When Things Fall Apart: Conflict, Crisis and Collective Healing in Activist Movements

In this time of intense global crisis, political unrest, and social polarization, for many activists and progressives the greatest devastation has come from within our own communities: Moments in which our shared values have seemed to fail us. Conflicts that tear our relationships apart. The collapse of social networks that we relied upon to give us strength and meaning. In the midst of betrayal and despair, what can we do? How can Transformative Justice and the politics of love lead us back into right relationship with ourselves, others and the work of making change? Join Kai Cheng Thom, mediator and healer, for an embodied dialogue on choosing love at the end of the world.

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performance artist and community healer in Toronto. She is the author of the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir (Metonymy Press), the poetry collection a place called No Homeland (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in 2018), and the children's picture book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, illustrated by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li. Her latest book is the essay collection I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes at the End of the World (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in 2020). Kai Cheng won the Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers in 2017.