My organising background forms the foundation for all my academic work – not the other way around. I was and am an activist before I’m an academic – even though nowadays disability, time and energy, and professional demands limit my grassroots involvement.
I am using ‘organising’ here as a catchall term. By this I mean anything in between coordination-type organising and grassroots organising; this can literally refer to the organisation and coordination of e.g. events or groups (which in academia might fall under the category ‘Leadership’), but also anything related involvement that could otherwise be called activism – from participating in demonstrations and campaigning to making coffee, setting up the room and cleaning the dishes after a meeting. None included formal training (only in the late 2010s I trained as a group facilitator); everything is grounded in experiential learning or, in employment terms, ‘learning on the job’. Although activism burnout is real, at the same time there is no better education than grassroots organising!
Organising journey
I started ‘organising’ as an adolescent in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) in the 1990s, trying to find my way in finding a community to put together social justice ideals into practice. Probably the first activity was the high school newspaper, I was briefly one of the student representatives in the school board (which was equally interesting and boring), a short while in a European youth group against racism (peculiar detail: apparently this organisation was infiltrated by MI5 as it was considered ‘radical left’), and I even hopped in and out of the squatting of the empty floors of the next high school I joined. My first longer-term involvement was as a young adult with a local LGBT radio station and gay youth café in Amsterdam.
When I finally, after a few tries (or perhaps a few trials), found my way to academic education that I enjoyed, and I ended up in Porto Alegre (Brazil) for a year (2001-02) to study International Relations and Gender Studies (UFRGS), I fell right into a very persistent strike at the federal universities in Brazil and only could attend MA classes. It happens that the 2nd World Social Forum (Fórum Social Mundial) was being organised at the time there and I found my way to a group that was preparing the ‘Female Planet’ (Planeta Fêmea). As the strike continued, I decided to move to São Paulo to study at the USP. Fun times, the state universities went on strike! So I did an (academic) internship at two women’s/feminist organisations instead: União de Mulheres de São Paulo and Sempreviva Organização Feminista or SOF – the first more grassroots, the latter more institutional. I learned so much about organising through my participation. But part of this internship was also to set up and execute a small research project about female leadership in the annual course Promotoras Legais Populares (‘Popular Legal Promoters’) from the União de Mulheres. The seed was planted for my interest in the role of gender, race and age relations in agency, social justice and activism, specifically in terms of change and non-change and the tension between ideals and practice (see the project on ‘intersectional agency‘)!
Returning from Brazil and back in Amsterdam, I decided that I wanted to contribute actively to the Dutch women’s or feminist movement (at the time the difference was less clear to me, and often, but not always, groups used them interchangeably anyway). I was specifically curious about ‘boundaries’ between different groups of women: age/generation, race/ethnicity, and national/international boundaries. After an open call, three of us – all young, white and middle class women (!!) – ended up organising the 3-day conference Bordercrossing Meeting: Women/’s Movements in Conversation (‘Grensoverschrijdende Ontmoeting, Vrouwen/beweginging in Gesprek’), grounded in the collaboration with numerous women’s groups on the various sides of these boundaries. As I was responsible for the program, I basically spent a year searching for all these potential groups and cold-calling/emailing them, to end up travelling around to share cups of coffees, meals and dances wherever I was invited.
Next to learning-organising-by-doing, these were some amazing lessons about ‘welcomeness’, collaboration, disadvantage and privilege, intersectional tensions, and also how curiosity and bluntness can lead to amazing contacts and connections. Looking back, this is also where I learned, and started to reproduce the lesson without realising, that feminism is about abled-bodiedness. Ironically, because it was this 24/7 organising that tipped my life into disabledness.
After this, I joined and co-founded other feminist groups and networks, mostly revolving around multiracial and critical whiteness and young feminist organising. The majority of this was in Amsterdam, but I also continued my connections in the young feminist movements in São Paulo and elsewhere in Latin America that were thriving in the early 2000s! After a few years focussing on my PhD, I joined a feminist disability group for a while in London.
Being a disabled and neurodivergent academic, I wish I could still do more grassroots organising, but the reality is that there are only so many spoons in a day. While doing academics, I still seek to stay true to social justice ideals and practices and, more than 20-25ys into my organising journey, I now run the monthly Intersectional Neurodiversity and Disability Reading Groups.
Academic organising experience (selection)
2020-present: Coordination and facilitation of the monthly Intersectional Disability Reading Group (1st Friday of the month); in 2020, the organisation and facilitation was shared with Dr Kelsie Acton
2019-present: Coordination and facilitation of the monthly Intersectional Neurodiversity Reading Group (3rd Friday of the month)
2020-2021: Coordination and co-organisation – flipped webinar Intersectional Approaches to Disability and Race, Intersectional Neurodiversity and Disability RGs: 9 July 2021. Find the programme with links to the blog posts here.
2020-2021: Coordination and organisation – online symposium Feminist Perspectives on Neurodiversity and Neuronormativity, on behalf of the Intersectional Neurodiversity RG (with the Feminist Studies Association UK & Ireland): 29 January 2021. Find the programme here. Find the recordings of the presentations here.
2019-2020: Co-convenor of the Disability Study Group of the British Sociological Association.
** Organisation of the webinar series ‘Disability and Health Inequalities in Times of COVID-19’. Chair of the webinars ‘1: Recognising Disabled People?’ (recording here), ‘2: Education’ (recording here), and ‘3: Intersectional Inequalities, part 1’ (recording here) and ‘5: Intersectional Inequalities, part 2’ (recording here).
2019: Coordination and co-organisation Critical Pedagogy HE Teaching Practice (CPHETP) Labs, with Dr Terese Jonsson and Dr Shaminder Takhar
2014-2016: Member of the founding steering group of the National Association of Disabled Staff Networks (NADSN)
2013: Co-organisation and facilitation Summer Clinic on Sociological Agency, London South Bank University: 09 July – 08 August 2013, with Dr Julien Morton
2013: Organisation and facilitation seminar Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA): an interdisciplinary introduction, Methods@Manchester, University of Manchester: 02 July 2013 (Keynote speaker: Dr Michael Larkin)
2011: Co-organisation and facilitation panel “Continuities and discontinuities of whiteness and nation in Europe“, Social Relations in Turbulent Times, 10th ESA Conference, Geneva: 7-10 September 2011, with Prof Bridget Byrne
2010: Facilitation panel “Making Whiteness, Making English, and the State”, PGR Conference New Territories in Critical Whiteness Studies, University of Leeds: 18-20 August 2010
2010: Co-organisation PhD Seminar Young Feminism, University of Manchester: 11 May 2010, with Dr Susan O’Shea (Keynote speakers: Dr Sophie Woodward and Catherine Redfern)
2010: Organisation seminar Critical Whiteness and Transformative Sociology, University of Manchester: 5 May 2010 (Keynote speaker: Prof Les Back)
2010: Facilitation online international seminar “Discourse analytical approaches towards uncovering power relations, with a specific focus on race/whiteness“, PG White Spaces Network: 24 January 2010
2005: Organisation and facilitation workshop “Whiteness/Westernness,” Feminism as Critical Thinking: utopian dimensions of and a new search for alternatives, Cultural Analysis Summer Academy (CASA), Amsterdam
Social movement organising experience (selection)
2015-2017: Board member; co-coordinator and co-facilitator project Disability & Sexuality; Sisters of Frida (disabled women’s organisation), London
2013-2014: Facilitator; London Roots Collective (social justice facilitation collective), London
2003-2009:Board member, organiser, facilitator; ZAMI (Dutch BMR women’s organisation), Amsterdam
2009: Educator; COC Amsterdam (LGBT association), Amsterdam
2007-2008: Board member, facilitator; EYWF (European young women’s network), Europe
2005-2007: Co-founder, coordinator, organiser, mentor, facilitator; V-mania (Dutch young women’s network), Amsterdam
2002-2003: Co-founder, coordinator, organiser; Women and Diversity Foundation, Amsterdam
2002, 2003: Intern, organiser União de Mulheres de São Paulo and SOF Semprevive Organização Feminista (feminist organisations), São Paulo