Workshop #3: The Hologram: On the conversation on Palestine

Please join us in this workshop session where we are going to talk about the conversation on Palestine. Everyone is welcome!

The genocide in Gaza is a topic that is being thoroughly discussed among students at the university and around the world. Many students join demonstrations, direct actions or activist gatherings to do their best to say no to the crimes against humanity done by the Israeli military and government. However, it can still be nerve-wracking to partake in discussions about the conflict, even though many students feel united in the need to appeal to the people in power to put an end to the genocide.

This Hologram session raises questions about how we can talk about Palestine at our university in a way that centres collective health and life while bringing us closer to justice and liberation for all Indigenous people. Together, we will talk about our experience of the genocide in Palestine using The Hologram protocol. This may help us learn and feel what it would take to communicate about politically difficult and socially spiky issues in ways that generate support and energy.

About Cassie Thornton

Cassandra Thornton is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). Her 2020 book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is available from Pluto Press.

About OIKOS

The climate is changing. As a result, human life and how we take care of each other and our world is also changing. The environmental crisis can, consequently, be understood as a crisis of care. The research project “OIKOS. A Cultural Analysis of Care and Crisis in the 21st Century” will investigate the nexus of care and crisis through cultural analysis of works of literature, visual and performance art. By focusing on the care practices of parenting, maintaining, and regenerating, OIKOS shifts the perspective from the existence of a warming planet to human existence it.