This video was produced as an appendix to our article “Between Success and Failure: Dwelling with Social Movements in the Hiatus” which appeared in Interface: A Journal For and About Social Movements  5.2 (November 2013) (interfacejournal.net/).  It outlines our approach and perspective and also leads activists and organizers through a variety of exercises (to be undertaken together or as individuals) that might help clarify strategy, tactics and the imagination. But it also provides a nice overview of the Radical Imagination Project and our inspirations and ambitions.

This video gives a brief overview of the paper, and also can serve as something of a “guided collective meditation” for social movements to help them clarify, discuss and develop themselves strategically and organizationally. In other words, it is a brief workshop or collective exercise to help movements discover what is common and uncommon about them.

This workshop asks participants to think about how they imagine “success” and “failure.” It encourages participants to examine and discuss questions like:
– What would it mean to win?
– What would it mean to lose?
– What are some of the key success you’ve had in the past?
– What are some of the key failures so far?
– (How) do our small successes lead us towards our vision of “winning”?
– (How) do our small failures lead towards a greater failure as a movement?
– How can we address failure as a group in a constructive way?
– How do we build a movement that can sustain itself in a state between (non-)success and (non-)failure?
– How can we support one another in this state without succumbing to burnout.
– How can we negotiate and overcome that challenges of systemic and interpersonal oppression?