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Quote by Dean Spade

“We should interact with legal reform tactically, knowing that it will not meet our ultimate goals but asking whether there are ways that engaging with particular reforms might benefit our work and help reduce certain harms or dangers.”

Quote by Dean Spade

Author

Dean Spade, born in 1977, is a writer whose work primarily focuses on social issues such as gender, race, and class, exploring their manifestation in law, politics, and social movements. more

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“When we approach legal reform work, we can ask questions like: Will this provide actual relief to people facing violence or harm or will it primarily be a symbolic change? Will this divide our constituency by offering relief only to people with certain privileged statuses (such as people with lawful immigration status, people with jobs, married people, etc.)?”

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Author:Dean Spade

“Music is a safe kind of high.”

Kind Music Safe Music Is

Author:Jimi Hendrix

“We must experiment, fail, and try again, but beginning with a critique of legal reform and a commitment to center the most vulnerable moves us away from some of the most common, obvious pitfalls of neoliberal social movement strategies.”

Trying Moving Social Common Failing Movement Commitment Strategy Obvious Experiments Vulnerable Reform Critique Try Again Pitfalls Social Movements

Author:Dean Spade

“Over the past decade I have watched many friends go through graduate school and write dissertations. Through that process, I have seen how they are guided by mentors to understand particular norms within their disciplines and to learn about what they can and cannot, should and should not say, and which ideas can go together and which cannot. I never went through this process.”

Should Writing Ideas School Together Past Process Particular Discipline Decades Graduates Mentor Norm Over The Past Many Friends Graduate School Dissertation

Author:Dean Spade

“I went to law school which is a 3-year program in the US that is focused primarily on memorizing certain doctrines and taking exams that test whether you can apply those doctrines to help prepare for the bar exam. If you are lucky, you get a few classes where you are encouraged to think more critically and read critical texts rather than just casebooks, and perhaps write a paper that is not a legal memo or brief.”

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Author:Dean Spade

“Because my graduate academic training at law school was not one that included most of the intellectual traditions I find useful for understanding the conditions and problems that most concern me - anti-colonial theories, Foucault, critical disability studies, prison studies and the like are rarely seen in standard US Law School curricula, where students are still fighting on many campuses to get a single class on race or poverty offered - I developed most of my thinking about these topics through activist reading groups and collaborative writing projects with other activist scholars.”

“The thing about those conditions [anxiety and depression] that sucks the worst is that you don't address the root cause, so you never see it coming. What's worse is when you don't even KNOW what the root cause is, you can never fix the problem. So that's what's really scary.”

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Author:Matty Mullins

“Unless you seek out help for your symptoms, you'll never really know that that's not how everyone feels. You go through life thinking that this is how you feel in certain situations and that I can ease the tensions by doing this or that.”

Thinking Knows Feels I Can Helping Certain Situation Ease Tension Symptoms How You Feel

Author:Matty Mullins

“When you sleep your eyes move left and right and physical movement takes trauma and moves it from your frontal lobe to the back of your brain or to another part of the brain where you can store it that memory but when you think about those things that happened, you don't associate the feeling that normally comes with it. So the problem is if you have something traumatic happen and you are not getting a good amount of rest, it will stay in your frontal lobe.”

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Author:Matty Mullins

“I will always encourage people to seek out the word of God, because I do believe that THAT is where truth really comes from. I believe that when things go wrong if you instead of looking at that as a negative, you choose to rejoice in all things. It's the hardest thing in the world but I think that that is what ultimately leads to happiness.”

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Author:Matty Mullins