Currently, there is a global shift, focusing on dismantling centuries of white supremacist impact. While new worlds need to be reimagined, we must look back and look sideways at the building, thriving, fighting, and dreaming that have already happened. How can we create the future while embedding the past? How do we awaken the muted answers that lie dormant within our bodies? How do we revere, revive, support, archive, and make sustainable the work that our global village has been holding up for so long?
In the context of this journey, ‘Researching Practices to Prepare for the End of the World’, Rivers Coaching is embarking on a journey in which we are immersing ourselves in the practices, traditions, rituals, trauma, histories and muted stories of communities who have already seen the end of the world.
As a team, we come to this work with backgrounds in community activism, anthropology, educational pedagogy, photography, dance, writing, art, coaching, healing, and embodiment practices. We also come to this work as three bodies of the African diaspora, with a multitude of intersectionalities and the oppression, trauma and magical realities that come with them.
We do this and all our work for everyone; For those who came before us, for those here in the struggle for liberation with us and for those who will come after us. This is for our ancestors who helped guide us here and whose wisdom has been lost to colonialism and global capitalistic exploitation.
It is our hope that this work will benefit everyone seeking to shed the bondage of all the current oppressive systems that disenfranchise and marginalise.
We want to meet people who have been kept at the periphery of the conversation for years. We also want to meet those who have been present in the conversation but have not truly been listened to. We want to meet those who are fighting for a/their version of liberation within their specific contexts and histories.
Our work is research reimagined. While it will move outside of the research, we are comfortable with a big chunk of it sitting in the realms of research and data. This work acts as a counter to existing research and data, which is relied upon by academics, local authorities, organisations, communities, etc. It is important that it sits in the research space as well as other spaces, to drown out existing work.
This is about communal healing, building solidarity, and survival.