Lessons From The Garden: Happiness Is Not A Good Goal feat. Sarah Tyson

Oct 3, 2024

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Sarah Tyson joins Kim for a spirited conversation about her suspicions about happiness and the intellectual underpinnings that inform why happiness is not a worthy goal in general, but specifically for her children. Sarah and Kim talk about how the work of Sarah Ahmed helps us to understand why the archetype of the killjoy is an important abolitionist parenting framework, and why we can’t separate the material conditions under which we are forced to exist from our parenting practice.

This is the second installment of our new series, Lessons From The Garden, where Kim will be interviewing contributors to the forthcoming anthology that she co-edited with Maya Schenwar titled We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. You can pre-order this volume now from Haymarket or wherever you buy books.

The name of the series, Lessons From The Garden, is an apt phrase that reflects the metaphor in the book’s title, and allows us to consider many issues related to caregiving, parenting, and abolition. As Lydia Pelot-Hobbs once said “our citation politics matter,” and in that spirit we want to credit Susie Parras for the series title. Lessons From The Garden is an opportunity to engage in further conversation with the many brilliant organizers, writers, and thinkers about their work, and how they practice abolitionist parenting and caregiving in their daily lives. Additionally, we will draw on some of the themes that they wrote about in the book in order to help us deepen our understanding of caregiving - broadly configured - and what it means to live collectively in a world that is designed to keep us isolated from each other.

Sarah Tyson is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Affiliated Faculty in Ethnic Studies, Associated Faculty of Women and Gender Studies, and chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado Denver, which is on Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne land. Her research focuses on questions of authority, history, and exclusion, with a particular interest in voices that have been marginalized in the history of thinking. She edited with Joshua Hall Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Lexington, 2014) and wrote Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better (Columbia University Press, 2018). She is cohost (with Robert Talisse, Carrie Figdor, and Malcolm Keating) of New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. She has organized against human caging in Denver and Nashville, including as a member of the REACH Coalition.

Episode Resources & Notes

Pre-order We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, Edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson

IN STORES NOV. 19, 2024!

Abolition has never been a proposal to simply tear things down. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks, “What if abolition is something that grows?” As we struggle to build a liberatory, caring, loving, abundant future, we have much to learn from the work of birthing, raising, caring for, and loving future generations.

In We Grow the World Together, abolitionists and organizers Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson bring together a remarkable collection of voices revealing the complex tapestry of ways people are living abolition in their daily lives through parenting and caregiving. Ranging from personal narratives to policy-focused analysis to activist chronicles, these writers highlight how abolition is essential to any kind of parenting justice.

HELP SEND THIS BOOK INSIDE: Contribute toward sending copies of We Grow the World Together to folks in prisons and jails by donating at https://haymarketbooks.app.neoncrm.com/forms/we-grow-the-world-together