Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

By Nora Samaran

“Violence is nurturance turned backwards,” writes Nora Samaran. In Turn This World Inside Out, she presents Nurturance Culture as the opposite of rape culture and suggests how alternative models of care and accountability—different from “call-outs,” which are often rooted in the politics of shame and guilt—can move toward inverting cultures of dominance and systems of oppression. When communities are able to recognize and speak up about systemic violence, center the needs of those harmed, and hold a circle of belonging that humanizes everyone, they create a revolutionary foundation of nurturance that can begin to repair the harms inflicted by patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Emerging out of insights in Gender Studies, Race Theory, and Psychology, and influenced by contemporary social movements, Turn This World Inside Out speaks to some of the most pressing issues of our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AK Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781849353595

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to the many people who have been part of bringing this book into the world, who shared ideas, critiques, edits, support, and encouragement. I would like to thank my editor at AK Press, Andrew Zonneveld, for meticulous editing, for believing in the project from day one, and for kindness as the generative work took its twists and turns. Thank you additionally to Charles Weigl, Zach Blue, Molly Uzzell, Colin Beckett, Suzanne Shaffer, and the AK Press collective, who all work tirelessly to bring challenging, ethical books into the world and get them onto bookstore shelves and into readers’ hands. Thank you to Cindy Milstein and Tanya Andrusieczko whose editing of significant sections of the manuscript was indispensable, and to Nat Marshik, Shanaya Nelson, and Rebecca Coates for clerical, formatting, and proofreading support.

An enormous thank you to the contributors, Aravinda Ananda, Serena Bhandar, Alix Johnson, Natalie Knight, Ruby Smith Díaz, and the anonymous contributors, for sharing your wisdom and expertise in these pages. Special thanks to cover art designer Siana Sonoquie whose tremendous cover beautifully captures the spirit of the book. Thank you to Kit Dobson, Ben Korta, Wayde Compton, Agustina Vidal, Maryse Mitchell-­Brody, Jeff Derksen, David Chariandy and Sophie McCall, Michael Barnholden, David Gray-Donald, Jónina Kirton, Larissa Lai, Proma Tagore, Benjamin Lefebvre, Marshall Soules, Steve Collis, Gillian Jerome, Tuval Dinner, Dorritta Fong, Laura Moss, Clarissa Rogers, the Institute for Anarchist Studies collective, and others, too many to name, for encouragement, advice, and belief in this work that helped me believe in it too. Thank you to Harsha Walia, Harjap Grewal, David James Hudson, and Gwen Benaway, whose generosity in reading and discussion at various stages of the project transformed the way I think, and for your willingness to turn toward and challenge me. I am grateful for your insight and generosity of spirit. Thank you to Proma Tagore and Yasmin ­Jiwani for critiques on an earlier project that significantly shaped the direction of this one. Thank you to all of my department and faculty colleagues at Douglas College, for cultivating a caring workplace. Thank you in addition to Deans Meg Stainsby and Manuela Costantino for support, and to my colleagues Janet Allwork, Liz McCausland, Dorritta Fong, and Wilhelm Emilsson, for kindness around accommodation when in their role as department chair, which made more of a difference in my life than I can properly express. Thank you as well to Dorritta, to Ivanna Čikeš, Jasmine Nicholsfigueiredo, Nancy Earle, Leni Robinson, Farah Moosa, and colleagues from both Douglas College and Simon Fraser University who have come out to events, lent their moral support and encouragement, and generally made this project more meaningful, and more possible, than it would have been otherwise.

I would like to acknowledge a significant intellectual debt I owe to the No One Is Illegal-Vancouver collective 2004–2009, including Harsha Walia, Harjap Grewal, Mandeep Dhillon, Andrea Lofquist, Valerie Zink, Magín Payet Scudellari, Tracey Jastinder Mann, Sozan Savehilaghi, Proma Tagore, Nassim Elbardouh, Cecily Nicholson, and others, who taught me much of the analysis that underpins this work and that continues to inform my thinking every day.

Thank you to The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, including Hiromi Goto, Wayde Compton, Andrew Chesham, my amazingly encouraging and supportive mentor group, and the TWS 2018 cohort for helping hold up this project.

Thank you to Miranda Worthen, Simon Dougherty, Christopher Lyon, Ian Caplette, and Tasha Bassingthwaighte, for decades of ethical rigor and care in friendship that continues to help me learn and grow, as well as to David Zinman, Gillian Jerome, Swathi Nirmal, Kai Rajala, and Curtis Burrowes for insights that have helped shape this work. Thank you to Eve Rickert, AV Flox, Chelsey Rhodes, Gwen Warman, Pepper Mint, Chach M. Heart, Aida Manduley, Eva Blake, and the rest of the Badassery crew for sharing vital resources and for seeing together. Thank you to Rachel Zellars, whose McGill class on Black feminist theory and organizing was eye opening and worldview-shattering in the most necessary of ways. Special thank you to Kira Page, Alix Johnson, Jon McPhedran Waitzer, Avi Gross-Grand, Simone Lucas, David Zinman, Karine Rogers, Leetal Cuperman, Lily Schwarzbaum, the pod who taught and learned with me, and without whom this and much else would not have been possible.

Thank you to Dahlya Smolash and James Noyes, Leetal Cuperman and Dan Spiegelman, Shanaya and Shane Nelson, and Tom-Pierre Frappé-Sénéclauze, who have over and over again caught me when I fell, and whose immeasurable care, meals, laughs, and safe places to hide and heal have repeatedly set me back on my feet. I am more grateful to you than I can express. Thank you to Christine and Graham Lyons, Andrea Lofquist, and Aleks Besan, for enduring friendships that have helped in so many ways. Thank you to my sister, Dahlya Smolash, for lovingly putting up with me in the early caterpillar and pupa stages of this work (and generally), and for connecting me with Brian Goedhart and Pierre Larouche. Thank you to Brian and Pierre, Leanne Lloyd, Pam Hirakata, Morgan Kalani, and Corianne Bell for helping me recognize this path could be possible, and helping me heal enough to walk it. Thank you to my mother Hilda Smolash and my aunt Naomi Jacobson, to my cousins Ruth, Elana, and Dina Smolash, my uncle Alex Smolash and my aunt Henya Gordon, my brother Michael Smolash and sister-in-law Jen Green, and to my entire immediate and extended family whose values and ways of being in the world have shaped mine. Thank you to Tom-Pierre and to Kevin Lloyd Young, who taught me how trust feels. And thank you to my niece and nephew, my godson, and my chosen family kidlets, whose experiences and wisdom sparked several of the chapters in this book.

Thank you to the wide, only partly seen web of people whose economic contributions and moral and practical support have buoyed the project. To everyone who has helped, too many to count by name, you have my gratitude.

Thank you to the readers, without whom this book would not have been possible.

May we call forth one another; may we all nurture one another’s best gifts.

All errors and oversights remain the responsibility of the author.

Introduction: Nurturance Culture Means Holding the Circle

At Windsor House, a free school in Coast Salish territories (also known as Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), every child has an internal map of how harm is handled by their school community.¹ In this school, the only public democratic school in North America and one of the longest-running brick-and-mortar free schools in the world, any student who experiences harm can write up the other person who they feel harmed them. When someone is written up, they are required to go to what the school calls justice council, which is a circle of their peers who then help repair the harm.

Going to that circle is not an option. It is a requirement for anyone who wants to be a member of the school community. This is especially notable because it is one of the only concrete requirements at a public, accessible, democratic school that has almost no coercion or compelling of any other kind. In the free school system, deeply invested in beliefs about autonomy and keeping kids whole, if a student wants to skateboard or paint all day, that is what they do.

In a community so steeped in an ethic of consent and self-determination, with so few kinds of ordinary, everyday compelling in place compared to regular schools, I was curious how this requirement worked. What is the relationship, I wondered, between the commitment to individual autonomy that is such a dearly held value of the school, and this justice council that can compel students to repair harm?

At the beach one day, while watching kids pull up seaweed and pile it into stacks, I asked my close friend’s twelve-year-old son, who goes to the school, What happens if a kid who gets written up doesn’t come to council? He barely skipped a beat before he answered, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, If someone doesn’t go to council, council goes to them.

A day later, I asked my friend’s nine-year-old daughter, who had not heard my earlier conversation, that same question. She too is a student in the school.

I got the same answer. She barely paused in her playing, glanced up, and said, council goes to them, as though this was the obvious answer to a silly adult question, and then immediately resumed her game.

What their answers say to me is that these kids experience justice council as self-evident and ordinary: when you hurt someone, you get called to council and you have to go. You are expected to make it right. This concrete, practical structure, and the kids’ regular use of it for handling harms large and small has, it seems to me, hardwired an ethical framework for a functioning, everyday model of interdependence into their assumptions about how the world just is, how reality works, and how human beings obviously get along.

Attachment theory teaches us that true autonomy relies on feeling securely connected to other human beings.² Current developments in the field of attachment science have recognized that bonded pairs, such as couples, or parents and children, build bonds that physiologically shape their nervous systems. Contrary to many Western conceptions of the self as disconnected and atomized, operating in isolation using nothing but grit and determination, it turns out that close-knit connections to others are in large part how we grow into our own, fully expressed, autonomous selves.

It seemed to me, thinking in attachment terms, that there is a relationship between this requirement to heal relationships and the children’s sense of freedom to be themselves.

The students who go through justice council are not necessarily best friends and may not be freely choosing one another. They exist in relationship nonetheless. They decide how close they want to be, but an underlying sense of a shared humanity exists in a bigger container that can hold everyone in the school community, that can expect certain basic relational capacities from them—don’t bully, don’t gossip, don’t exclude peers when in group activities, don’t harm or violate one another—regardless of whether they are close, regardless of whether they even like one another.

At justice council, students are not punished. Punishment can disconnect people from empathy and lead them to focus on whether they got caught, or on shame, rather than on the feelings and needs of the people they have harmed. Instead, a circle of their peers listens as each of the people involved gets a turn to share what happened. Then the circle expects whoever caused the harm to mend it in a way that helps meet the needs of the person who was harmed. This, again, is not optional, but required.³

As my friend’s daughter patiently explained to me, her feet planted as she stopped swinging for a moment to help me understand, The goal of justice council is to stop that same harm from happening again, and help them both feel good and stronger together again, so they’re not hurt by what happened.

Kids at Windsor House use justice council often and easily, because they know they will be cared about, protected, and heard. They