry and prose, attending to the emotional and analytic dynamic and the shifting meaning of the ‘I don’t knows.’ Narrators’ responses point to the importance of aspirations in guiding action and remind us that liberation dreaming is not only about or bound to the future. May this curation of responses/dreams(/nightmares) and shimmers of hope continue widening space for ‘unimaginably’ grand possibility amidst daunting conditions that threaten to shrink it, and inspiring collective action toward the ever-emerging horizon of liberation.