Frances > Recent Status Updates

‘To feel like you are ‘other’ is to feel unsafe, to feel like you don’t belong, to feel like your value is less than. To ‘other’ is to dehumanise.’

‘All the crises we face today, all those at the fundament of the emergency, are linked by the willingness of those in power - financial and structural power - to subjugate and exploit those they consider different, whose languages they do not understand, whose voices they refuse to hear, whose lives they refuse to bear witness to.’ -Bel Jacobs

‘Colonialism has, in many contexts, laid the groundwork for racialised communities to fall victim to the effects of climate breakdown. This has been facilitated through continued economic subjugation as a result of a long era of colonial extractivism as well as the “violent expansion of European economies.” ‘ -Renuka Ramanujam

‘I’m really thrilled by this upcoming generation of kids…And they’re very conscious that the climate crisis is real. They’re not in denial. They want to do something about it. They’re tired of y’all. I’m like, yes! That gives me so much hope. As I find my heart getting tired, they are getting angry, and they’re getting fired up and they’re being so creative…’ -adrienne maree brown

‘…imagination as a place of strength and beauty and practice that we need to be in, but I also wonder how to balance the relationship between imagination and reality…we want to be able to imagine a future we love. But imagination is the key to unlocking a collective consciousness that’s able to actually be in relationship with what’s happening from a place that’s not hopeless.’ -Adrienne Maree Brown

‘An intersectional environmentalist practice then, is when we attune ourselves to ecology and apply critical realism to an understanding of the interrelationship between power, the ecological crisis and the structural and global hangover of the colonialist and imperialist projects.’ -Georgina Johnson

‘Art has increasingly become a forum where open socio-politic conversations and criticality can emerge - as they should.’ -Francesca Gavin

‘…maybe you’re thinking about choosing a name for your child, for your love, for yourself…I can’t choose your name for you but I’ll tell you I’m beginning with a list of wishes.
I wish this name will:
Describe a history.
Encompass two lives.
Spell the name of a home.
Be mixed and mixed up.
Be ours.’

‘Memories and identities that were created and developed in previous situations get utilised in different ways and get expressed in new ways. These are intersections of my identity that are articulated for each new audience, and I have a choice in how they get presented.’ - Anna Sulan Masing

‘What I do find in every space I occupy is an awareness; I am aware of my mixed-race status and how that plays with privilege and choice - for and against me. Being mixed race, and/or coming from multiple spaces, but occupying a Western world is knowing where you fit and knowing how to fit in.’ -Anna Sulan Masing

‘Like after so many deaths when shock, grief and anger are masked as greed for money and other material remnants left behind. Things often left unsaid become internalised and explode, further hurting the already hurt, enacting even more damage.’ -Naomi Shimada

‘We need to remember that we all experience the same things differently.’

‘For the first time it occurred to me that what she sought in my face might be fading. I no longer had someone whole to stand beside, to make sense of me. I feared whatever contour or colour it was that signified that precious half was beginning to wash away, as if without my mother, I no longer had a right to those parts of my face.’

‘We sit here in silence, eating our lunch. But I know we are all here for the same reason. We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves. We look for a taste of it in the food we order and the ingredients we buy.’

‘The path of an inherited trauma is random; you never know who might get it, but someone will…Sometimes family trauma skips a generation altogether and redoubles its hold on the following one. You may encounter grandchildren who silently shoulder the hurts and sufferings of their grandparents.’

‘The paradox is that people need to have a satisfying experience of dependence before they can become truly independent and largely self-regulating.’

‘Self-esteem is not just thinking well of oneself in the abstract; it is a capacity to respond to life’s challenges.’

‘We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit. It isn’t. Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits.’

‘If governments want to tap the GDP source of women’s increase participation in paid labour it’s clear that they have to reduce women’s unpaid work…introducing properly paid maternity and paternity leave is an important step to achieving this, by increasing female paid employment and potentially even helping to close the gender pay gap - which is in itself a boon to GDP.’

On training programmes: ‘Women may sign up for these programmes, but if the initiatives don’t account for women’s childcare demands, women don’t complete them. And that’s development money down the drain - and more women’s economic potential wasted. In fact, the best job-creation programme could simply be the introduction of universal childcare in every country in the world.’

‘Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose.’

‘…for the vast majority of hiring decisions around the world, meritocracy is an insidious myth. It is a myth that provides cover to institutional white male bias….The fact that meritocracy is a myth is not a popular one. Around the industrialised world, people believe that not only is meritocracy the way things *should* work, it’s the way things *do* work.’

‘…it is simply a fact that none of us, including businesses, could do without the invisible, unpaid work carers do. So it is time to stop penalising them for doing it. Instead, we must start recognising it, valuing it, and designing the paid workplace to account for it.’

‘…women’s unpaid workload doesn’t begin and end with newborn babies, and the traditional workplace is tailored to the life of a mythical unencumbered worker.’

‘Whiteness and maleness are silent precisely because they do not need to be vocalised. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default. And this reality is inescapable for anyone whose identity does not go without saying, for anyone whose needs and perspective are routinely forgotten.’

‘…it is exactly their whiteness and maleness that caused them to seriously vocalise the logical absurdity that identities exist only for those who happen not to be white or male. When you have been so used, as a white man, to white and male going without saying, it’s understandable that you might forget that white and male is an identity too.’

‘But so much human feeling was also swept aside in the relentless expansion of capitalism. The most glaring damage was done to the least powerful, but these changes affected emotional life in all classes and genders. In particular, the drive to maximise production encouraged factory owners to treat their workers as extensions of their machines, not as people with feelings.’

‘At the time of the Congo controversy a hundred years ago, the idea of full human rights, political, social, and economic, was a profound threat to the established order of most countries on earth. It still is today.’

‘Leopold’s critics from British humanitarian societies were easily dismissed by the public as relics of past battles like Abolitionism and as people who were always upset about something in some obscure corner of the world.’