On this page, you will find free downloadable eBook resources I have created on topics related to conflict transformation, social justice, somatics, and sex education. I encourage you to use and distribute these liberally, so long as credit is given to me as their creator.
Currently, there are two eBooks available:
1. SO YOU’RE READY TO CHOOSE LOVE – A workbook on trauma-informed, anti-oppressive conflict resolution
2. THE VILLAGE AND THE WOODS – A book-length essay on social panic and cultures of punishment and social exile as they exist across the political spectrum; this is also a general response to the social dialogue on cancel culture
3. FLOCKING TOWARDS JUSTICE: SUPPORT PODS IN ACTION – A slide deck mini-resource on how to effectively use the “support pod” strategy first innovated by Mia Mingus and the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective as a grassroots crisis response.
SO YOU’RE READY TO CHOOSE LOVE – Free Conflict Transformation Workbook
This free digital (and printable) conflict resolution workbook is intended as a gift and humble offering to anyone looking for trauma-informed, anti-oppressive conflict resolution resources. While SO YOU’RE READY TO CHOOSE LOVE is self-published in the tradition of queer zines and open source knowledge sharing, it is in many ways a practical companion to my more anecdotal/theoretical essay collection, I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE, which is distributed for purchase through the wonderful Arsenal Pulp Press.
Please feel free to share SO YOU’RE READY TO CHOOSE LOVE as widely as you like – however, I ask that you please not sell the work and that you give credit for it. The exercises and diagrams this book are my own creations, influenced heavily by teachers, authors, and practitioners I admire in the fields of Transformative Justice, Restorative Justice, mediation, polyvagal theory, psychology, and somatics. They include but are not limited to: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, adrienne maree brown, Mariame Kaba, Dan Siegel, Pat Ogden, Betty Pries, and more. There are further references and reading lists in the book itself. I’m also deeply grateful to the donors to the GoFundMe Campaign who made this work possible.
I hope this work is helpful to you. Thank you for choosing love.
THE VILLAGE AND THE WOODS: ESSAY ON SOCIAL PANIC – Free eBook
The Village and the Woods: An Essay On Social Panic, Purity Politics, and the Left is a map, an extended metaphor, and a prayer. It is a response to longstanding and emotionally intense polarities within progressive political communities on responses to conflict and harm, social exiling as a practice, and the devastating impact of dogmatic political puritanism on social movements and marginalized communities. In short, it is my response to the “cancel culture” debate.
Using a mythopoetic lens and creative non-fiction as the guiding structure for this piece, I attempt to find my own understanding and generate a helpful set of concepts and guidelines for understanding and resisting social panic and punishment culture. This eBook is likely to be challenging and perhaps even controversial, as it directly challenges some prevalent cultural norms in progressive spaces and compares Leftist dogma to its right-wing counterparts.
I am deeply grateful to Carly Boyce and Caffyn Jesse for their reading and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay.
The Village and the Woods is for anyone who has ever felt lost among their “own kind,” and for the Monster that lives within us all.
FLOCKING TOWARDS JUSTICE: MUTUAL AID & CRISIS SUPPORT PODS IN ACTION
This is a slide deck of maps and ideas on how to effectively use the “Pod Mapping” strategy developed by Mia Mingus and the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective as a grassroots, community-based response to crisis. I created this resource in part due to overwhelming demand from individuals struggling with the question of how to navigate abuse and cancel culture in activist communities, but I have also used this strategy in a wide range of other contexts. If you are a person who has recently experienced harm in activist community and you are wondering how to put TJ into concrete actions to support yourself, this resource is for you. If you are a person who has recently been accused of harm in activist community and you are asking yourself the same question, this resource is also for you.