Dr Laura James's writings

Clearing out old tabs...  Another amazingly thoughtful and insightful article from Rachel Coldicutt: Conley’s framing seems revelatory because care work is often characterised as a bundle of physical acts and emotional feelings, but in reality it involves predicting eventualities, mitigating the mitigatable, and softening the blows of the unavoidable. Care work is the anticipation of grief is a beautiful articulation of care as a thoughtful and a thinking practice; a constant loop of recognising and managing risk. Taking care involves noticing and remembering, writing lists and prioritising; doing the right things in the right order to get to the best outcomes in the circumstance. When I remind my son to put a jumper in his school bag on a sunny day, it’s because I’ve looked at the weather forecast and know it will be colder later. Likewise, when we reply to a government consultation, it’s because we’ve looked at the proposals and know the outcomes will be unjust or unworkable. Bo...

I've spent most of the last two years as CTO at the OPEN .  This continued my trend of working with organisations related to 'open,' but confusingly was nothing to do with open at all. OPEN is the Online Progressive Engagement Network, and I think of it as a co-op, although formally it is not. It's a capacity-building and power-building network, funded (in part) by its member organisations, and mostly works behind the scenes. (It was quite a relief not needing to do social/media/event circuit hustle for once!) OPEN's members are each progressive campaign organisations, building mass people-power to create change across multiple issues including human rights, climate change, and so on. They use the internet for scale, and each organisation operates across a whole nation - the "one member per country" rule means OPEN members aren't competing for local funding or membership. (That the organisations are OPEN members, and that they themselves call their sup...