In and Against the State: lessons from our recent past
“Conciousness raising has had a really profound impact on the way I’ve thought about and felt my way through lockdown. It surprised me in becoming the most open and intimate forum in which I’ve been able to share experiences of lockdown – more so than with friends or family actually, even though I only knew one other participant at the start.”
Life under Covid has raised certain questions: How is being confined in our homes affecting our thought patterns and behaviours? How is this weird point in history affecting us and making us feel? Will the experience of the pandemic give us a new perspective on the political and economic dynamics that structure our lives? How do we mitigate any claustrophobic feelings or loneliness as we were stuck in our houses away from people we care about?
The idea for this resource came up in a conversation between a few of us who thought that an online consciousness-raising exercise may be a good experiment to run in these unprecedented times. Below is a report that we have written about the experience and our reflections on setting up an online consciousness-raising group in late March as the UK went into its Covid-19 lock-down, as well as a short resource on how you can start your own.
As an experiment we have not written this as a manual in which to follow exact instructions but outlined what we did and reflected on the experience. At the end of the document we have written some tips on how you also may approach this if this has interested you and would also like to run your own online consciousness-raising group.