Thoughts on Food Fight - Shake Summer Intensive 2015

When the team was asked (I volunteered) to write a blog about the war being waged on our food systems for the next Shake Intensive course ‘#FoodFight', I started to consider my own relationship with food, what I have personally seen with regard to changing attitudes and patterns of behaviour around food, and found that reams of questions poured out of my finger tips as I typed.

2013 and my finances were particularly low post-London 2012 Olympics. If you had not been recruited with some kind of an Olympic themed large scale poetry project or spoken word education initiative, 4 months of your existence in that year was like being left out in the cold with your face pressed against a window while the party raved inside because you weren’t on the guest list. So, in November, broker than I had been for a very long while (2003 and just starting out as a poet), this freelance artist had to be scrupulous with her food shopping.

Purchasing food in the local superstore took on a more ominous tone. My vigilance peaked and my brow knotted as I price-filtered my way along the aisles. Over time, as I accustomed myself to being more thrifty, I found that only own-brand tinned and white carb foods – white bread, potatoes, pasta – and low cost foods with high and salt and sugar content were available to me. The quality of own-brand food stuffs fluctuated dramatically from packet to packet and tin to tin. Fruit was a luxury. Especially oranges.

Eyes glazing over at the cash till, I remembered delicious foods cooked for me on open fires by street children in the clamouring, hot, dusty city of Mumbi and on Forodhani beach on the island of Zanzibar; honeyed milky bread served to me by the impoverished Khoisan Aboriginal tribes people in the Khalahari desert corridors (reservations). And how I heard their own empty stomachs roar at my privilege.

These memories informed me that going further back into my roots was the way forward for a wholesome and healthier a diet - root vegetable curries, sweet potato, cassava, black eye peas and corn stew; back to my student roots to the humble jacketed spud, pasta and pesto, brown rice and lentils. I’m not a meat fan and fish was a treat, so pulses, beans and ground maizes became staple to my diet.

After a good 6 years of convenience food living, grabbing what was pre-packed and pre-cut after working for no-fuss rapid, efficient “cooking”, I was forced to go back to the street markets in Brixton and Dalston and memories of shopping days with my Mother, having to carry heavy bags of food shopping for the week and big Sunday dinner cook ups that took all day. Those days brought us together as family and they were now long gone. I became more strategic in my food planning. I found I only ate what I needed and packed lunches (sometimes breakfasts for those early meetings) had my stomach straight for the day until dinner. I began to find a flow.

Emotional eating
As I write about of food monitoring and planning, I’m reflecting on a couple of my teen years. I remember being an angsty young woman of colour whose identity was heavily influenced by fashion trends. When I looked in the mirror I rejected most of myself, especially those diasporic curves and took such a hard-lined approach to how much I ate, to the degree of taking diet pills that were simply capsules of fibre and gel extract that expanded in your stomach to make you feel full. But what does it mean to “feel full?” How I saw myself had nothing to do with my appetite so how and why did my emotions begin attaching themselves to food? Food as a device for punishment or as a treat is not uncommon across the generations as body consciousness becomes obsessive in the century of selfies.

Weighing in at…
Obesity has been labeled an “epidemic” in the West.  However, obesity in the UK and US is being closely connected to discourses about class. Low cost but poor diets loaded with sugars and salt are causing heart disease. NHS spokes people stress the need for more education about healthy eating and exercise as it strains under the weight of illness and ailments due to the rise obesity, especially in children.
In some cultures a wide girth is considered a sign of wealth. African diasporic communities find high levels of diabetes and high cholesterol levels due to eating habits reminiscent of “what was left” from "his master's table"  as chattel enslaved Africans, relabeled as “soul food”. So there are cultural aspects to consider when food is a vehicle for communicating and expressing culture and lived historical experience.  However, a lack of awareness of food’s nutritional value as nourishment and not something you “do” as a consumer activity or a form of cultural expression is putting lives at risk. How informed are we about the addictiveness of the food on supermarket shelves?

What types of rocks and hard places are citizens of a nation placed in when we want to actually change our attitudes toward food? Food advertising campaigns seem scattergun when in fact they are strategically focused to have maximum psychological impact to very targeted viewers. Product placement is  a craft. At varying times of the day and year children are targeted,  this insecurities of women are played up on and an increasing numbers of men are now being documented with having Body Dysmorphic Disorders. What responsibility do food manufacturers have in their product placement and the illusions they sell in content of their advertising?

Ingredients of slavery
We are now forced to think vigilantly about the content of our food as corporates like Monsato, Nestle and Coca Cola step up the disseminate of distorted information about how they manifest corporate responsibility. But the morality of their take-over strategies project and evidence their expansion as brutal disenfranchisement threatening the livelihoods and lives of hardworking people and their families.

Deforestation for palm oil as a cooking ingredient for prepacked goods and snacks, for cattle grazing, and breeding factories, these anomalies raise numerous issues around animal rights and  Earth rights at the same time as ecosystems are destroyed when a trees are mass felled. But local people are fighting against this new economic enslavement via mass food production processes which have mortal impact. Climate issues and food intersect and many campaigns bring powerful arguments against corporate control over government policy.

Who is Monsato?
Nestle Baby Milk powder and Nestle privatising water
Coca Cola is sucking India dry

In various parts of the historically ex-colonised world, there is neo-economic slavery centered around access and supply of food. The issue of food aid destined for conflict zones rattles with dissonance. We’ve seen he images of bags of grain are handed out to traumatized people in manufactured wars over their land and mineral resource. Yet we know that billions donated to charity haemorrhages away from those who need it.

Aid travels with a bomb, Watch out! Aid travels with a bomb!" - Jean Binta Breeze

The Starving West
The UK’s version of food poverty manifest itself in the figures put forward by organisations like the Trussell Trust. The number of people using food banks has risen exponentially since 2009 and there are varying reports of religious community centres over stretched feeding low income hungry families as part of their faith practice. And austerity is set to hit even harder over the next 5 years.

The American public, starved of information, continue to fight for transparency regards naming the ingredients on the packaging of their food. The implication of a life time consuming carcinogens from petsicides  and cancerous  potentional of genetically modified foods is now unavoidably disconcerting.
GMO products have entered the planet’s ecosystem and we have no idea of knowing how food will manifest itself in the next few decades. How well will our bodies adapt, after all we are what we eat? While the rest of the world sees the obscene (GM) abundance and waste of food in the US, millions still struggle to get food daily, living on less than a dollar a day. But at what cost?


Final thoughts...So as I sift through the aisle I am squinting at the back of bottles of cheap pasta sauce checking the suger content and I'm trying to ignore glow-in-the-dark tomatoes in the vegetable section but need them for my own homemade tomato pasta sauce. With no sugar. I look for the yellow stickers to see if I can save a few extra pence here and there and I wonder - How does it come about that supermarket bosses consider sell by dates on the packaging of food as waste markers and that this now deemed "waste" food is a health and safety risk for the homeless and active Freegans foraging superstore waste bins? And when a tomato can sit in a fridge for three months and not deteriorate in any way, what do sell by dates mean anyway?

"We live in an economic system where sellers only value land and commodities relative to their capacity to generate profit. Consumers are constantly being bombarded with advertising telling them to discard and replace the goods they already have because this increases sales. This practice of affluent societies produces an amount of waste so enormous that many people can be fed and supported simply on its trash."

The most chilling (and empowering) aspect of my thoughts around food is being aware of how our civil liberties and human rights are consistently at odds with the principles of profit and gross expansion. Fatal illnesses, mental unwellness - for example, farmer suicides from lost crops and 'disappeared' eco-activists - are considered acceptable collateral damage to corporates leveraging the interests of shareholders and CEO bonuses. Where does the moral compass needle land when food and water - the building blocks to a healthy body and mind, a healthy family and community – become pawns in economic profit battleground?


Shake’s Food Fight intensive summer course 2015
This time Shake! looks into the reclamation of the right to a clean food chain and interrogates (in)equality in universal food distribution. We'll be asking what are the next radical steps people are taking to decentralise and decolonize the monopoly corporates have over our bodies through food - for example locals in cities and rural areas all over the world are reclaiming economic agency by developing plots of land into community gardens and promoting local green economy initiatives. May Project Gardens is one such initiative and Ian 'KMT' Solomon from May Projects will be joining the Shake team for two days workshopping about how it works.

Ultimately, damage to the earth because of food abuse places the rights of the planet at the center of the discussion too, as the earth IS our food, and for out survival as a species urgently needs to be respected and healthily sustained.

· Specials of the day week menu

· Food and the History of Power- colonialism, consumerism,
· gentrification, cultural appropriation
· Food & violence –body and trauma, GM giants & corporations and state violence
· Food & Oppression- racalized and gendered oppression through systems
· Food and Healing Justice- radical health & self care, building resistance and
· resilience.

~Z~

Shake! welcomes and looks forward to applicants from all backgrounds. In our efforts to centre marginalised communities and create safe spaces, we will prioritise applications from people of colour, LGBTQI folk and residents of Tower Hamlets. Please state in your application if you want us to consider your application with this in mind.

Posted by Zena Edwards

Shake! Research Collective is here!: Public Space, Young People and "Violence"

The Shake!  collective will work inside out – from personal transformation to structural change – and will consist of collaborative and flat power-sharing structures. No ‘experts’ telling us what is and isn’t valid knowledge. We will define our own research, create new narratives and stories, and re-work the ways in which knowledge and content are produced. We will cultivate young researchers and young consultants to set up our own projects, to work within the NGO  and culture sector with the tools, knowledge and passion for radical and positive social change. 

Shake! is excited to launch its youth-led research collective, which emerged from questions about power that come up time and again as we make and remake Shake! One of our first Shake! researchers is Adam Elliot Cooper. Below you can find an introduction to his lead research area.

Why are we young people always the objects of ‘research’ and 'policy'? And why young people of colour in particular?
We are not interested in being described, explained, being told what we are like, or what is important to us, or what is good for us in a society that is still riddled with racism and classism. The ‘knowledge’ that we young people are expected to respect and suck up comes out of people who usually have a major stake in maintaining the status quo, whatever they claim - especially dominantly white or Eurocentric academics, educators, policy-makers, social workers, campaigners, and other researchers. We will create knowledge that speaks from and to our communities in a way that is both democratising knowledge - spreading the knowledge - and at the same time decolonizes it. We also want to make knowledge that isn’t just about the written word which European thought has privileged over everything else. We state that knowledge includes art, and activism, and knowing things through stories, voices, our senses, our bodies, our skins. 

Public Space, Young People and “Violence”

By Adam Elliot Cooper

Introduction

Public space, or what many of us consider to be public space, is a freedom often taken for granted. In the closely-governed cities of Britain, with their semi-public shopping centres, dispersal orders and CCTV, the places where people can meet, learn and live is becoming increasingly restricted. But what are the reasons given for the policing of public space, and are those reasons justified? Importantly, in what ways are communities, particularly young people, attempting to reclaim public spaces as sites of artistic and political expression? This article is the start of a wider research project with Shake! which will use research, art and activism to answer these urgent questions. By connecting the issues with possible solutions, and building links between different forms of community resistance, this research project will begin investigating why public space is so important, and how we can ensure it remains accessible to the people who need it.

Public Space

All too often, protecting the sanctity of our freedoms is invoked when we question why graffiti is criminalised but advertising billboards are protected, or why peaceful public protest “disturbs the peace” but police violence is a necessary tool in ensuring public safety. Policing the public, by way of private security in commercial districts, police stop-and-search or ASBOs are fast making spaces in the city in which criminalisation is both quick, and easy. One of the main ways in which this process has been justified is through the broken windows thesis. This theory argues that small, low-level crime creates an environment in which higher-level crimes become the norm. Therefore, the primary role of the police is to deal harshly with what they consider to be low-level crime, treating these lower-level criminals as if they had committed the high-level crimes that (according to the theory) will inevitably follow. 

These low-level crimes include homelessness, disturbing the peace, low-level vandalism, unlicensed street vendors, unlicensed buskers, begging and those suspected of carrying weapons or criminalised drugs. In practice, this involves police officers patrolling urban spaces on foot, approaching people who appear unfamiliar in the area who are “[n]ot violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed” (Kelling & Wilson 1982: 1). The proponents of this theory admit that, even if the policies do not actually reduce crime, “residents of the foot patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas” (ibid), which of course makes the policies politically desirable for those wishing to maintain power.

The Conservative-led coalition’s first policy document on policing and urban governance was called ‘Policing in the 21st Century’. One of the key proposals of this paper was to make it easier for police to stop, question and search individuals whom they suspect of breaking the law.

Facilitating what they call “common-sense policing” allows police officers to use their intuition. In addition, being more visible on the beat will be expanded by repealing “bureaucratic barriers” such as recording instances in which they have stopped and questioned innocent people in public spaces. This reflects the approach of the aforementioned Broken Windows thesis, which asserts that “disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence”, making police powers to stop, search and arrest individuals who may not be breaking the law, the norm. Prime Minister David Cameron has, for a long time, sought to recruit advocates of the Broken Windows Theory from police forces operating in urban spaces in the US to those in Britain.

Bill Bratton, who is famous for using Broken Windows Theory in his policing of New York and Los Angeles, was defended by Cameron when he was pushing for the recently reformed legislation which now allows foreign nationals to become a police commissioner. Whether Bratton makes it to Britain or not, the state has made it clear the direction it intends to take criminalisation.

A Place To Be

More than anything, public spaces are places for us to be. They are spaces in which we learn about the world and each other, places for us to rest or unwind, or escape the difficulties of home life. They have historically been places of learning, such as Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, where socialists, black nationalists, feminists and other dissident voices spoke truth, to both power and the people. But these spaces are increasingly privatised, monitored and policed.

Places of worship, particularly mosques, are being heavily policed. Regarded by many in the community as a place of sanctuary for those in need, and a space where debate and community discussion can flourish, they are branded as the new ‘enemies within’. Rather than such places of discussion being the bedrock of a free society, they are presented to us as a threat to it. While the British Parliament discusses the bombing of Libya, and the arming of factions in the Syrian conflict, it is never branded a threat to democratic freedom. Yet, the multitude of opinions and voices which speak in mosques up-and-down the country are being closely monitored by the British state, with those suspected receiving harsh penalties, regardless of the lack of concrete evidence or their right to due process.

In other parts of our communities, community centres, youth clubs and libraries, long-standing meeting places for social, political, intellectual and artistic exchange, are being under-resourced, or closed. While over £70 billion is owed to the British treasury in unpaid corporation tax, and billions more have bailed out powerful banks, the infrastructure which holds together the political freedoms of Britain’s most deprived communities is paying the ultimate price. Yet the outside is also a public space under threat. CCTV, stop and account, stop and search, ASBOs and dispersal orders are just some of the ways the state is making the outside a public space which is only accessible to those it permits worthy –the homeless, the young, the poor, migrants and ethnically minoritised communities are at best suspects, and at worst, criminalised on the spot.

Artistic and Political Expression

Free society is now defined by free enterprise – the freedom for corporations to advertise on every blank space in the city – our public transport systems, roads, and now even schools are encouraged to attract sponsorship. Artistic expression in equivalent spaces is not considered part of the freedom that corporations enjoy, but a criminalised form of vandalism. It is not widely known that the British police direct substantial resources towards stakeouts, monitoring and delivering harsh custodial sentences to the young people engaged in this art-form. While graffiti is one of the foundations of hip-hop culture, now a global phenomenon, and a form of political expression recognised the world over, it is used by the state to criminalise disproportionately poor, young people, continuing to fill Britain’s prisons with non-violent offenders.

The myriad of policies, practices, laws and powers being made available to the police and other security personnel makes resistance to the erosion of our freedoms increasingly difficult. Attempts to peaceful occupy Westfield Shopping Centre in December 2013 led to 76 arrests, where even visibly marked legal observers were arrested for alleged violent disorder. The banning of protest in Parliament Square has been widely condemned by civil liberties groups, and the ‘kettling’ of protest by police, in order to make protest an uncomfortable, violent and sometimes traumatic experience, now appears routine. Public events have historically been important sites of protest, and this has not gone unnoticed by the British state. During the Olympics, dispersal orders, and the banning of what were perceived to be t-shirts displaying political slogans, were banned in a sinister and totalitarian fashion. Even verbal challenges to unlawful Stop and Searches can be interpreted by officers as “common assault” or a “civil disturbance”.

Getting out there, and finding out why and how young people are creating social, political and artistic expression – reclaiming public space today – is vital. The erosion of the freedom of assembly and freedom of expression has been shifted from the political public sphere to the profit-making private sphere. Rebuilding the community institutions which keep the most marginalised afloat in post-crisis Britain is broadly supported among progressive groups. But those that have been criminalised through newly invented powers also deserve our solidarity. While criminalisation is reserved for the poor, undocumented and racially minoritised, a radical critique of state power is both necessary and urgent. Making public spaces public and pushing state violence and corporate interests away from democratic spaces must encompass the most marginalised among us. The research which will follow this brief outline intends to express both problems in more detail, while vividly expressing the possible solutions in a clear, creative and participatory manner.

Watch this space.

Exploring the State of Violence - by Zena Edwards

The new Shake! Course is nearly here! Monday 16th February, we begin unpacking one of the most contentious subjects our species confronts: Violence. We will be exploring what makes violence, physical and ideological, a seemingly imherent part of modern day life.

As a poet I think about the word ‘violence’ as  anything that is excessively detrimental  and its with this thought that the Shake! team will create a safe space where participants can interrogate the States of Violence that seem to plague the planet. We will question if physical violence is our natural disposition or if it is a nurtured trait. Many are calling for alternatives to fatally destructive and violent deconstruction of current imperialist governments, minimising bloodshed. We will ask is that possible.

We will question the role of violence and the State. What ways are the government and its machinery violent towards its citizens –   the implementation of  long working hours with minimal pay, rampant gentrification of culturally diverse and poorer areas with unaffordable housing  breaking up communities, the privatisation of the British National Health Service, cuts to education and benefits with biased and convoluted conditions placed upon them, further leaving the less well off in even more dire predicaments.

We live in a time where the global economy forces a climate of uncertainty and fear upon the majority of the earths population, mainstream media thrusts distorted journalism upon poly-cultural societies, encouraging and perpetuate attitudes of xenophobia and sexism, discrimination and judgement. The female body is hyper-sexualised, the male body is hyper-masculinized, black and brown bodies are stereotyped, demonized and attacked, while religion is a manipulated tool to promote homophobia and child objectification. Nobody and nothing feels sacred leaving us all feeling vulnerable to seemingly unexplainable and inexcusable acts  abuse and violence. We are forced at unexpected moments to question which parts of our human psyche are activated, provoked to violate the bodies of those who are considered "other",  different to "the norm", and framed to be viewed as inferior and are stigmatized. This brings about a mainstream thinking that this  "other" is a threat and must be suppressed

In the last 20 years, in activist circles, there have been many urgent discussions about institutionalized racism and a sinister growth of the prison industrial complex and millions watched and condemned the deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Mike Brown, unarmed black males, who are among the ‘one killed every 28 hours ‘ by the hand of US police. Theirs and many other tragic stories of unarmed black deaths sparked the global #BlackLivesMatter campaign echoing the oppression in many western ex-colonial countries with history of migrants, immigrants and home-grown "others". The conversation exploded on social media and there were many who deemed US police action as blatantly excessive, while by others thought it justifiable, because of a pervading fear within the police force of violence being done unto those in service ‘to preserve and protect’. “We just want to get home to our families.” 'The law' upheld these ‘justified’ deaths throwing in to deep question the integrity of a justice system seen to be the central principles of a brand democracy which provokes conflict in other richly mineral resourced countries across the planet.

 

This is a recurring story across the face of Western civilisation and each country's power state has devices to ensure that it’s status quo is preserved with a multitude of means of attack on ordinary people coming from many directions, creating an atmosphere of '#ICantBreathe. But what about those who are perpetuating state violence? They are just people after all.

"Césaire demonstrates how colonialism works to “decivilize” the colonizer: torture, violence, race hatred, and immorality constitute a dead weight on the so-called civilized, pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism. The instruments of colonial power rely on barbaric, brutal violence and intimidation, and the end result is the degradation of Europe itself.” - Robin D.G Kelly, from the article, "The Poetics of Anticolonialism."

This is an idea of some of the subjects we will cover in Shake!’s ‘States of Violence’ intensive course in February.

But what do us, as individuals feel we can do about the world we live in where violence seems to be everywhere - on our TV screens, in the news, online.  Participants will also unpack notions of change through non-violence  when the systems we live under are founded on ruthless colonial and capitalist violence in the name of progress. So does this mean that  progress and change can only happen with  forms of archaic and technologically enhanced violence? Is the process of deconstructing society to reconstruct and alternative one only a violent  process? How do we break cycles of violence and how do we navigate through a seemingly terrifying world while maintaining a sense of self and well being?

We will ask all these questions and more, and in their own language, through discussion, film and spoken word poetry, participants will respond to these question to explore and reflect on the current human inclination for violence, while seeking  to create new paths to living more peacefully and compassionately. Beyond violence.

Reflections on Shake! by Orla Price

2014 was a great year for Shake!. We had two of the largest intensive course groups so far, and got to meet some pretty amazing people, including the talented artist, writer, and editor Orla Price.

Orla was no stranger to the idea of art as a powerful tool for social change, and in fact when we met her she was half way through her master’s course in art and politics. She decided to include Shake! as a case study for her dissertation, and has shared with us some of her insights about Shake!, art practice, and radical pedagogy.

“In observing group participation at the August 2014 SHAKE!, one girl trying to express the relationship between mental health and systemic power and […] her own reasons for being there quoted Bell Hooks saying, “I came to theory because I was hurting”. In examining Bell Hooks’ views on critical pedagogy she goes onto to state “Theory is not inherently, healing, liberatory or revolutionary, it fulfils this function, only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorising towards this end”. In many ways Hooks makes a criticism of the University as a place where the digestion of theory is encouraged but the influence of personal experience and motive not so. Taking into consideration this mix of telling personal stories, motive and theorising, we can see how [this kind of] space is essential, and especially when it comes to the matter of personal stories, art can then become the medium to represent the mix.”

….

“The personal experiences of the facilitators were treated on an equal level to those of the participants. Commenting on her role Paula said ‘We focus on exploring everyone's opinions on certain topics instead of feeding them with facts and content’. In observing the facilitation of ‘SHAKE’ the participants would first discuss the themes of injustice before they creatively responded to them. Talking about this process and its facilitation Grainne said “They made the space feel like somewhere you could feel safe to express yourself and your ideas without judgement.” Comparing this to her experience in University she said there it was like “There was this hierarchy that was very present and you also felt like you where being judged on everything you said, and you had to try and impress.””

….

“[I]t is integral that for a critical pedagogy to function, its participants must feel whatever their background that their experience can be voiced. If we take SHAKE! as an example of critical pedagogies on this relational level, we can see how well the project incorporated these ideas.”

Thanks so much to Orla for sharing her reflections with us!

Zena's Thoughts on the Three R's- Remembering, Re-imagining, Reparations

This will be my fourth time as a Shake! facilitator and the third time as  core team intensive 5-day course deviser.

Shake! 1: The pilot "Arts Race and Power" course honoured the lives of aspiring architect and London youth Stephen Lawrence, and the eco-activist and Nigerian Ogoni Tribesman writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and used their stories as case studies to interrogate the themes

Shake! 2 – The "Voice Verse Power" course analysed media representation, political definitions of race and power to estabilish, validate and give a platform for the voice of the marginalised and stigmatised.

Shake! 3: focused on the themes of and "Power, Perceptions, Propaganda".

Now we’re going in deep – Remembering, Re-imagining, Reparations. This the title of the next course and it is going to be one of our most challenging courses to devise for the themes are so broad, complex and could potentially take us down a worm hole of new age theory and idealistic visions of Utopia.

What we are going to endeavour to do is imagine a world where equality is a reality, where the redistribution of wealth is just and sustainable, where the generations and races are working together to ensure the human rights of every child is acknowledged and honoured into their old age.
WHAT could or will this world look like and WHERE TO BEGIN?

Since coming on board there has been clear trajectory for the content of this course.

We begin with the Story. 

When Students Are The Teachers - Shakers are the Facilitators: Power Sharing

"Education as Freedom. 

Through dialogue, 

the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher (terminology) 

ceases to exist and a new term emerges: 

teacher-student with students-teachers...

The students — no longer docile listeners — 

are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher." 

- Paulo Friere 

 Shake! Mission Statement, Item No.4  

To unite the energy of artistic generations 

to creatively campaign on issues of race, 

power, environment and injustice 

I was very happy to finally have Shake! 's first ever Youth Led professional training session happen. And what a success it was. Previous Shake participants Adam Cooper, Khadiza Shahid and Selina Nwulu delivered their sessions with confidence, packed full of useful information and provocations for in-depth discussion.

What is important about these sessions is that those who attended were professional mentors, educators and facilitators who came along to hear what causes these young people are actively engaged in, why they chose them and how they, as the next  generation of activist, can inform the attendees understanding of the subject and their working practice.

Adam gave us amazing insight into our rights as citizens and as a young person when it comes to police stop and search. "Its about power, not so much about getting guns and knives off the street...just remember there is always a mirror question to the one the police ask you, so you can take back your power. For example, 'What's your name? I'm not obliged to answer that, but what's your police number? Where do you live? I'm not obliged to answer that but what's your station?... And it is 100% legal to record the stop and search. Record directly on to Ustream and it's recorded online so can't be deleted, even if they confiscated or smashed  phone."
Very very useful stuff.

Click the Shake! Twitter feed screen grabs  to enlarge.

Praises for Shake event at Rebellious Media Conference

Well, we seemed to have totally hit the spot on Sunday with our session "The Unheard: Youth, the 'riots' and the media" at Rebellious Media Conference.

+ here's one of many praising tweets, and an extract from same person on a blog review of the conference:

@RUDY2HATS Best workshop of the RMC, many thanks...

http://rudy2shoes.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/rebellious-media-conference/

...On Sunday I went to the forum on alternative voices from ‘the riots’ this was a focused and well organised session; probably worthy of the trip in itself.  A number of young people talked about their experiences of the riots, their interpretations of mainstream media as well as their analysis of the causes.  They expressed themselves in a variety of ways, including using video and poetry.  This was the ‘rebellious media’ I was looking for, not mirroring the current inadequacies but finding common ground with others and allowing their own expression to be the media.  Concerns of those close to events were raised, not mediated through some elite journalist with a decontextualised catchphrase. This is what a radical media conference should look like as voices from the heart of relevant issues command centre stage while networking and organising follow...  

A MUSING ON INTERNATIONAL EXAMINATIONS by Hannah Clark

I realise that the subject matter of this post may have little to do with the message of SHAKE!, but after my English exam this morning and my Psychology exam this afternoon, I felt the need to muse on the necessity of examinations. Why do we have them and what purpose do they serve? Especially in an 'international' qualification.

Read Samia's Letter Post Shake's Albany Event

Dear Jane, Ben, Ed, Simon, Anna, Eric and Zena,

I often think there’s something quite liberating in writing letters. I wonder whether our words lose value when sent electronically. Anyway, that’s just me thinking out loud. I wanted to write to you to properly thank you all for your time and effort in putting together Shake! as well as sharing a few of my own thoughts. As with everyday of that week in August, I left the Albany on Saturday feeling excited, inspired and full of so much warmth.

Review of the big Shake! Preview

On the evening of the 26th February, the Albany in Deptford hosted the Shake! preview - an inspirational night of poetry, music and the sharing of experiences of contemporary issues across generations. Hosted by Shake’s very own multi-talented Rotimi Skyers, accompanied by ground-breaking facilitator/poet/performer/all round awesome person, Simon Murray, the night successfully shared the message, aims and work of Shake! with the wider community.

Watch the Teaser For Our 'Voices that Shake' Film