Lesson 5.5: Joy as Resistance
This topic focuses on joy as the emotional and cultural energy that fuels collective agency. Care protects; joy amplifies. Together they create the conditions for endurance and imagination.
4. Joy, creativity, and emotional learning
Joy flows into education, art, and knowledge-sharing. These are not separate from activism; they are how movements survive and renew themselves. In Ireland, activists emphasised the importance of creating ‘space for collective joy’:
- community parties
- creative workshops
- trans-only events
- activities for people of colour
- support groups combining celebration, education, and rest.
One activist described organising as a way to
create a different world, a safer world, by changing people’s relationship with the one that actually exists. (p. 17)
Joy allows learning to be relational and imaginative. It opens space for new narratives of belonging.
