SLOW MOVEMENT
slow down now
My name is Ice. That is the Crip name I chose when I became involved in Crip communities and the Slow Movement in the late 2020s. My name refers to a skill many Crips possess: the ability to transition our own state of (crip) matter. My bodymind is transformative, vulnerable, fluid, changing. I move through the world as a person who contains contradictions, multitudes; who has been harmed for who they are, and has themself harmed others. The people in the Slow Movement are my family.
The movement has existed since 2028. We are a diverse crowd cripping social movements by means of radical accessibility. I became involved in the Slow Movement through my art, particularly poetry. Later, I began participating in training sessions where I learned about radical accessibility, direct anti-ableist action, time management in social movements, and organizing Slow protests. When protesting, I’ve often taken care of safety at events, for instance first aid assistance.
We chose our name at our first Conference in Stockholm, Sverige, in August 2032. There were about 30 participants, and it was the first time we all met in person. Before that, we had met and discussed online, even though community members in each “country” had already met each other.
At the Conference, we joked about how it took us 5 years to meet and start planning our action in a structured manner, and how this was proof of us practicing what we preach. The afterparty took place at a cheap, physically accessible coffee shop. There, immersed in a multilingual, messy and fun debate about how to inform others of our new collective/movement, we chose the name “Slow Movement”.
We were happy with this name because it was easy to understand and smooth to translate to all the languages we work with. I still remember when we began writing down “slow down now” everywhere. There was something magical in repeating that sentence often enough, it helped us find our rhythm.
It has helped me stop and re-evaluate: slow down, seriously, right now, even for a second, what are you even doing? In Helsinki in 2033, one could find the sentence in a page of a public library book, on the wall of an accessible toilet, at the back of a skateboard, or written on a street lamp. The Slow Movement truly resembles the beings who make it and keep it alive: It is transformative, fluid, unstable, weird, queer, messy, and longs for healing and justice.
At its core, Slow Movement is about radical accessibility, about us Crip people leading the way. Many of us Disabled/Crip people feel we have been pushed aside from every movement and organization, except from disability rights/arts organizations. The Slow Movement is about everyone waiting for the slowest one and picking up that person’s pace to move together as a united, clumsy front: towards a slower, more just, and sustainable world. We’ve made ourselves the leaders, setting Crip bodyminds and skills and wisdoms to the center stage. We started with access, instead of thinking of it as an afterthought.
From the beginning, our main goal has been to “crip all existing social movements''. For our members and partners, participating in activism in a sustainable way means:
I am feeling sufficiently nurtured, I have resources, I feel like I matter, I can continue living this way as long as I want to without needing a long vacation to calm my nervous system. I can trust the community, and I participate in the movement deeply out of love and sense of justice, not guilt or shame or rush or demands.
Since the 2020s, we’ve gathered around issues dealing with white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and accessible activism. What does speeding do to our thinking and our bodyminds? How can the movement support individuals instead of “demanding” free labour? Why is it that even many Abled people can’t participate in activism run by Abled people? By slowing down, we have radically shifted away from the inhumane, fast-paced (post)capitalist rhythm that affected for a long time the ways many people organized (around) social movements in “Western” and many colonized societies.
Slowing down can mean many different things. I sometimes compare us to the Extinction Rebellion, a pretty successful movement in the 2020s-2040s, because we too have many “sections”. Everyone can start going to our Conferences, join our movement, then set up a section in their own context, organize themselves, and use our materials to start slowing down. For example, there’s one Slow Section in Norge that focuses on slowing down ecologically in local villages, and another one in rural Danmark that aims to slow down the local public school curriculum.
The Slow Movement has always been anti-nationalist, but we have also tried to recognize that we began working in the context of a nation state. Already in the 2020s, our focus was to do things locally instead of generalizing and universalizing our actions. We needed a local movement with global ties, so we asked ourselves what it meant to be local in our context.
Our geopolitical context was “people and communities located in “the Nordic countries”. We, in "Suomi", shared some languages, understandings, knowledges, histories and systems of oppression with the areas once called Sverige, Norge, Danmark, Ísland, Kalaallit Nunaat and Sápmi. Since the start of the movement, there's been differences and power dynamics at play, for example, between the colonizer Danmark and the colonized Kalaallit Nunaat, which didn't become an independent Indigenous-led area until the 2040s. Despite these differences, the Slow Movement has become a platform for collaboration med nordiska länder and with Indigenous areas (in Indigenous people's terms). We are also a multilingual group of people practising kodväxling from scratch.
In the present, we mainly work in “the Nordic countries” and Indigenous territories in the Nordics but, due to the movement's history and philosophy, we have also developed global ties throughout the years.
Since the 2030s, we’ve collaborated with several organizations or movements that either are or aim to be leftist, feminist, ecological and/or intersectional. Some examples include: Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, Feminist Vegans, Black Lives Matter, ECOfeminists Europe, PETA, Animalia, Non-Human Life Project, Companion Species, Against Speciesism Denmark, Fridays for Future, among others. Recently, it’s also been possible to start a dialogue with more traditional institutions holding power, like universities.
Anyone is welcome to join the movement if they share our goals, and if they are willing to examine their own privilege and act accordingly in Slow spaces. The Slow Movement centers Crip/Sick lives and skills, but Abled/"Healthy" people who seek to expand their awareness in relation to disability and vulnerability can join us too.
To crip up social movements and the ways we organize ourselves in communities that fight for justice, we:
– increase CROSS-SOLIDARITY among groups
– learn and spread deep understanding on ACCESSIBILITY’s central role in building a better world
– take concrete ACTION towards a slower, more just world
There’s no one leader or direct hierarchy, there are just different responsibilities, and some of them are more visible to the public eye. We always shift and rotate tasks and responsibilities, and have several models/systems developed and tested for this. We do everything as slowly as needed, we embrace the process of moving at a pace that suits us.
If people are well enough to do it, we host Slow Conferences in every “country” about once a month. Conferences are communal spaces for sharing and producing local Slow Knowledges. Like in everything we do, we start with accessibility. We listen, negotiate, and support each other.
How could we make almost everyone feel welcomed and cared for? Who is this event for, honestly? How do we make this process accessible for ourselves too, the organizers? Anyone in the movement can join, and no one has to organize anything if they need to rest instead – that’s a vital task.
Altogether, we plan actions, collaborations, protests, and events. Some of our gatherings are public events where we offer Slow perspectives to everyone, and invite them to join the movement. There are more structured, planned gatherings open to all, like the Slow Reading Circles in Oslo or the Slow Spiritual Gatherings in Áltá. Finally, once a year we host a bigger conference, usually online, where everyone in the Slow Movement is welcome.
Even if radical accessibility is at the core of everything we do, and although some of our members disagree, we’ve noticed through years of practice that it is impossible to organize a Conference or event that is fully accessible. There is no such thing as accessible for all, a thought formulated already by the Disability Justice movement in the 2010-2020s. Us, Crip people, are such an immensely diverse group.
Crip Amazingness is definitely not the only thing/identity/factor/reality/community in our lives. We are multiplicity. Inevitably, if there are many of us in the same space, we have needs that just do not go together. Thus, we try to be honest about this to find a balance, and we listen to the people most impacted in the movement, namely those with many access needs.
The Slow Movement has expanded significantly since 2032. From 30-something people, we are now between 200–400 active members in each territory, divided into groups that act more locally. The movement has triggered concrete changes, most of which have become visible during the past decade. Besides a wide-spread, increased interest in accessible (event) organizing, there’s been a significant difference in what organizations consider accessibility to include: a ramp for a wheelchair in a venue is now very far from “accessibility”.
In 2035, we published a free online booklet called Towards Slower and More Accessible Demonstrations in 10 different languages. We received a huge amount of positive feedback: the booklet was a very concrete and understandable resource, particularly useful for non-profit organizations that had been struggling with organizing and including marginalized Crip people in their movements. Since then, new movements, small collectives and organizations have directly expressed having been inspired by us, like De Svenska Krymplingarnas Motstånd 2042-, Hitauden Puolesta Helsinki 2043- and EKV = Espoon Kehitysvammaiset Vaikuttajat 2046-.
Overall, I believe our biggest accomplishments have been:
– including members to our movement who’ve personally told me this is the first time they can actually do “volunteer” work and organize events without losing themselves or their mind, body and health/balance
– being able to make thousands of people all over the “Nordic countries” reimagine a more sustainable and accessible way of living in general
– bringing solidarity, Crip people, and our visions to the front of a battle for a more just world
There’s been, of course, mistakes. In one Conference in the Spring of 2037, a white Crip woman gave a speech about the history of the movement in which she ignored all the ways anti-racism has affected the anti-ableist movements, Disability movements, Crip movements and the Slow Movement. She erased all the (queer and trans and) Black, Indigenous and People of Color’s contributions to the Slow Movement. Half of the people at the conference started moving their bodyminds outside in the middle of her speech, leaving the huge lecture hall. Many who were experiencing it via online stream closed their devices in shock. After the conference, the Slow Movement has had several international and local discussions on how and why this happened, and what we should do to prevent it in the future.
We still have a lot of work to do in evaluating the ways in which whiteness affects how we see organizing in the first place. I remember someone saying at a Conference we should never underestimate white supremacy and many other systems sneaking up on us. We still have some serious evaluation to do so that the whole movement doesn’t fall apart. If we’re a Crip movement, we should be so, or at least have several groups and spaces for every Crip.
We are part of a longer, ongoing process of Slowing down to a spiral where all bodyminds are worthy. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it’s happening. Our predecessors come in many shapes, yet I would like to emphasize the North American Disability Justice Movement (especially during 2005-2045), particularly the work of the Sins Invalid Collective and the absolutely irreplaceable writings of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (in 2010s), who can directly be credited for many of the things I have written here. The Disability Justice Movement, and of course all the Crip, Sick, Mad and Disability movements before it, have given us the tools and chances to reimagine.
Being in “the Nordics”, we inevitably operate in a different context and thus have a slightly different focus. Our philosophy is based on Crip and radical views of accessibility. We believe in community and healing, which used to be distant in “the Nordics'' compared to (white) Anglo-American cultures. A few decades ago, in North American contexts, people were clearly more dependent on community support and safety nets than in the Nordics.
Here we have had things like (a problematic) universal health care, high levels of taxation, etc. Now that capitalist and nationalist constructions called "states" are falling apart, we are living interesting, new, and, for some of us, dangerous situations where reimagining communities is vital and perhaps more possible.
We haven’t invented anything new, but we’ve brought together important ways of thinking into a specific context, for example intersectionality (Black feminism), queer feminism, and ecofeminsm. We are also standing on the shoulders of relentless fights for the most basic disability rights everywhere, particularly in the U.S. and the U.K. between the 1980s and the 2010s. Internally, this is something the movement tries to problematize: where do our ideas and imaginations stem from really?
Theoretically speaking, many disabled movements have focused on the social model of disability. In this model, the “problem” of disability lies in inaccessibility, in the societal structures and attitudes, but never in an individual or their body. Cripness is always changing and tearing down constructed dualisms and revealing the vulnerability in all of us.
No one is really 100 % Crip or an Abled person, and the category itself is definitely not a monolith. While we appreciate the work done based on the social model, Crip is something else. It’s a fluid, queer, powerful political hybrid containing multitudes. Alison Kafer wrote about this in the 2010s already, and I recommend it, if a somewhat academic text from that time is accessible to you. Crip recognizes all “aspects'' of disability as a whole, it seeks to create a new type of political agency around Sickness/Cripness instead of focusing on, for instance, human rights and policies.
This said, all social justice movements have deeply affected us. In our local sections, we actively honor, remember and learn about Crip/Sick/Disabled people, highlighting their work relevant to that particular local context. We do this during Conferences, possible spiritual services, and in the writings/materials we publish. Last but not least, we are very inspired by and enmeshed in the environmental movements of the 2010s–2040s aiming to save our own planet. Thank you for making us think about sustainability. We will continue working with you on prioritizing Crip issues more when battling climate change.
SLOW MOVEMENT
slow down now
My name is Ice. That is the Crip name I chose when I became involved in Crip communities and the Slow Movement in the late 2020s. My name refers to a skill many Crips possess: the ability to transition our own state of (crip) matter. My bodymind is transformative, vulnerable, fluid, changing. I move through the world as a person who contains contradictions, multitudes; who has been harmed for who they are, and has themself harmed others. The people in the Slow Movement are my family.
The movement has existed since 2028. We are a diverse crowd cripping social movements by means of radical accessibility. I became involved in the Slow Movement through my art, particularly poetry. Later, I began participating in training sessions where I learned about radical accessibility, direct anti-ableist action, time management in social movements, and organizing Slow protests. When protesting, I’ve often taken care of safety at events, for instance first aid assistance.
We chose our name at our first Conference in Stockholm, Sverige, in August 2032. There were about 30 participants, and it was the first time we all met in person. Before that, we had met and discussed online, even though community members in each “country” had already met each other. At the Conference, we joked about how it took us 5 years to meet and start planning our action in a structured manner, and how this was proof of us practicing what we preach. The afterparty took place at a cheap, physically accessible coffee shop. There, immersed in a multilingual, messy and fun debate about how to inform others of our new collective/movement, we chose the name “Slow Movement”.
We were happy with this name because it was easy to understand and smooth to translate to all the languages we work with. I still remember when we began writing down “slow down now” everywhere. There was something magical in repeating that sentence often enough, it helped us find our rhythm. It has helped me stop and re-evaluate: slow down, seriously, right now, even for a second, what are you even doing? In Helsinki in 2033, one could find the sentence in a page of a public library book, on the wall of an accessible toilet, at the back of a skateboard, or written on a street lamp. The Slow Movement truly resembles the beings who make it and keep it alive: It is transformative, fluid, unstable, weird, queer, messy, and longs for healing and justice.
At its core, Slow Movement is about radical accessibility, about us Crip people leading the way. Many of us Disabled/Crip people feel we have been pushed aside from every movement and organization, except from disability rights/arts organizations. The Slow Movement is about everyone waiting for the slowest one and picking up that person’s pace to move together as a united, clumsy front: towards a slower, more just, and sustainable world. We’ve made ourselves the leaders, setting Crip bodyminds and skills and wisdoms to the center stage. We started with access, instead of thinking of it as an afterthought.
From the beginning, our main goal has been to “crip all existing social movements''. For our members and partners, participating in activism in a sustainable way means:
I am feeling sufficiently nurtured, I have resources, I feel like I matter, I can continue living this way as long as I want to without needing a long vacation to calm my nervous system. I can trust the community, and I participate in the movement deeply out of love and sense of justice, not guilt or shame or rush or demands.
Since the 2020s, we’ve gathered around issues dealing with white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and accessible activism. What does speeding do to our thinking and our bodyminds? How can the movement support individuals instead of “demanding” free labour? Why is it that even many Abled people can’t participate in activism run by Abled people? By slowing down, we have radically shifted away from the inhumane, fast-paced (post)capitalist rhythm that affected for a long time the ways many people organized (around) social movements in “Western” and many colonized societies.
Slowing down can mean many different things. I sometimes compare us to the Extinction Rebellion, a pretty successful movement in the 2020s-2040s, because we too have many “sections”. Everyone can start going to our Conferences, join our movement, then set up a section in their own context, organize themselves, and use our materials to start slowing down. For example, there’s one Slow Section in Norge that focuses on slowing down ecologically in local villages, and another one in rural Danmark that aims to slow down the local public school curriculum.
The Slow Movement has always been anti-nationalist, but we have also tried to recognize that we began working in the context of a nation state. Already in the 2020s, our focus was to do things locally instead of generalizing and universalizing our actions. We needed a local movement with global ties, so we asked ourselves what it meant to be local in our context.
Our geopolitical context was “people and communities located in “the Nordic countries”. We, in "Suomi", shared some languages, understandings, knowledges, histories and systems of oppression with the areas once called Sverige, Norge, Danmark, Ísland, Kalaallit Nunaat and Sápmi. Since the start of the movement, there's been differences and power dynamics at play, for example, between the colonizer Danmark and the colonized Kalaallit Nunaat, which didn't become an independent Indigenous-led area until the 2040s. Despite these differences, the Slow Movement has become a platform for collaboration med nordiska länder and with Indigenous areas (in Indigenous people's terms). We are also a multilingual group of people practising kodväxling from scratch. In the present, we mainly work in “the Nordic countries” and Indigenous territories in the Nordics but, due to the movement's history and philosophy, we have also developed global ties throughout the years.
Since the 2030s, we’ve collaborated with several organizations or movements that either are or aim to be leftist, feminist, ecological and/or intersectional. Some examples include: Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, Feminist Vegans, Black Lives Matter, ECOfeminists Europe, PETA, Animalia, Non-Human Life Project, Companion Species, Against Speciesism Denmark, Fridays for Future, among others. Recently, it’s also been possible to start a dialogue with more traditional institutions holding power, like universities.
Anyone is welcome to join the movement if they share our goals, and if they are willing to examine their own privilege and act accordingly in Slow spaces. The Slow Movement centers Crip/Sick lives and skills, but Abled/"Healthy" people who seek to expand their awareness in relation to disability and vulnerability can join us too.
To crip up social movements and the ways we organize ourselves in communities that fight for justice, we:
– increase CROSS-SOLIDARITY among groups
– learn and spread deep understanding on ACCESSIBILITY’s central role in building a better world
– take concrete ACTION towards a slower, more just world
There’s no one leader or direct hierarchy, there are just different responsibilities, and some of them are more visible to the public eye. We always shift and rotate tasks and responsibilities, and have several models/systems developed and tested for this. We do everything as slowly as needed, we embrace the process of moving at a pace that suits us.
If people are well enough to do it, we host Slow Conferences in every “country” about once a month. Conferences are communal spaces for sharing and producing local Slow Knowledges. Like in everything we do, we start with accessibility. We listen, negotiate, and support each other.
How could we make almost everyone feel welcomed and cared for? Who is this event for, honestly? How do we make this process accessible for ourselves too, the organizers? Anyone in the movement can join, and no one has to organize anything if they need to rest instead – that’s a vital task.
Altogether, we plan actions, collaborations, protests, and events. Some of our gatherings are public events where we offer Slow perspectives to everyone, and invite them to join the movement. There are more structured, planned gatherings open to all, like the Slow Reading Circles in Oslo or the Slow Spiritual Gatherings in Áltá. Finally, once a year we host a bigger conference, usually online, where everyone in the Slow Movement is welcome.
Even if radical accessibility is at the core of everything we do, and although some of our members disagree, we’ve noticed through years of practice that it is impossible to organize a Conference or event that is fully accessible. There is no such thing as accessible for all, a thought formulated already by the Disability Justice movement in the 2010-2020s. Us, Crip people, are such an immensely diverse group. Crip Amazingness is definitely not the only thing/identity/factor/reality/community in our lives. We are multiplicity. Inevitably, if there are many of us in the same space, we have needs that just do not go together. Thus, we try to be honest about this to find a balance, and we listen to the people most impacted in the movement, namely those with many access needs.
The Slow Movement has expanded significantly since 2032. From 30-something people, we are now between 200–400 active members in each territory, divided into groups that act more locally. The movement has triggered concrete changes, most of which have become visible during the past decade. Besides a wide-spread, increased interest in accessible (event) organizing, there’s been a significant difference in what organizations consider accessibility to include: a ramp for a wheelchair in a venue is now very far from “accessibility”.
In 2035, we published a free online booklet called Towards Slower and More Accessible Demonstrations in 10 different languages. We received a huge amount of positive feedback: the booklet was a very concrete and understandable resource, particularly useful for non-profit organizations that had been struggling with organizing and including marginalized Crip people in their movements. Since then, new movements, small collectives and organizations have directly expressed having been inspired by us, like De Svenska Krymplingarnas Motstånd 2042-, Hitauden Puolesta Helsinki 2043- and EKV = Espoon Kehitysvammaiset Vaikuttajat 2046-.
Overall, I believe our biggest accomplishments have been:
– including members to our movement who’ve personally told me this is the first time they can actually do “volunteer” work and organize events without losing themselves or their mind, body and health/balance
– being able to make thousands of people all over the “Nordic countries” reimagine a more sustainable and accessible way of living in general
– bringing solidarity, Crip people, and our visions to the front of a battle for a more just world
There’s been, of course, mistakes. In one Conference in the Spring of 2037, a white Crip woman gave a speech about the history of the movement in which she ignored all the ways anti-racism has affected the anti-ableist movements, Disability movements, Crip movements and the Slow Movement. She erased all the (queer and trans and) Black, Indigenous and People of Color’s contributions to the Slow Movement. Half of the people at the conference started moving their bodyminds outside in the middle of her speech, leaving the huge lecture hall. Many who were experiencing it via online stream closed their devices in shock. After the conference, the Slow Movement has had several international and local discussions on how and why this happened, and what we should do to prevent it in the future.
We still have a lot of work to do in evaluating the ways in which whiteness affects how we see organizing in the first place. I remember someone saying at a Conference we should never underestimate white supremacy and many other systems sneaking up on us. We still have some serious evaluation to do so that the whole movement doesn’t fall apart. If we’re a Crip movement, we should be so, or at least have several groups and spaces for every Crip.
We are part of a longer, ongoing process of Slowing down to a spiral where all bodyminds are worthy. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it’s happening. Our predecessors come in many shapes, yet I would like to emphasize the North American Disability Justice Movement (especially during 2005-2045), particularly the work of the Sins Invalid Collective and the absolutely irreplaceable writings of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (in 2010s), who can directly be credited for many of the things I have written here. The Disability Justice Movement, and of course all the Crip, Sick, Mad and Disability movements before it, have given us the tools and chances to reimagine.
Being in “the Nordics”, we inevitably operate in a different context and thus have a slightly different focus. Our philosophy is based on Crip and radical views of accessibility. We believe in community and healing, which used to be distant in “the Nordics'' compared to (white) Anglo-American cultures. A few decades ago, in North American contexts, people were clearly more dependent on community support and safety nets than in the Nordics. Here we have had things like (a problematic) universal health care, high levels of taxation, etc. Now that capitalist and nationalist constructions called "states" are falling apart, we are living interesting, new, and, for some of us, dangerous situations where reimagining communities is vital and perhaps more possible.
We haven’t invented anything new, but we’ve brought together important ways of thinking into a specific context, for example intersectionality (Black feminism), queer feminism, and ecofeminsm. We are also standing on the shoulders of relentless fights for the most basic disability rights everywhere, particularly in the U.S. and the U.K. between the 1980s and the 2010s. Internally, this is something the movement tries to problematize: where do our ideas and imaginations stem from really?
Theoretically speaking, many disabled movements have focused on the social model of disability. In this model, the “problem” of disability lies in inaccessibility, in the societal structures and attitudes, but never in an individual or their body. Cripness is always changing and tearing down constructed dualisms and revealing the vulnerability in all of us.
No one is really 100 % Crip or an Abled person, and the category itself is definitely not a monolith. While we appreciate the work done based on the social model, Crip is something else. It’s a fluid, queer, powerful political hybrid containing multitudes. Alison Kafer wrote about this in the 2010s already, and I recommend it, if a somewhat academic text from that time is accessible to you. Crip recognizes all “aspects'' of disability as a whole, it seeks to create a new type of political agency around Sickness/Cripness instead of focusing on, for instance, human rights and policies.
This said, all social justice movements have deeply affected us. In our local sections, we actively honor, remember and learn about Crip/Sick/Disabled people, highlighting their work relevant to that particular local context. We do this during Conferences, possible spiritual services, and in the writings/materials we publish. Last but not least, we are very inspired by and enmeshed in the environmental movements of the 2010s–2040s aiming to save our own planet. Thank you for making us think about sustainability. We will continue working with you on prioritizing Crip issues more when battling climate change.