Spring Lyceum: A Journey

Join Highlander Center for Spring Lyceum-A Journey. This March, Highlander partners with Knoxville’s Birdhouse Neighborhood Center for a day of workshops mapping the intersections of politics, movement-building, solidarity economies, and dreaming new stories for our communities. Spring’s Lyceum finds us partnering with old friends and new to think about how we organize ourselves, strategize with each other, tell our stories, and what we want these new stories to do.

After Kelle Jolly brings us into the space we’ll be hosting a session with Dr Seyi Amosu designed to help us navigate the compassion to cynicism pipeline, Joseph Cuiilier of The Black School will guide us through the Process deck, our Community Safety friends will make the language of “Vision, Strategy, and Tactics” crystal clear so we can focus our work, and we will all come together for a conversation with organizers moving work in Tennessee. Come to learn and build community, leave with marching orders and places to plug in. 

After we learn together stick around for a free community dinner with food from Kianga’s Kitchen and  music by DJ Drew Drake 

Info: Kelle Jolley opens the space with a short performance. Poet Mia Willis will provide grounding with a reading of “A Journey” and connecting themes to the day’s events, including a reading of a poem from Mia’s book.

Info: Featured in The Black School’s exhibition at the New Museum in the summer of 2018, The Black School: Process Deck is a tarot-style interactive methodology tool for brainstorming and designing creative activism projects. The cards are to be used in an art making capacity to help creatives, educators, and organizers explore how art can activate change on a local level. Through a series of questions and choices participants identify issues of primary significance to them, define the terms and context around that/those issues and design impactful projects to address them.

Info: What are we working towards in the long term? How do we use the possibilities that our current relationships, skills, and infrastructure offer to bring in new relationships, skills and infrastructure that create new possibilities? How do we best use what we can count on now to get to the next step in a strategy? Join us on the porch at Birdhouse Neighborhood Center to define these terms and think about where we go from here.

Info: Organizers from the Black Nashville Assembly/Southern Movement Committee and Knoxville City Council Movement (CCM) will talk about their work and the key lessons they’ve learned while building power with Black communities in Tennessee. Time will be allotted for dialogue with attendees.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Birdhouse Neighborhood Center, 800 North 4th Avenue, Knoxville, United States