Slow Action: Recommended Reading

Covers of select books recommended by the author of this post.

This week’s edition of Slow Digest is written by former C21 Graduate Fellow Jamee N. Pritchard. 

This year, C21 will explore the practices, methodologies, histories, and theories of collective organizing across communities and institutions within the theme of Slow Action. Slow Action asks the following questions:  

  • How might the humanities help us understand and enact organizing as a form of care?  
  • What does it look like to build actionable pathways that are both purposeful and adaptable, rooted in values yet open to change?  
  • How do attention and pace shape what is possible – inside and outside the university – as we face the most pressing challenges of our time? 

The following reading list is organized by Slow Action in transformative justice through collective power and institutional spaces.

Slow Action and Collective Power 

  1.  “Revolution of the Snails: Encounters with the Zapatistas”, Rebecca Solnit (2008) 

Writing about her encounters with Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico, Solnit challenges conventional understandings of revolution as sudden, dramatic political change. She draws on the Zapatistas’ use of the snail as a symbol and considers transformation as a slower process built through community, collective decision-making, education, storytelling, and the creation of alternative institutions and ways of living. The essay shows how political transformation can emerge through practices sustained over years and generations. You can find the article in this link.

  1. The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs (2011) 

Boggs argues that transformative politics requires more than opposing existing systems. Communities must slowly create new relationships, institutions, and ways of living in the present.  

  1. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba 

In this collection of essays, speeches, and interviews, abolition is presented as an ongoing collective practice rather than a destination reached through one political victory. Kaba emphasizes organizing, relationship-building, political education, and creating community-based responses to harm. This work connects to the idea of organizing as a form of care.

Slow Action in Institutional Spaces 

  1. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life by Sara Ahmed  

Drawing on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education and her own experiences with diversity work, Ahmed examines what happens when people try to transform institutions from within.  

  1. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope by bell hooks  

Extending education beyond the university classroom, hooks imagines teaching and learning as practices that can take place wherever people gather to exchange knowledge and build community. The book invites its reader to understand education as both a transmission of knowledge and the relational work of building trust, practicing care, and creating conditions through which university change becomes possible.   

  1. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown 

Drawing on activism, organizing, science fiction, and the natural world, brown considers how small interactions and practices can contribute to larger processes of social transformation. Rather than treating movements as fixed plans with predetermined outcomes, emergent strategy emphasizes relationships, adaptation, experimentation, and learning from changing conditions. This work asks: What becomes possible when movements and institutions remain rooted in their values while allowing their methods to evolve? 

Sources

Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press. 

Boggs, G. L., & Kurashige, S. (2011). The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century(1st ed.). University of California Press. 

brown, adrienne maree. (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press. 

Hooks, B. (2022). Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. Taylor & Francis. 

Kaba, M. (2021). We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (T. Nopper, Ed.). Haymarket Books. 

Opinion | Revolution of the Snails: Encounters with the Zapatistas | Common Dreams. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2026, from https://www.commondreams.org/views/2008/01/16/revolution-snails-encounters-zapatistas 

All Slow Digest posts are independently researched and written by individual contributors. All opinions expressed therein are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of UW-Milwaukee or the UW system.