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“We have a great opportunity in our movements to learn how to be opponents without being enemies,” says Tanuja Jagernauth. In this first of a two-part conversation, Jagernauth and host Kelly Hayes discuss the language people use to describe harm and conflict, the difference between disagreement and abuse, and how organizers can move through conflict with more clarity and care under fascist conditions.

Music: Son Monarcas, HATAMITSUNAMI, and Daniel Fridell

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes.

Conflict is inevitable in movement work. When people are trying to build together under conditions of fear, exhaustion, repression, and constant urgency, we are going to disappoint each other, misread each other, frustrate each other, and sometimes hurt each other. That doesn’t mean all conflict is the same, and it doesn’t mean every rupture should be understood in the same way. But as our communities struggle to organize and reorganize themselves under fascist conditions, many people are moving through conflict while stunned, traumatized, exhausted, or simply expecting others to be guided by the same values and intentions they bring to the work. In that state, it can be hard even to know what questions to ask, let alone how to distinguish between disagreement and mistreatment, hurt and harm, activation and danger, or behavior that calls for curiosity and repair versus behavior that needs to be interrupted and confronted.

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Today, we will be hearing from organizer, circle keeper, writer, theater maker, and yoga educator Tanuja Jagernauth. Tanuja is a longtime friend of the show, and she is also the co-facilitator of Understory, an emotional and spiritual support group for activists that she and I have been organizing together for about two and a half years. This episode is the first of a two-part conversation about conflict in movement spaces. In this installment, we talk about the language we use to describe harm and conflict, how that language can be misused or weaponized, and how we can reorient ourselves to respond constructively in difficult situations. Conflict can be generative. It can help propel us and our movements forward. But for that to happen, we need to identify the patterns that are holding us back, and the boundaries, agreements, and understandings that can help keep us steady and help us build in right relationship with one another.

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KH: Tanuja, welcome back to Movement Memos.

Tanuja Jagernauth: Thank you so much for having me, Kelly. It’s always wonderful to be here and in conversation with you.

KH: I’m so happy for the chance to think alongside you. How are you doing today?

TJ: I’m hanging in. I am a fun combination of rage and disgust at what we’re seeing happen all around us. And I’m also feeling really hopeful and really heartened by the way that I continue to see Chicago show up and the way I continue to see movements show up. So it’s all here, a nice little combination of rage and hope.

KH: I am right there with you, and so grateful to be in community with you here in Chicago, where people are doing so much powerful and important work. Intense movement work can bring people closer together, and it can also generate conflicts that we are sometimes ill-equipped to navigate. I want to dig into that subject and offer some tools and understanding for people who are grappling with interpersonal dynamics as they organize their way through this fascist moment. But first, for folks who may not remember our previous conversations or be familiar with your work, can you say a bit about what you do?

TJ: Sure. And in the context of our conversation, I’ll say I am a lifelong learner. I’ve been living in Chicago since 2001 when I came as just a wee Volunteer in Service to America. Long story, but I have a long background in studying conflict and being called in to support folks to resolve conflict. So I feel like I’ve had a wonderful opportunity to learn so much from movement leaders across the decades, and I feel really humbled to be able to continue doing that work.

I am a theater maker, I’m a writer and a yoga educator. And as somebody who is a descendant of indentured laborers, I just feel like this conversation about addressing our own generational trauma wounds, our own present life wounds while we also fight to build the next world, super, super personal and relevant to me. And I come to this conversation with a lot of humility and with a lot of gratitude for everyone who has helped me to learn how to navigate conflict better.

KH: Well, I really appreciate your work around the subject that we’re going to address today, which is conflict and conflict resolution. You mentioned your work as a theater maker, and I think folks should know that you also recently authored a play that was performed at Free Street Theater called Rupture & Repair, which offers an artistic vision of what conflict transformation can look like, and how the lessons we learn from those experiences can help us build the world we’re meant to live in. I really appreciate all the ways you urge us to view conflict as something that can help shape us for the better.

I think we need that approach right now, because while our movements are always in conflict, we are all under so much pressure right now. There is so much strain. There is so much unpredictable violence that people are witnessing and experiencing. Responding to what we’re up against – together – is always going to result in conflict, and I think responding under these conditions has left a lot of us raw and unready for the mess of trying to understand each other and mend what’s broken.

What are you seeing in the realm of conflict and how it’s playing out in movement spaces?

TJ: Thanks so much, Kelly. And yeah, from my humble vantage point, and I say this with love and I say this with self-recognition of my own part in all of this, you mentioned Rupture & Repair, I didn’t set out to create that show about conflict transformation because I felt like I had it all figured out and I’m an expert here. It really was driven by a true question around what does conflict transformation and repair actually look like? And can we all do better at approaching conflict and staying present with each other when we’re in conflict? Versus what I am seeing, which is a lot of defensiveness, honestly, when folks bring feedback to one another. And I’m really curious about how we can all build little cultures of giving and receiving feedback with one another.

Unfortunately, we have access to really beautiful transformative justice language, restorative justice language, abolitionist language. And I’m seeing these beautiful words become weapons in the hands of our comrades who are wounded, who are trying to get by, who are truly doing their best with what they have, the time they have, and so on and so forth. And at the same time, this pattern of weaponizing language against each other is actually just reinscribing the systems of violence that we’re trying to transform. Okay, so I really want to invite us in to do better on that front.

And at the same time, Kelly, I am seeing more folks embrace this challenge to learn about conflict, practice, and learn about generative conflict. I’m seeing, and I’m so grateful for this, more people embracing engagement of the body toward conflict transformation. So shout out to Generative Somatics, shout out to Healing Justice Lineages, shout out to everyone really who’s been working on that front for decades and decades, asking us to please incorporate our bodies in our work.

So I’m seeing a mix of things, Kelly. And ultimately I do have hope because I see people really fighting hard. Kelly, you’re one of these people to create spaces for political education. I’m grateful every two weeks you and me and a handful of people meet through Understory to try and practice different frameworks with each other in a space that I hope feels safer and a space where we can really hold the work that we do sacred and where we can hold our relationships sacred. So I’m seeing that too. I’m not just seeing us fumble and grasp for survival in these systems.

KH: I really appreciate you naming both sides of that, the ways in which we are messing up out here, and the ways in which we’re trying to build what needs to exist, and to hold each other in our humanity. And I’d love to talk more about Understory at some point.

But first, I want to zero in on what you’re saying about weaponizing language because I feel like that’s been a huge problem for quite a while now. Discomfort gets conflated with unsafety, and harm often gets conflated with abuse. So let’s talk about that distinction for a moment. How do you distinguish between harm and abuse and why does that distinction matter in movement spaces?

TJ: Yeah, thank you for that question, Kelly. In general, I think I’m going to offer us, we need to define our terms with one another. I think I can offer up some definitions that I’ve collected and that I use in my work, but I also think it’s so important for formations to take the time to get clear about what definitions of terms they’re going to use when they talk to one another. So first I want to say that. And harm is one of these words, unfortunately, kind of like community, kind of like healing, where it’s not clear what it actually means, and it is so context-specific. So I’m really glad we’re digging in. And I’m going to offer three different ways to think about harm and three different ways to define harm.

The first comes from Spring Up. They are a radical liberatory education collective that I’m actually studying with right now. I’m taking their 60 hour mediation certification program. It’s a one-year program. I highly recommend it. The folks that Spring Up, I find to be really thorough, really principled, grounded, and also embodied in what they are trying to do. So Spring Up’s definition of harm is “When the actions of a person, people or systems have a negative impact on a person or people, and that creates unmet needs and obligations.” And they recognize that this can be rooted in differences in power.

Power is always going to be present in our work together. I would invite us to even define power in our formations, right? How does it move? What does it look like? How do we share power? And then what does power over look like in our group? If I behave in a certain way, what behaviors will be interpreted as me trying to seize power or hoard power, right? We really need to understand power. So I appreciate that definition from Spring Up.

From the In It Together toolkit, which was created by Dragonfly Partners and Interrupting Criminalization, they look at harm as an impact when a person is deprived of or senses a threat to an essential need as a result of the action or inaction of another person, group, institution, or system. So both definitions are talking about needs not getting met, right? And then the incident creating a gap there that we need to address.

And then lastly, I had the opportunity to go through the Vision Change Win security school training in which they also talked about harm in our formations and how to address it, and they broke it down even more. And I really love the way they break it down. And the trainer who spoke on this is Yalini Dream. And so they invite us to ask when someone says they’ve been harmed, get curious and ask, okay, are you triggered in this moment? Are you experiencing discomfort versus being triggered? Are you misaligned? Are we misaligned? Or is this abuse? So they really want us to get clear on those distinctions.

All of these things can feel very similar, but as we know, the implications of what we call things really, really matters. So if we’re using the Vision Change Win frame of breaking down harm even more to name abuse as a type of harm, what is abuse? I’m pulling from a domestic violence hotline definition, and they talk about harm being a pattern of behaviors. Or, sorry, abuse being a pattern of behaviors that are used to maintain power and control over others. And so I really want to lift up that pattern-of-behavior piece of the abuse.

So certainly can harm escalate and become abuse over time through patterns of unmet needs? Absolutely. But what I think is important for us to really sit with is the first time something happens in a formation, we want to address harm that occurs and be watchful to see if it becomes a pattern, but I would really caution us against naming something abuse right off the bat, right?

Okay. And why does this matter? Back to what we were talking about, Kelly, at the very start of this conversation, language matters. The stories we tell to each other about each other, about who we are and what we do, this is the way we make the world, right? As you demonstrate in your work all the time, the way we interpret one another matters. And the words that we use to describe our interpretation of events absolutely matters. So we really have a great opportunity to get sharper around the language we’re using and how we’re using it, because what we call things is going to really impact the direction we go in to intervene on what’s going on.

And then if I label something harm or if I label something abuse and I talk to my homies about it, we’ve seen it. And I’m just going to name it, we’ve seen people be like, “Oh, well, so-and-so is abusive. Well, I’m staying away from them,” or, “So-and-so is a harmdoer now.” Well, okay. And what I’ve seen and........

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