WHY WE STUDY AND WHY WE HOST STUDY GROUPS

Through multiple moments of crisis and uprisings in our lifetime, we’ve seen ourselves and others reacting to and mitigating the violence and harm that the crises and system cause, which is critical.

However, being exhausted, this often leaves us with little to no time for sustained, ongoing political education.

People who are activated by a trigger event or moment can come into activism and organizing with heightened emotions, which can be energizing at first, but can burn out and are not sustainable as the only fuel for the long run.

For the long run, we need to sharpen our understanding and analysis, because our goodwill, good intention, and desire for change — even our marginalized identities and personal lived experiences and trauma — do not sufficiently give us a critical analysis of the structures and powers we are contending with.

Further, in the Vietnamese diaspora, we often get fragmented and conflicting versions of our history, coupled with red-baiting, saviorism & demand for refugee gratefulness, and false promises of liberal inclusion. All the factors aforementioned can make us vulnerable and susceptible to co-optation, manipulation, neutralization, and sabotage.

“Without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down."

— Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Political education is a priority for Sông2Sea because, simply put, there is a lot for us to learn in order to be effective organizers, to practice solidarity, and to have a critical understanding of the world and systems we live in and the systems we want to build.

We host the study groups in the spirit of popular education, popularized by Paulo Freire, which seeks to create "education for critical consciousness" for poor and politically disempowered people, grounded in notions of class struggle and social transformation.

As the study groups take place over several months, we work to create a space to build community and solidarity. People interested in joining Sông2Sea can get to know us, and we can get to know them.

Ultimately, we use our study groups to grow our political maturity, and we host them in and for community so that we can build power collectively.

“When I think about the way we were using the term ‘study,’ I think we were committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.”

― Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study