“Why Culture Matters to Justice” is a series of essays commissioned by 

 as part of their Culture Justice Initiative (CJI). Believing the value of this content goes beyond our organization, NPN reached out to online publications within the arts and social justice movement sectors. This series is being cross-published by National Performance Network, 

Convergence, A Magazine for Radical Insights

Landscapes, a digital platform from A Blade of Grass

. Each day this week, an essay will be released. None of what you read this week is sacrosanct. Agree, disagree, contemplate, or expound on—are all welcome forms of engagement. This work is offered in the spirit of protagonism with the hope of provoking dialogue, influencing strategy, and deepening practice.


Artists and cultural workers are an integral part of all revolutionary movements across geography and time. From Chinese puppetry, to the harmonies of Sweet Honey in the Rock, to the Místicas of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, culture has added to the canon of what resistance can look like.

Living in a time of authoritarianism and proto-fascism means culture has been hijacked. These conditions did not appear overnight. Little by little, we have been trained through reward and violence to accept and even champion systems and ways of being that were never designed to hold the well-being and dignity of all life.

These means of coercive control answer the age-old question: “Why would people work against their own interests?” The answer is because many have come to believe that there is no alternative but to be successful within these systems. One’s beliefs about the world are transmitted through culture—both popular and intimate. If we are going to inspire collective action, we must intervene on the level of belief by experimenting, investing in, and uplifting ways of being that counter the current hegemonic culture. It is time to grow our understanding of, and delve more deeply into, cultural strategy.

In 1995, the novelist Toni Morrison gave 

the convocation speech at Howard University.

 It was entitled “Racism and Fascism.” In it, she says, “Racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new.“ As this speech and many talks before and after show us, Morrison was a brilliant student of the world. She entreats that the twins of racism and fascism do not make anything new and through that she provides us direction on how to be strategic in the moment.

In this current moment of authoritarianism and proto-fascism, our strategies require people who can create something new. For artists and cultural workers, creation is craftwork and that extends beyond an artistic discipline. It makes them instrumental in this current moment of struggle.

A presenter during a major arts conference spoke about the ways arts and culture helped people get through the pandemic. He quipped, “I mean, what would we have done without Netflix?” While that may be true in some sense, statements like that reduce culture to a commodity. Culture supported well-being during the pandemic by providing critical mutual aid networks, activating public spaces for care and protest, and reviving long-standing community practices. In the face of fractured systemic social support systems, cultural interventions connected people and moved us towards collective care.

This reference to the value of art and culture by the conference presenter appears throughout movement spaces as well. The request for fifteen minutes of performance for the rally or the strategy to “meet people where they are” has often meant an engagement with culture in its most popular sense. Culture and pop culture are treated as the same.

Movement history has demonstrated that shifts away from a racial capitalist colonial culture never start as popular. Culture is something that starts at the margins and grows to become the center. Not only is it not popular, but attempts to create different, more just societal arrangements are met with violence and coercion to keep people in their place.

Oppressive forces use two primary strategies to keep us in a culture of repression and dominance. Societal arrangements rooted in racial, economic, and social hierarchies work to truncate the imagination and keep people ahistorical, disconnecting them from lineage.

The first strategy disappears or rewrites history, erasing labor and fostering a fixation on the “never seen before.” Unlike Morrison’s invitation towards something new as evolution, this strategy creates disconnection. It uplifts individual inspiration over collective learning and rewards singular, charismatic leadership. Being ahistorical makes it impossible to connect and learn from each historical moment.

We see this tactic used over and over again. Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their land and sent to boarding schools to “kill the Indian” in them. CLR James writes in 

, “The only place where Negroes did not revolt is in the pages of capitalist history.” Erasure is a tactic of cultural warfare because without connection to a lineage, the subjugation of the individual is much more possible. Every insurgency has found a way to forcibly push against erasure.

The second strategy used to reduce culture’s fundamental role in revolution is the truncation of our imagination. That our imaginations are contested spaces is not new. In a 

 author and abolitionist organizer walidah imarisha reminds us that we are “living inside the imagination of old white men.” Fevered dreams of power, supremacy, and fascism are shaping the conditions of our lives every day. When the question asked is “In what world does any of this make sense?” the answer is that our spiral towards mass poverty and the destruction of the Earth’s necessary resources across race and class makes way for a few billionaires to play.

The capture of imagination leads masses of people to believe that fevered dream could be theirs as well. Racial imperial capitalism subjugates the imagination through systems of violence and coercion to reward complicity in the world never built for the well-being of all living beings: a world that requires racial, economic, and gender inequality and subjugation of the majority of people for a few to amass ecologically unsustainable amounts of wealth.

This series addresses these strategies directly with essays that ask us to evolve our thinking and engage history as a practice of Sankofa, to go back and fetch it. Uplifting the history of resistance through culture within the Chicano Movement of Denver, Colorado across generations asserts the potency of culture as a pathway to renewed strength through remembering. This series also asks us to open up our imaginations. It asks the question, 

 Each essay charges our curiosity by offering language, concepts and strategies towards a more nuanced relationship between culture and justice.

There is a difference between engaging aspects of culture to further a goal and the intentional shaping of culture itself. Cultural strategy involves both, but far too often the focus is on culture as an instrument for change. Culture is used to make the change rather than culture being the focus of the change. In this moment, we need to investigate, experiment with, and uplift cultural practices rooted in communalism, care, and justice for the sake of collective liberation. Cultural strategy looks at the past, present, and future to develop the capacities we need to fight for and live in a different world. In other words, cultural strategy addresses history, assesses the current conditions, and imagines how to organize people. Cultural strategy is found in the how as much as the what.

If we take culture seriously as a front in the fight for liberation and justice, then “fighting” on that front requires strategy and collective action. We can no longer think about culture as something that just happens or solely as something that is passed down. Culture is a living, evolving organism that shapes us all and has the capacity to be shaped through intention.

For some, that has meant leaning into pop culture as a way to connect and build movement. In 2024, the Democratic National Convention used 200 social media influencers to spread the word and encourage civic participation. Many of these influencers had no history of political content on their platforms and were given unprecedented access to candidates and officials. 

The DNC’s choice to use influencers left little room for traditional press and skilled journalists.

 This is an example of a strategy colluding with oppressive forces to limit the press under the guise of engaging with popular culture. While the DNC is neither Left nor Radical, this example can still be used as a warning and an invitation for rigor in our methods.

When people refer to the Culture War, they are often referring to the repression of artistic freedom in the late 1980s and 1990s in which federal lawmakers became moral police for the National Endowment for the Arts, and obscenity charges were brought against individual artists and directors of predominantly white arts institutions.

Yet there is a larger and longer view of the war on culture dating back to enslavement and the first attempts at colonization. The outlawing of the drum was not only an assault on a cultural connection that could provide enslaved people a respite from the horrors they endured. It was an assault on the very act of communication itself. Similarly, the strategic decision to ensure that the few people who spoke the same language or were from the same villages were not housed together was a war on culture.

Attacks on artists such as Billie Holiday, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paul Robeson were attempts to silence anyone who was using culture as a strategy towards liberation. In 

 Amílcar Cabral, revolutionary strategist of the decolonial revolution of Guinea-Bissou, states, “History teaches us that in certain circumstances it is quite easy for a stranger to impose his rule on a people. History equally teaches us that whatever the material aspects of that rule, it cannot be sustained except by permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people in question.”

Today, we see how the Kennedy Center has become a tool to weaponize and erase culture for the current administration. And we see people showing up and protesting outside the building because of the cultural legacies embodied in the institution. The community is organizing because they understand the importance of culture.

The possibility of a progressive, functional democracy is hampered by a failed two-party system, vicious voter disenfranchisement, and a collective descent into Antonio Gramsci’s crisis of legitimacy that undermines people’s belief that a democratic government can be salvaged, much less work for all. At the same time, there are brilliant organizers working on building a multi-party system and fighting in the streets and the courts against redistricting and voter disenfranchisement.

Cultural strategies can bolster this work by refounding the belief that collective care can be central to a thriving society and grow what Aisha Shillingford of Intelligent Mischief refers to in her essay “

” as “a collective political imaginary grounded in love, care, regeneration and interdependence.”

The essays in this series are designed to introduce an expanded engagement with culture. This is an invitation to wrestle with the content and concepts offered and allow your agreement, disagreement, and/or curiosity to sharpen your understanding of the role of culture in our lives, movements, and society. This series takes on the expansiveness and importance of culture as a necessary component for building interventions that can move from the intimate or hyperlocal to the level of societal transformation. These essays bring philosophies, practices, and lessons from behind the paywalls of the academy where much of the current cultural theory is expressed. The authors represented are practitioners. Their ideas have been born through years of experimentation and study.

To come to this body of work, the writers brought their ideas to a four-day convergence in rural Mississippi. They spent their time having morning discussions and writing in the afternoon. The essays offer thoughts on shifting our understanding of culture(s), strategy development, a historic case study, and a current intervention.

Vanessa Whang – “What Is Cultural Justice?”

Evan Bissell – “Experience As a Whole: Expanding the Boundaries of Cultural Strategy”

Allen Kwabena Frimpong (nii.a.k) – “Building a Reparative Framework for Cultural Equity: Redesigning Creative Business Through Solidarity Economy”

Tanya Mote – “Chicano Cultural Resistance, a Case Study Across Generations”

outline of the 5 basic stages of movement building

 starts with “Making visible the invisible.” This series makes culture visible as a front in the fight for justice, so we can hone our strategies and be intentional about where society goes from here.

Attendees at the Culture Justice Institute retreat. From top left: Tanya Mote, muthi reed, Vanessa Whang, and Brandon Black. From bottom left: Evan Bissell, Allen Kwabena Frimpong, Sage Crump, and Riley Yaxley.

Sage Crump (she/her) is a culture strategist, artist, and movement facilitator who expands and deepens the relationship between the cultural sector and social justice organizing. Based in New Orleans but working nationally, she leverages creative practice and the cultural sector to transform systemic oppressions. Sage is a member of Complex Movements, a Detroit-based artist collective whose interdisciplinary work supports local and translocal visionary organizing. She is co-founder of The Kinfolk Effect (TKE), an incubation space for multimedia installation work that examines the movement of Blackness through time and space with artist muthi reed. Sage was an inaugural cultural strategy fellow at Opportunity Agenda and released a Cultural Strategy Toolkit. At NPN, she led Leveraging A Network for Equity (LANE) before founding the 

Department of Racial Justice & Movement Building

 in 2023; she was named Co-Executive Director in 2026. Sage is a former co-director of the Emergent Strategies Ideation Institute. She is a former member of LeftRoots, a member of the Guild of Future Architects, Women of Color in the Arts, and a board member with the Center for Cultural Innovation, Art2Action, Double Edge Theater, Change Elemental, and Mark-n-Sparks. Sage’s work incorporates movement history, complex sciences, emergent strategy, and creative practice to imagine the world we want to live in and build strategies and practices that will get us there.

Instagram

Sage Crump

Artists and cultural workers are an integral part of all revolutionary movements across geography and time. From Chinese puppetry, to the harmonies of Sweet Honey in the Rock, to the Místicas of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, culture has added to the canon of what resistance can look like.

Why Culture Matters to Justice

Culture and the Moment

This year, we’re reflecting on the act of gathering as an artistic form and tool for building movements, distributing resources, and nurturing new futures. In a field as expansive and difficult to define as socially engaged art, the impulse to gather people, collectively organize, and build networks emerges as a throughline amongst a vast array of disciplines and practices. This work cannot happen individually; collaboration is inherent to the process at all scales, from artist cooperatives, ensembles, and mutual aid networks to broader efforts of convening and coalition building across networks and geographies. How can we create intentional spaces to build together and dream together? What are the formats we might create or return to in times of escalating crisis? How can the act of gathering build solidarity and coalition?

Our own rebuilding process as an organization revolved around a series of listening sessions in New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, and online, where we gathered artists, practitioners, and community partners to discuss the needs of the field and the types of models needed to meet them. Participants repeatedly emphasized the deep desire to be together—to think, to build, to rest. Our programs developed out of this feedback, centering support for artist-led gatherings in both our monthly microgrant program, Field Funds, and our fellowship program, In Fellowship. Our Field Funds cycles for artist-led gatherings consistently see the highest spike in applications. Across the country, artists are building schools, organizing festivals, hosting meals, and carving out space, both physical and virtual, to be in community together.

This past year also represented the introduction of our reimagined fellowship program, In Fellowship, which gathers a working group of artists, practitioners, and cultural organizers to collectively explore key facets and processes of socially engaged art. Over a year of virtual meetings dedicated to group reflection and mutual learning, cohort members shared the joys and challenges of collective work within the context of interconnectedness and shared power. Being able to convene regularly with this cohort, even virtually, offered a balm to our team during a year of unending crisis. “This cohort has helped to create a place to think about these questions, to listen to how our colleagues around the country are trying to move,” Alison De La Cruz of Great Leap recently reflected during a group call. “There’s not one solution model to the challenges that we’re facing right now, and more and more I find it deeply radical when people choose to do things together.”

To kick off the issue, we’ll hear from each of the cohort members, both individually and together in conversation, to offer learnings and resources that have emerged from their time In Fellowship. Each issue of 

engages a guest collaborator, and the cohort is assuming that role for the first set of contributions. Later this year, we’ll be welcoming the second cohort of In Fellowship and will invite those members to contribute, as well.

We’ll also be in conversation with artists from across the field who have built practices around the act of gathering, offering a glimpse into their work and process. What models are they developing? How can gathering unfold safely and accessibly right now? How can we build more channels of support for this crucial aspect of socially engaged practices? Welcome to the third issue of 

, a roving exploration of these questions and more from artists, practitioners, and their circles of collaborators and networks. It’s an honor to gather their voices and to share them with you.

This year, we’re reflecting on the act of gathering as an artistic form and tool for building movements, distributing resources, and nurturing new futures. In a field as expansive and difficult to define as socially engaged art, the impulse to gather people, collectively organize, and build networks emerges as a throughline amongst a vast array of disciplines and practices. This work cannot happen individually; collaboration is inherent to the process at all scales, from artist cooperatives, ensembles, and mutual aid networks to broader efforts of convening and coalition building across networks and geographies. 

A Circle of Circles

How might we gather when physical congregation is not safe or accessible? One way might be online, where we can imagine and build the spaces that we want to see. Queer Spa Network, a group of autonomous queer artists and healers invested in rest, healing, and pleasure that emerged from The Every Body Spa project, has been hosting virtual gatherings the past few years to collectively and collaboratively build a genderqueer spa, drawing on the history of queer bathhouses and beaches. This week in 

, member Carol Zou and the collective reflect on the search for the perfect gender inclusive spa and the guiding lights informing their design.

Getting naked is the implicit siren call of the bathhouse, a place where people disrobe and descend into warm waters, emerging from said waters cleansed and renewed as part of a pseudo-religious baptism. Bathhouses are places where the body exists in its full unfettered vulnerability. But while we shed our clothes in the bathhouse, we cannot shed the ways our bodies are socially policed. We are shuttled into gender-segregated areas despite feeling neither man nor woman. 

 with no conception of volume control gossip about the shapes of our bodies. Any wrong move, or any wrong embodiment, leads to accusations of sexual transgression—as indicated by the ongoing right-wing panic regarding trans women and bathrooms.

Where, oh where, can queer and trans people get naked?



Digital Sanctuaries: Design Your Dream Genderqueer Spa

, posits that one place where queer and trans people can metaphorically get naked is on the internet. In keeping with the ideas expressed in Legacy Russell’s book 

 the internet becomes a place where instead of being disembodied, we explore alternative forms of embodiment that are not available to us afk, or away from keyboard, in a shared physical reality.

For three years, Queer Spa Network hosted community visioning sessions amongst trans and queer people on what a Genderqueer Spa could look like. Our initial speculative online spa was built in 2021 by Carrie Marie Schneider, with subsequent iterations built by Xixi Edelsbrunner (2024), Andy Cao (2024, 2025), and Forever Dominguez (2025). Leo Alas, Mel Liu, Lindsey Morris, Ada Runge, and Carol Zou provided additional facilitation support. Each online spa iteration built upon our previous community visioning sessions. We initially selected Gather as a platform where we could customize fantastical spaces and facilitate interactions similar to interactions in a physical setting. Participants could participate in multiple conversations depending on proximity to each other and had the freedom to explore our speculative spa and/or participate in facilitated activities. Additional unique features of Gather helped us facilitate access for disabled and trans community members. In a world where the majority of people have decided to practice COVID-denialism, our speculative online spa refused to leave behind disabled people impacted by COVID. Trans community members defined the terms of their embodiment through custom avatars and options to participate on- or off-camera. As Gather morphs and updates, our speculative spa will also likely morph and migrate. However, the lessons about the internet as a powerful tool for facilitating imagination and trans/disabled access persist.

What does it mean to queer the bathhouse? bell hooks defines queer “not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

 Cisheteropatriarchy exists well beyond the bedroom and permeates all our physical, economic, political, and social structures—from the blueprints of single-family homes, to tax breaks for married people, to the hospital bed where a dying lover lies. Not everything is queer (unfortunately), but everything 

 queered. It is through this lens that reimagining the queer bathhouse necessarily addresses issues of labor, grief, history, ecology, sensory play, and sexual deviation.

As a collective, we model shared labor and ideation. Capitalism has co-opted Audre Lorde’s definition of self-care

 into an individualistic, commodified pursuit: a paradigm in which white, cis, hetero, abled women eschew social responsibility in the name of “self-care” and take bubble baths in the privacy of their own homes. Reclaiming care as a communal, decommodified act means practicing collectivity. Through our visioning sessions, we invited our larger queer and trans community into this act of collective dreaming. In our 2025 iteration, we led participants through grounding and get-to-know-you exercises, demonstrated how to build speculative spaces on the Gather platform, and then separated into themed rooms where groups could build according to the theme of the room. Before building, Queer Spa Network facilitators prompted each group to come up with a set of “guiding lights,” or principles, that could inform the build.

 Architecture without an explicit set of guiding principles defaults to the dominant capitalist values upon which the field is built. As a collective, we want to explore further cooperative labor and economic models for queer wellness.

We may be the first queer bathhouse to exist on the internet, but we certainly are not the first queer bathhouse to exist afk. From Riis Beach to Midtowne Spa, queer communities have historically claimed certain beaches, hot springs, and bathhouses as queer havens. Our 2024 online spa featured an altar room that paid homage to Riis Beach,

: fleeting spaces of queer aquatic joy. Participants could browse the photo albums and learn more about these queer bathing sites, as well as leave a memento on the community altar located in the center of the room. The queer bathhouse becomes a space to somaticize and transmogrify the grief that we collectively carry from seeing members of our communities gone too soon. Our comprehensive research on the history of queer bathing sites is available in Lindsey Morris’s contribution to our zine: 

When asked to imagine spaces of relaxation and community, many people expressed a desire to connect to nature. Indeed, it seems odd that one never thinks about the politics of water inside a structure where water flows freely. Thinking about nature in concert with the spa also brings the spa into conversation with natural hot springs, forest bathing, and other ways that nature has always served as a site of community healing. Nature provides a refuge for queer and trans people who feel otherwise oppressed by the financial barriers and gender segregation of traditional spas. A nature-inspired seasonal approach to wellness also challenges the fixed and artificial characteristics of spa architecture. The abundantly variegated forms of sexual expression in nature—from hermaphroditic conifers, to sex-changing clownfish, to self-reproducing komodo dragons, to sexually promiscuous bonobos—affirm the range of sexual expression that we find amongst ourselves.

 Nature clears airways and serves as the site of COVID-conscious gathering.



Hot saunas, cold plunges, eucalyptus steams, mud wraps—spas invite our bodies to experience the fullness of our senses. Our Sensory Play visioning room asked participants to envision how else sense and play could be incorporated into a queer bathhouse. Many members of the queer community identify as neurodivergent and express a need for heightened sensory-seeking experiences.

 Additionally, queerness is partially about desiring a sensory experience outside of cisheteronormative understandings of sex and embodiment. A literary example would be Octavia Butler’s ooloi

 series and how these third-gender alien beings both sense and facilitate reproduction in an entirely extra-species manner. It follows, then, that one of the “guiding lights” created by our Sensory Play room involves “impractical/forbidden touch exploration” involving “jellyfish and jello”—sensory seeking that bridges our two other rooms exploring nature and kink.



Speaking of jello, the current cisheteronormative bathhouse as it stands both invites the intimacy of the body while disavowing the sexual appetites of the body. Queering the bathhouse means acknowledging the entwining of the politics of the body and the politics of sex in the bathhouse. Bathhouses are historically not just sanitized spaces, but also places of casual, intimate, sexual encounter, as depicted in Andrew Ahn’s steamy film 

 The speculative dungeon in our queer bathhouse asks if we can reconcile the puritanical baptism of the hot tub with sex acts deemed licentious and depraved by cisheteronormativity. 

How can we make spaces for bodies that are at rest, but also bodies that are actively reaching climax?

 Queer Spa Network’s speculative dungeon visioning session included trans-inclusive signage, a leather and sex toy lending library, showers that doubled as water sports areas, an educational area emphasizing consent and featuring a tribute to the hanky code, and a candlelit lounge for the patient wingpeople who accompany us on our sexual escapades. In reimagining the dungeon within the parameters of a queer bathhouse, our visioning session also deconstructed the biases and limitations within oft-cisheteronormative and trans-exclusionary kink spaces.

Queer placemaking happens in the interstices. Shoved into the closet by the cisheteropatriarchy, we reimagine the closet, bathhouse, alleyway, movie theaters, chat rooms, and other liminal places where queer sex happens. Samuel R. Delany’s 

 gives a first-person account of roving and contingent spaces of queer encounter, constantly interrupted by raids, redevelopment, community losses, and economic precarity.

’s documentation of disco balls and transient dance floors celebrates the brief, beautiful, luminous flashes of queer encounter that exist in an alienated landscape. Queer placemaking challenges the illusory stability that cisheteropatriarchy and ossified capital project into their conception of place. Queer placemaking 

.

One day we will build our afk Dream Genderqueer Spa. Until then, we’ll see you on Roblox.


Nature is immersive and not an accessory to humans and our built environment

Playing around with seasons and how we define them

Seasons are grounding us in the passing of time and the moment, appreciate the moment and being present, and what nature represents of time

It is interesting to build a nature space, when our relationship to nature is often one of looking and interacting

Creating different environments that vary in lushness with different elements, such as rocks and water

Have places to lounge, feel, observe, take in

Live music, water noises, and animal sounds

Impractical/forbidden touch exploration (jellyfish and jello)

Wing person architecture—concept of the “dandelion” dispersal

Approachable for newbies. Educational resources

Website

Queer Spa Network

Reclaiming care as a communal, decommodified act means practicing collectivity. Through our visioning sessions, we invited our larger queer and trans community into this act of collective dreaming.