The Theorypractice Lab: An Organizer's Workshop with Dr. Stuart Schussler

Date: February 5, 2025

Time: 1-2:30pm

Location: University of Waterloo Davis Centre Library

Join the Theorypractice Lab for a hands-on workshop with Dr. Stuart Schussler for students interested in community organizing towards liberation for all. Together participants will learn about Zapatista praxis (theory and practice in action), participate in small group activities to consider community organizing practices, and join in conversation with Dr. Schussler about his twenty years of experience organizing for Indigenous automomy, migrant and refugee justice, and human rights. Please join us from 1-2:30pm in room DC-1568. In person: Masks appreciated. Registration required.

For questions, please email the co-directors of the Lab, Drs. Lisbeth Berbary and Craig Fortier at: theorypr@uwaterloo.ca.

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Dr Stuart Schussler is an Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellow in UW’s Knowledge Integration Department, researching how professors are able to connect their students with the dynamic, sometimes-chaotic grassroots organizations that are at the forefront of social change. His dissertation "Making social movement: The reproductive labour of organizing from Chiapas to Chicago and beyond" analyzes the work of student-activists who have learned from the Zapatistas. He also recently translated Jerome Baschet’s book “The Zapatista Experience: Rebellion, resistance and autonomy” (AK Press). Prior to getting his PhD, Stuart coordinated study abroad programs with the Autonomous University of Social Movements, bringing students to Cuba to learn about their socialist project and to Chiapas, Mexico to learn about the Zapatista struggle for indigenous autonomy. He has organized in the migrant justice collective No One Is Illegal, as a rank and file union member, against the foreclosure crisis, as a human rights observer in communities resisting mining in Ecuador, and with undocumented Colombian refugees organizing for justice.

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Theorypractice: verb

To simultaneously think theory and enact practice; an on-going thinkact.

The Theorypractice Lab at the University of Waterloo cultivates spaces of encounter for students to engage with political education, build collaborative relations, develop analytic tools, and expand organizing skills towards igniting transformative material change within our communities. Taking lead from the Black radical tradition of praxis that recognizes the indivisibility of thought and struggle (Kelley, 2018), our lab embraces a position of theorypracticing for change, where theory and practice are valued equally and engaged simultaneously to move us toward useful action.

Our Lab prioritizes those theorypractices rooted in the daily resistance efforts, interpersonal/collective relationalities, visionary futurities/imaginations, and acts of unsettling activated by diverse communities leading our liberation movements across the globe. Together, we study theory, practice skills, and build strategy necessary for meaningful organizing, coalitional action, collective healing, and community change, while (re)creating our human and more-than-human interrelationalities in ways that seed the possibilities of large-scale transformations.

Our Lab’s on-going offerings include skill-sharing workshops, mini political education curriculums, study groups, artistic interventions, collaborative resource development, and public events in various areas of resistance traditions, including community organizing, direct action, mutual aid, redistribution, and alternative economies. These ongoing offerings provide students with the awareness and skill to critically analyze our social conditions, build collective power, create care-full relations through shared politic, and organize towards (re)creating more just communities. In our Lab we theorypractice collectively towards the liberated worlds we want for us all.