Tabitha’s sentence starting “What we feel we are seeing..” is spot on and really important. The next sentence however I don’t understand at all, sounds like something out of Turbulence magazine! That Dwight misrepresents the amount of time or identity-label you fall into is a bit irrelevant (though rude) – we need to take time to prepare our workshops for them to be useful.

thanks for taking the time to read the post, and leave such a lengthy comment. I won’t respond point by point, since we are both very busy, and both of us will be dead a long time.

You claim that being critical of other people’s events and then going home and imagining how I’d have done it “ meant [I] missed the whole thing.”
Er, no. I multi-tasked.

“woah, sounds like you had already decided to hate on it if you’re writing notes at the back just as we started to talk.”

Well, before you started to talk, you could have invited people to turn to someone near them and get “warmed up.” Activation phenomena, much? You also very carefully don’t quote the very next sentence in my blog post – “I scribble down “Ok, I’m wrong”” , since this would undercut your argument as to how open-minded I was prepared to be. I was prepared to be reflexive, change my opinon. But it’s far more convenient for me to be a strawman, no?

“Maybe instead you would have thought, oh, she’s just said she’s a working mother, she’s fitting in this workshop on her spare sunday, i won’t expect her to have spent months preparing the perfect workshop”.
Fair point – I should not have used terminology like “full-time activist.” I won’t start playing games about which of us is busier or more oppressed. Suffice to say, if you are going to have the privilege of having 40 people come to pay attention, then it’s rude to deliver dross.
You are also however, setting up a totally phony opposition here – I did not expect “the perfect workshop.” I just expected one that went beyond two people talking about their article, followed by comment tennis followed by still-too big groups of people in which the loudest dominated and others were bewildered. Clearly this was totally unreasonable, classist and patriarchal of me. So it goes.

“but wrote angry notes to your friend then angry posts ages later.”
it would be helpful if you checked the date of publication of my blog post. It was published on October 11th. Your workshop was on October 7th. That does not constitute “ages.” Perhaps you are confused, thinking that because you have only just seen it, then the blog post did not yet exist? Sort of Bishop Berkely and the tree falling in the forest maybe?

“I’m not sure how you knew the article was dire without reading it.”
Copies of Shift (the f is silent)’s last issue were on sale at the Kraak gallery. I bought one (more fool me). I read your article on the day. Simples.

“The workshop you suggest is an interesting take on the sort we are increasingly seeing, which are obsessed with trigger warnings and internal dynamics of mundane categories of power, and less about understanding capital and our multifaceted and multilayered resistances to it.”

So, one trigger warning means I am “obsessed””? Whatever you need to tell yourself, comrade.
And I would be entertained to know what you actually mean by “multifaceted and multilayered resistances”. Is that the writing of turgid and utterly forgettable sub-academese in magazines nobody reads? Or is that sitting in a field surrounded by cops and calling it the eco-revolution? Or squatting? Or flashmobs? Maybe I should start reading SchNews again?