Dean Spade is a trans activist, writer and teacher. Read the latest updates, learn about his book, read other writing, and watch videos. Learn more about Dean.
Featured Videos
Shit’s Totally FUCKED! What Can We Do?: A Mutual Aid Explainer by Dean Spade and Ciro Carillo
When We Win We Lose: Mainstreaming and the Redistribution of Respectability, 2016 Kessler Award Speech
Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back
Queer Liberation: No Prisons, No Borders
News
Valentine’s Day Webinar with Fireweed Collective
I was lucky to get to present a webinar on Valentine’s Day with Fireweed Collective about Dismantling the Romance Myth. Here are the slides from the webinar, and I will post the video here when it is ready.
Video: Lecture about How Mutual Aid is the Infrastructure of Protest Occupations and Encampments
On Jan 25 I gave this lecture as part of UC Berkeley Department of Gender and Women’s Studies Social Reproduction in Crisis Series. See below for the flyer that lists all the other upcoming events!
Appearance on Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness
I had a fun time talking about mutual aid on JVN’s podcast! Some clips below, and/or listen to the whole episode.
Featured Project
Mutual Aid Toolbox
Conditions are already disastrous and getting worse under the new presidential administration. This new Mutual Aid Toolbox is a collection of tools for creating mutual aid projects to help each other survive the brutal realities of poverty, criminalization, immigration enforcement, racism, ablism and violence, and building the world we want to live in where everyone has everything we need. The site has hundreds of projects and tools for starting projects that we need right now.
Mutual aid is a term to describe people giving each other needed material support, trying to resist the control dynamics, hierarchies and system-affirming, oppressive arrangements of charity and social services. Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.
Image credit: Seth Tobocman.