collective action

Jan

2026

From Minneapolis: The Power of Collective Courage

A dear friend from Minneapolis sent me this heartfelt message about the resilience of her fellow citizens in the face of the ICE crackdowns (shared with permission):

“I’m so proud of my city right now. Everyone is in it for the long haul. Every shitty thing they do, more of us come out to witness, record, object. I’m expecting it to get worse before it gets better (if that’s even a thing anymore ‘better’), but we won’t go down quietly & we will win the narrative war.”

As an eyewitness account of the power of community she recommended:

https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/from-minneapolis-ive-never-seen-unity

Its author really captures the spirit of what’s unfolding:

“The resistance to ICE in Minneapolis is strong, generalized, and sustained. It’s also entirely decentralized and leaderless (or “leaderful” if you’d like).

Feb

2025

The Epistemicide of USAID: A Call to Action for Global Knowledge Communities

Urgent call to action in the USAID and the new burning of the books in digital and ideological epistemicide. A call to action-article by Sarah Cummings, PhD (she, her), Nancy Wright White and Bruce Boyes on the epistemicide taking place through the gutting of USAID, including its invaluable knowledge resources:

“In summary, removal and destruction of USAID’s knowledge should be identified as epistemicide. It should be stopped. It violates the fundamental understanding that all knowledges and unheard voices must be included if we are to solve complex problems. Undermining this knowledge will lead to less effective development. It will bolster ignorance that will hurt many initiatives and approaches. We must examine these actions in the context of a wider epistemicide, including the purge of diversity and inclusion initiatives, ending access to critical health data, and the rewriting of science to exclude reference to gender.”

Dec

2024

Talk – From Classroom to Global Stage: Harnessing Deliberation on Wicked Problems in Education

The First Symposium on Educating for Collective Intelligence took place on December 5th and 6th, 2024. It was an honor to be invited as one of the speakers.

Check out my talk “From Classroom to Global Stage: Harnessing Deliberation on Wicked Problems in Education”, as well as the position paper that went along with it. Let me know what you think the role of the classroom could be in building capacity for social impact.

Sep

2024

New publication: Participatory Network Mapping for Public Action

B. Brayshay and A. de Moor (2024). Participatory Network Mapping for Public Action, in T. Rossetto and Laura Lo Presti (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK, pp.371-380

[Download preprint]

Abstract:

In this chapter, we present findings from a participatory mapping project undertaken in the Black Caribbean community in the London Borough of Lambeth commissioned to create a Systems Map of community support available to unemployed people and identify the barriers and leverage points to their economic engagement. We introduce the case study and go on to outline our design philosophy to enable the community to find its voice using participatory mapping and storytelling. We show how we applied this philosophy in the Lambeth case study.… Read more...

Nov

2020

New publication: New Community Research and Action Networks – Addressing Wicked Problems Using Patterns and Pattern Languages

Schuler, D., de Moor, A., & Bryant, G. (2020). New Community Research and Action Networks Addressing Wicked Problems Using Patterns and Pattern Languages. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability, 330–337. doi.org/10.1145/3401335.3401818

[Download PDF]

See also the presentation of our paper that co-author Doug Schuler gave at the LIMITS 2020 Sixth Workshop on Computing within Limits on June 21.

Abstract:

The goal of this paper is to present a vision of research and associated practice that is intended to help transcend many of the barriers that are preventing society from adopting the sustainable goals that will help them survive, and even thrive in the coming decades. We believe the research enterprise could be expanded to meet contemporary needs, and to see it as more of a collaborative undertaking involving thinking, implementing, monitoring and evaluations of interventions with larger groups of people (not only specialists) and would be more focused on social benefit.

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