The Trouble With "Burnout" Discourse: Toward Relational Ontologies and Sustainable Community Organizing

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Five
  In Roundtable Session: Reimagining School Safety and Relational Ontologies Across Communities (Table 3)

Abstract

In this paper, I probe the ontological contours of burnout and self-care discourses in justice-oriented community organizing. I position these discourses in neoliberalism and Cartesian ontology that verify the individual as the most trusted source for problem-solving or harm prevention. I suggest that exploring relational ontologies in our movement settings – including and beyond educational justice movements – can support more sustainable, caring, and collaborative organizing efforts poised to enact the anti-oppressive world(s) we seek to shape through our advocacy. By denaturalizing taken-for-granted concepts that populate organizing spaces, we might create new collective notions of what it means to engage in and sustain political action that approximates the complexity of our entanglements and the possibilities for transformative justice in education and communities.

Author

• Briana Bivens, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author