Reflections from Kōtare

Abstract

Members of the core crew of Kōtare Research and Education for Social Change in Aotearoa have attended each of the five conferences in the Social Movements, Resistance, and Social Change series. We have always been excited by the possibilities these conferences have offered for engendering deeper connections and new opportunities for group formation and action across different sectors in the left-activist and academic worlds. We offered three workshops in the conference, seeing this as an opportunity both to contribute usefully to the overall goal of ‘activating collectivity’ and as a way of demonstrating a small sample of Kōtare’s pedagogical methods. In this article, we have taken up the invitation from the conference organisers to contribute a few reflections on our overall experience of the fifth SMRSC conference.