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Hello,

We’re new to blogging so please bear with us a we find our way through the overwhelming possibilities of running our own blog. When we’re on top of it all we will hopefully have all different kinds of exciting info to post up here but for now here’s a little bit of info about us and what we do.

The Rural Racism Project is an anti-racist collective working in the South Devon area. We are a small group of community organisers with shared histories and experiences in anti-racist work. Our main and most urgent concern is working together with our constituencies through critical education practices using dialogue, sound, film and reading with the odd walk and group activity when circumstances allow. Essentially our work sits at the intersection of culture, self-organising and education. As anti-racist work increasingly becomes the empty shell of “diversity”, “equality” or “social cohesion” pandering to a discourse of victimhood, the vagaries of identity politics and representation in general, we start from the collective, the everyday, from our shared needs, commitments and struggles.

Recent years have transformed the shape of anti-racism as more and more projects and organisations close down under a politics of “managed decline” or are incorporated into the institutional status quo through austerity, commissioning or other shifts towards the ideology of the market steadily permeating the voluntary sector. Clients, service users, social enterprise, cultural and community capital – the concepts and vocabulary which serve the markets are now frequently uncritically employed within charities while community cooperation and a sense of place are systematically dismantled and replaced with alienation, displacement and individualisation managed by well-meaning institutions of crisis management and social provision.

We consciously reject this commodification of social inequity and misery and thus we have a somewhat more radical approach to our work:

1. We do not provide “a service”. Our work is participatory – we believe in working together with people experiencing racism, not for them. We do not subscribe to the notion of service user/service provider or “client relationships.” To this end our collective is precisely that – a collective. We have no salaried staff and do not receive steady funding to operate. Everything we do arises from a shared need or urgency – not because somebody is employed to provide a service. Our project is perhaps more of a process than a project. It has been populated by various members over the years and has undergone many ideological and operational shifts. Collective meetings are open and constituent participation encouraged above all else.

2. Instead of “users” or “clients” we understand our work in terms of “constituencies” to whom we are accountable and “collective needs” which must be met collaboratively. In this sense the classic “casework” model in which “experts” solve other peoples’ problems is largely antithetical to our way of organising. In emphasising collectivity, we strive for a discursive space amongst people experiencing similar problems or having similar needs to find common responses. Often those with immediate experience of a problem are far better-placed to help each other out than the “expert caseworker” the central tenet of whose work it is to know and act on behalf of somebody. For us this needlessly perpetuates an uncritical “victim rhetoric” and reproduces “victims” in that vital experiences of learning and problem solving are rendered unnecessary as a result of the experienced caseworkers’ intervention.

3. We are an autonomous organisation and do not subscribe to any particular political or religious doctrine or espouse any institutional understandings of race, racism, culture, ethnicity etc. We treat these phenomenon as dynamic and in constant need of critique and subject to divergent analyses. Conversation within the collective    perpetually revisits theoretical and practical questions around our work and ensure that strategies are based on consensus rather than majority vote.

4. We situate our analysis of anti-racism in a broader social context and understand that it is impossible to engage constituencies in a discourse of racial justice or migrant organising without a wider critique of other framing social conditions such as class, poverty, space and power. Years of working at the intersection of different forms of structured oppression such as destitution, poor housing, poverty, mental illness and less tangible forms such as paternalism and cultural domestication (diversity programmes etc) means we have developed relationships of solidarity with other autonomous constituency-based organisations working critically in these fields. These shared sympathies provide the basis for cooperation and learning. We believe in a literacy of space and power and the capacity for these to be contested through collective process.

Much of our recent work has emerged from these longer-term collaborative processes and privilege slow processes of group knowledge production and learning together through participatory projects which draw heavily upon practices of popular education, participatory action research and listening. To view past and current work click here.

To find out more send us an email or call us through the contacts page.