Böcker av Benjamin Heim Shepard

Conflict and resolution are the lifeblood of social movements. How, and with whom, do we find lasting friendship, support, and joy in a world in need of so much repair?In On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting veteran organizer and social worker Benjamin Heim Shepard traces a pressing dynamic of social movements: friendship and conflict. The project builds on oral histories with more than  thirty movement organizers—from AIDS, queer, trade union, community, Occupy, and harm reduction-based movements—reflecting on the lessons, meanings, and future directions of movements and collective organizing efforts. “There is a hunger for radical history – to give credit to past struggles, to learn from our mistakes and to improve our strategies for the future,” writes Lesley Wood. Oral histories trace the stories of these movements.The book goes in depth into the reasons and ways the interviewees became involved in activism, the friendships they formed, and the conflicts they faced. This includes asking questions such as: where do friendships support or undermine these efforts? How can conflicts be resolved?  And where do people find lasting support?

San Francisco in the early 1990s. Cab is on the deep end of a losing streak. After having been dumped yet again, he moves to Haight-Ashbury fresh out of college. It is the middle of a recession, before the dot-com boom, and AIDS is an immediate and untreatable reality. He finds himself working in a housing program for people with HIV/AIDS. The entire city is reeling. His clients are dying. Cab records their every word.He starts drafting a narrative of every person with whom he's slept: those who dropped him, those he adored, and those he let go of without a second thought, to reassess what he has left behind from the South of his childhood of dyslexia and infatuations, football and ecstasy, divorce and sex panics. In between girlfriends, acting up, attempts at romance, and trying to find his place in the greater San Francisco narrative, Cab is looking for something, tracing the interconnecting stories of the people he's meeting, sleeping, and drinking with, as everyone tries to find a space in the city. As treatments emerge and the economy changes, a new story takes shape in Cab's life and the city.

Connecting urban activism to historical, philosophical and theoretical ideas of the dialectic, this book builds a new theoretical framework for reimagining the work of anarchist organizing and social movements