I’m helping to design and facilitate a people’s assembly in Stroud this weekend. There are many things to be discussed in terms of creating such an event, I just want to use this post about one thing.
Quiet Place
For many years, it has been standard practice to offer a quiet place in a workshop or conference. Somewhere to recover and relax. A place to get away from the noise and demands of being in a mixture of social and cognitive demands.
This is good and useful work. Though I’d always be wary of saying mitigation is a solution. There is still a design failure in that events create such stresses and such demands upon individuals.
Amplify Place
What I am more interested in and have finally got into an assembly is an Amplify Place. Somewhere to hold, not tiredness and stress, but emotion and distress. Particularly in civic assemblies there is a direction of discussion, deliberation and decision that smooths over disagreements and softens strong opinions and language. This is standard modern political demand that ideas and manifestos must, in the end, be civil and in PDF format.
Yet that makes no sense when a civic assembly is approaching long-term and deeply-felt issues that affect people and their lives. ‘Be civil’ is a control demand that goes beyond Code of Conduct ideas of treating each other as we would wish to treated. It is a line drawn by people with power.
Yet it is also a line that is manipulated by far-right people who seek power. The ‘You can’t tell the truth nowadays’ and ‘Political Correctness gone mad’ memes of common folk with common sense ideas being silenced and disrespected by the elite.
Thus it needs to be made explicit and faced openly. Much as Quiet Places were a reasonable reaction to the overwhelming effort of assemblies/workshops/conferences so Amplify Places seem necessary to treat people with dignity and respect.
Coming from a Coedsign workshop background, the living or lived experiences of people is something I have always sought to have heard. The loudness of professional voices can be hard to break thru. Yet there has also been a slight bias to the ‘suitable’ lived experience voices. Emotional experiences, the anger, the hate, the confusion, the regrets and resentments, are placed outside: alongside ‘Be civil’ is ‘Calm down’.
So we are making sure there is a place to be heard at this assembly. Somewhere to be seen and heard by someone with power and responsibility. In the discussion groups, the facilitation will remain as before but there will be an option to break away (or, I suspect in some cases, a request by the group to move away) to a place to use voice fully, to say what cannot be said, to find the words to describe something that is strongly felt but inchoate.
The Amplify place is an experiment but it does create a space that is too often missing. The demands for civility and rationality are pushed down on to people and that pressure cooks ideas and attitudes that need to be released so as to move on.
I will mostly be in that place this weekend as one of the eight facilitators and I want to see how holding such a space works and if it does benefit the individual, the groups and the assembly process.