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The Palestinian Ring: Boxing, women, and bombings in Gaza

A poster of Mike Tyson waves above the ring’s blue and red ropes. He was Farah and Abu’s idol, along with Muhammad Ali. And now it’s gone.
Gone, just like the punching bags, gloves, and photos of the girls boxing, including Rima’s, that once were scattered throughout the gym. All have been destroyed by the senselessness of war. Of the Palestine Boxing Center, the first boxing gym for women in the Gaza Strip, only rubble remains. Or almost. The desire to keep fighting has actually been rekindled, and it’s stronger than ever.
“Since the beginning of the war, not only our homes and our boxing club were destroyed, but also our memories and dreams”, says Osama Ayoub, founder of the project Gaza Boxing Women. But then something changed. “When they took us to the displacement camps in Rafah, I decided to organize a team there to revive boxing despite the lack of resources,’ says Osama. As of today they continue training in Khan Yunis.
Osama and the team are also offering entertainment and other activities to counter the fear and anxiety that many kids and women feel. This type of support also includes the noble art of boxing, in the hope of drowning out the bombing, because, as Osama says, “the war won’t stop our dream to box.”


Gaza Boxing Women began putting down roots in 2016. At the time, Osama was part of the Palestinian national boxing team, with which he had toured the Arab world. When he went to Lebanon with the team was when he first saw women training. “That’s how the idea of creating a women’s boxing club in the Gaza Strip was born,” Osama says.
Back in Palestine, he began to train kids of all genders and to his surprise, “the reactions in the neighborhood were very positive and word of mouth spread throughout the Strip.” The group expanded and the room at home was no longer enough. But as the number of boys and girls increased, so did the criticism.
“As we began training in busier neighborhoods, both men and women criticized us, including on social media.” But Osama and the team carried on. A few years later, however, a young woman named Rima Abu Rhama contacted him. She was 21 years old at the time. No longer a child, she was a woman. And she wanted to box.
Rima recalls, “It was 2020 and I was looking for some self-defense sports, but these weren’t exactly available for women. Then I found Coach Osama. I asked him if he could coach me too.” ‘He said, ‘I don’t have a place yet…and society… But we’ll come up with something.”
That’s the spirit of Gaza: one that creates beautiful things even from nothing and seeks solutions. They started training in a basement near their homes and in order to split the costs, Rima convinced her sister and a few friends to join. “We had a lot of fun. Boxing is not a common sport, so many girls saw our Instagram stories and started to get interested and wanting to participate. We became [a group of] ten. Then fifteen. And then many more,” Rima remembers. At one point Osama was training up to forty girls and from that, the first women’s boxing club in Palestine was born.


They call boxing “the loneliest sport”: the one that makes you reflect on yourself. Through the breath. The technique. The controlled emotions that pass from the mind to the arms and feet of those in the ring and are released with direct, fast, incisive punches, such as the jab.
“For me, boxing was a fight and a challenge. I started it because I wanted to get stronger physically. It’s a sport that opens up so many possibilities for women, which is another reason I continued. I wanted to show Palestinian girls that even when they were older women they could continue boxing,” says Rima.
“Sport is a unique vector of socialization. It connects people of all backgrounds and mindsets, like us for instance,” recalls Rima, “We were all different: different ages, different contexts, and with different ideas, yet the sport has brought us all together. Along with Osama, we became one big family. We had a lot of fun together, including outside of the ring, when we’d go out after training. It was a way to get to know the other girls’ cultures. We had one thing in common: we had to fight together. The fight didn’t begin when we put the gloves on but much earlier—because we had to fight to be able to even wear those gloves, and this realization brought us even closer.”
In fact, media interest came after a photographer friend of theirs started taking pictures. After that, many people started criticizing both Osama and the girls, to the point where they were threatening him and calling on the government to end the project on behalf of “religious, social, and cultural motivations.”
“We got over it because we knew we weren’t doing anything wrong. We have always been very respectful. Some women wanted to learn from a female coach, so Osama started training female boxers to become coaches themselves. We started inviting feminists and more traditional leaders of society, because if they accepted us, everyone else would respect us too,” Rima recalls. “Sometimes it’s a slow process. It takes time. And who knows, maybe after the war we might have to start from scratch, but it was worth it.”

It has not been easy, but as Osama says, “strength and determination are what allowed us to continue and expand women’s boxing in Palestine.” Which is the same spirit of Quarticciolo, a neighborhood in Rome that might seem far away in more ways than one from the Gaza Strip, but whose story is actually intertwined with Gaza Boxing Women. In fact, the first and only gym where Osama and the girls were training was built thanks to fundraising efforts and donations carried out by the Roman group Boxe Contro l’Assedio , or Boxing Against the Occupation, in English. This project was born in 2018 from the idea of community gyms (in Quarticciolo, Tufello - another Roman neighborhood, and Palermo) to create a bridge with Gaza, given their shared values and concepts. The group went to Gaza a few times over the years with the goal of developing a proper boxing club with Osama. This goal became reality when the “Palestine Boxing Center” was inaugurated in 2022.
That first gym in Gaza City had the PBC initials. “It was bright, accessible, and open”, as Daniele Napolitano, a photojournalist who had been following the boxing project for years, recalls. “Gaza is a place that from day one took the images I had in my head and turned them upside down. And seeing the girls in line, waiting to meet us in the gym, for the umpteenth time broke my balance.”
Fabrizio Troya, one of the coaches of Boxe Contro l’Assedio, went to Gaza at the end of September 2022 with the group as a trainer, and echoes the worldwide criticism of Gaza as an open-air prison. “My entry was very traumatic. Arriving at the Israeli border was like arriving at the end of the world: hours and hours of interrogations, visas, and international papers, which would ensure our entry, with guns drawn” he says.
They promised themselves they would come back, that they would wake up in the morning and have coffee with everyone. The memories often become clearer with time— memories like walking along the seafront before training, dinners with local dishes, or the fields of carnations and strawberries. “Even today, especially today, we should remember that under the bombings there was a university neighborhood, hundreds of young people enjoying and having fun. We tend to think about these places as places of death and destruction. But Gaza was full of life. As were the girls. They wanted to go out, learn, study…” says Napolitano.
Due to the even more restricted movement between the north and south of the Gaza Strip lately, Osama has been out of contact with the girls for 130 days. Osama recalls, “I learned with great sadness of the martyrdom of two girls from the boxing club and their families.” But the goals remain. “My wish is for the war to end, of course. And then to rebuild the gym and complete our dream: raising the Palestinian flag at international sporting events,” he says.
In Conversation:
Photography by:
Topics:
Filed under:
Location:
{
"article":
{
"title" : "The Palestinian Ring: Boxing, women, and bombings in Gaza",
"author" : "Paola Arrigoni",
"category" : "essays",
"tags" : "Gaza",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/gaza-boxing",
"date" : "2024-09-13 00:00:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/gazaboxingIMG_0089.jpg",
"excerpt" : "",
"content" : "A poster of Mike Tyson waves above the ring’s blue and red ropes. He was Farah and Abu’s idol, along with Muhammad Ali. And now it’s gone.Gone, just like the punching bags, gloves, and photos of the girls boxing, including Rima’s, that once were scattered throughout the gym. All have been destroyed by the senselessness of war. Of the Palestine Boxing Center, the first boxing gym for women in the Gaza Strip, only rubble remains. Or almost. The desire to keep fighting has actually been rekindled, and it’s stronger than ever.“Since the beginning of the war, not only our homes and our boxing club were destroyed, but also our memories and dreams”, says Osama Ayoub, founder of the project Gaza Boxing Women. But then something changed. “When they took us to the displacement camps in Rafah, I decided to organize a team there to revive boxing despite the lack of resources,’ says Osama. As of today they continue training in Khan Yunis.Osama and the team are also offering entertainment and other activities to counter the fear and anxiety that many kids and women feel. This type of support also includes the noble art of boxing, in the hope of drowning out the bombing, because, as Osama says, “the war won’t stop our dream to box.”Gaza Boxing Women began putting down roots in 2016. At the time, Osama was part of the Palestinian national boxing team, with which he had toured the Arab world. When he went to Lebanon with the team was when he first saw women training. “That’s how the idea of creating a women’s boxing club in the Gaza Strip was born,” Osama says.Back in Palestine, he began to train kids of all genders and to his surprise, “the reactions in the neighborhood were very positive and word of mouth spread throughout the Strip.” The group expanded and the room at home was no longer enough. But as the number of boys and girls increased, so did the criticism.“As we began training in busier neighborhoods, both men and women criticized us, including on social media.” But Osama and the team carried on. A few years later, however, a young woman named Rima Abu Rhama contacted him. She was 21 years old at the time. No longer a child, she was a woman. And she wanted to box.Rima recalls, “It was 2020 and I was looking for some self-defense sports, but these weren’t exactly available for women. Then I found Coach Osama. I asked him if he could coach me too.” ‘He said, ‘I don’t have a place yet…and society… But we’ll come up with something.”That’s the spirit of Gaza: one that creates beautiful things even from nothing and seeks solutions. They started training in a basement near their homes and in order to split the costs, Rima convinced her sister and a few friends to join. “We had a lot of fun. Boxing is not a common sport, so many girls saw our Instagram stories and started to get interested and wanting to participate. We became [a group of] ten. Then fifteen. And then many more,” Rima remembers. At one point Osama was training up to forty girls and from that, the first women’s boxing club in Palestine was born.They call boxing “the loneliest sport”: the one that makes you reflect on yourself. Through the breath. The technique. The controlled emotions that pass from the mind to the arms and feet of those in the ring and are released with direct, fast, incisive punches, such as the jab.“For me, boxing was a fight and a challenge. I started it because I wanted to get stronger physically. It’s a sport that opens up so many possibilities for women, which is another reason I continued. I wanted to show Palestinian girls that even when they were older women they could continue boxing,” says Rima.“Sport is a unique vector of socialization. It connects people of all backgrounds and mindsets, like us for instance,” recalls Rima, “We were all different: different ages, different contexts, and with different ideas, yet the sport has brought us all together. Along with Osama, we became one big family. We had a lot of fun together, including outside of the ring, when we’d go out after training. It was a way to get to know the other girls’ cultures. We had one thing in common: we had to fight together. The fight didn’t begin when we put the gloves on but much earlier—because we had to fight to be able to even wear those gloves, and this realization brought us even closer.”In fact, media interest came after a photographer friend of theirs started taking pictures. After that, many people started criticizing both Osama and the girls, to the point where they were threatening him and calling on the government to end the project on behalf of “religious, social, and cultural motivations.”“We got over it because we knew we weren’t doing anything wrong. We have always been very respectful. Some women wanted to learn from a female coach, so Osama started training female boxers to become coaches themselves. We started inviting feminists and more traditional leaders of society, because if they accepted us, everyone else would respect us too,” Rima recalls. “Sometimes it’s a slow process. It takes time. And who knows, maybe after the war we might have to start from scratch, but it was worth it.”It has not been easy, but as Osama says, “strength and determination are what allowed us to continue and expand women’s boxing in Palestine.” Which is the same spirit of Quarticciolo, a neighborhood in Rome that might seem far away in more ways than one from the Gaza Strip, but whose story is actually intertwined with Gaza Boxing Women. In fact, the first and only gym where Osama and the girls were training was built thanks to fundraising efforts and donations carried out by the Roman group Boxe Contro l’Assedio , or Boxing Against the Occupation, in English. This project was born in 2018 from the idea of community gyms (in Quarticciolo, Tufello - another Roman neighborhood, and Palermo) to create a bridge with Gaza, given their shared values and concepts. The group went to Gaza a few times over the years with the goal of developing a proper boxing club with Osama. This goal became reality when the “Palestine Boxing Center” was inaugurated in 2022.That first gym in Gaza City had the PBC initials. “It was bright, accessible, and open”, as Daniele Napolitano, a photojournalist who had been following the boxing project for years, recalls. “Gaza is a place that from day one took the images I had in my head and turned them upside down. And seeing the girls in line, waiting to meet us in the gym, for the umpteenth time broke my balance.”Fabrizio Troya, one of the coaches of Boxe Contro l’Assedio, went to Gaza at the end of September 2022 with the group as a trainer, and echoes the worldwide criticism of Gaza as an open-air prison. “My entry was very traumatic. Arriving at the Israeli border was like arriving at the end of the world: hours and hours of interrogations, visas, and international papers, which would ensure our entry, with guns drawn” he says.They promised themselves they would come back, that they would wake up in the morning and have coffee with everyone. The memories often become clearer with time— memories like walking along the seafront before training, dinners with local dishes, or the fields of carnations and strawberries. “Even today, especially today, we should remember that under the bombings there was a university neighborhood, hundreds of young people enjoying and having fun. We tend to think about these places as places of death and destruction. But Gaza was full of life. As were the girls. They wanted to go out, learn, study…” says Napolitano.Due to the even more restricted movement between the north and south of the Gaza Strip lately, Osama has been out of contact with the girls for 130 days. Osama recalls, “I learned with great sadness of the martyrdom of two girls from the boxing club and their families.” But the goals remain. “My wish is for the war to end, of course. And then to rebuild the gym and complete our dream: raising the Palestinian flag at international sporting events,” he says."
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "Culture Must Be the Moral Compass That Geopolitics and Economics Will Never Be",
"author" : "EIP Editors",
"category" : "essays",
"tags" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/culture-must-be-the-moral-compass-that-geopolitics-and-economics-will-never-be",
"date" : "2025-07-15 16:14:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_7_Opposing_Nazism_1.png",
"excerpt" : "The widespread cultural rejection of Nazism in the West did not emerge spontaneously from humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong. It was not simply that people around the world, and especially in the West, were naturally alert and to the moral horror of fascism.",
"content" : "The widespread cultural rejection of Nazism in the West did not emerge spontaneously from humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong. It was not simply that people around the world, and especially in the West, were naturally alert and to the moral horror of fascism.Rather, the transformation of Nazism from a nationalist ideology admired by many Western elites into the universal symbol of evil was a story of narrative engineering and the deliberate construction of collective memory. It is a story that reveals a larger truth: culture has always been the moral compass that geopolitics and economics cannot, and will not, provide on their own.And at this moment, it is crucial to understand and use the power of culture to shift geopolitics, and not the other way around.Understanding this history matters today more than ever. Because if it was possible to turn Nazism into the ultimate taboo, it is equally possible to reposition other violent ideologies and state projects—such as Israel’s ongoing system of apartheid and settler colonialism—as morally indefensible. But to do so requires acknowledging that cultural reckonings don’t simply arrive; they are made.Pre-War Ambivalence: When Fascism Was FashionableContrary to the comforting myth that the world naturally recoiled from Nazism, in the 1920s and 1930s many influential Americans and Europeans viewed Hitler’s Germany with admiration. American industrialists like Henry Ford openly praised Hitler’s economic management and fierce opposition to communism. Ford even funded antisemitic propaganda through his publication, The Dearborn Independent. British aristocrats, including the Duke of Windsor, flirted with Nazi sympathies, seeing Germany as a model of discipline and order.It was only when Hitler’s ambitions clashed with the strategic interests of other nations that fascism became intolerable. And even then, many major US and UK companies maintained their business interests with the Nazis, including Ford, IBM, GM (Opel), Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil), Chase Bank, and of course Coca-Cola, who famously created the brand Fanta so that it could break the boycott and do business with Nazi Germany.This distinction is critical: condemnation of Nazism began not as a moral imperative, but as a political necessity. Germany’s aggression threatened the European balance of power, British imperial security, and eventually, American economic and military interests. The moral narrative would only come later, after the fighting was over.It is important to learn from the past and see that only culture can shift perception, and to use culture to shift the economic realities that would otherwise wait to be shaped by politics.Wartime Shifts: From Enemy State to Symbol of EvilWorld War II did not instantly transform public opinion. For many Americans, the war in Europe remained remote until the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Even then, the decision to fight Nazi Germany was entangled with power politics: Hitler declared war on the United States first, effectively forcing Roosevelt’s hand.Nevertheless, the war provided fertile ground for a reframing of Nazism. Wartime propaganda efforts by the Allies recast the Nazi regime as a brutal, alien threat to civilization itself. Hollywood joined in: The Great Dictator (1940) ridiculed Hitler’s delusions of grandeur, while Casablanca (1942) romanticized resistance. Images of goose-stepping soldiers, swastika flags, and shattered cities circulated widely.As the Allies advanced, they encountered the first concrete evidence of the Holocaust: ghettos, mass graves, and emaciated survivors. Yet even then, much of this evidence remained unknown to the general public. It was only after liberation that the full horror became impossible to ignore.Post-War Revelation: The Holocaust and the Cultural BreakThe turning point came in 1945, with the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg Trials. The images and testimonies from Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen revealed the industrial scale of genocide. Millions murdered with chilling efficiency. A systematic attempt to erase an entire people. For the first time, the abstract notion of “Nazi evil” was grounded in visceral, visual evidence.Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander describes this phenomenon as the cultural construction of trauma. Atrocities do not automatically generate collective memory; they must be narrated, documented, and ritualized until they become an inescapable moral reference point. The Nuremberg Trials played this role by broadcasting confessions and evidence to a global audience. Schools, museums, and the press reinforced the narrative: Nazism was not simply defeated; it was unmasked as pure, irredeemable evil.Cold War Myth-Making: The Free World Versus FascismThe Cold War further cemented this narrative. To build legitimacy against the Soviet Union, the United States and its allies positioned themselves as the moral victors of World War II, the saviors of Europe from fascism. In reality, many of the same powers—Britain, France, and the United States—continued their own brutal colonial projects and enforced systems of racial hierarchy at home.But the cultural story was powerful: the West stood for freedom; the Nazis had embodied totalitarian darkness. School textbooks, popular films, and Holocaust memorialization institutionalized this story, forging a shared moral identity that could be contrasted against communist “evil.”This process was neither accidental nor purely altruistic. It was a strategic use of culture to consolidate power, project moral authority, and deflect scrutiny of the West’s own violence. The lesson is clear: collective memory is not a neutral mirror of reality. It is built, contested, and leveraged.The Sociological Core: Why Public Opinion ShiftsTo understand how an ideology once admired by many became the universal emblem of inhumanity, we must look beyond military defeat. Several mechanisms combined:Symbolic Association: Nazism transformed from a nationalist experiment into a symbol of mechanized genocide and racial supremacy.Cultural Trauma: The Holocaust became a shared wound that redefined moral frameworks across the West.Visual Storytelling: Images and films, rather than mere text, anchored the horror in the public imagination.State Rebranding: The Allies used anti-Nazism to build a postwar myth of moral superiority, even as they pursued imperial ambitions elsewhere.These insights are not simply historical trivia. They are a roadmap for how cultural shifts happen—and how they can be deliberately engineered.Israel, Palestine, and the Next Cultural ReckoningToday, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—systematic dispossession, apartheid laws, and repeated military assaults—remains largely protected in Western discourse. Politicians insist on Israel’s right to defend itself. Media narratives default to framing the violence as a “conflict” rather than an occupation. Solidarity with Palestinians is often smeared as antisemitism.Yet history shows that moral consensus is not fixed. With enough sustained exposure, narrative work, and cultural pressure, the global imagination can be reshaped. Just as Nazism’s legitimacy eroded, so too can the idea of Israel as an unassailable “victim-state.”This is not a call to equate the Holocaust with the Nakba—each is historically distinct. It is, however, an argument that the techniques which made Nazism morally intolerable—trauma visualization, reframing language, relentless storytelling—are tools available to any liberation movement.Here is how such a transformation could unfold:1. Narrative InversionIsrael’s founding story must be contextualized: a state born from the trauma of European antisemitism that, in turn, created the dispossession of another people. Exposing this contradiction—survivors becoming occupiers—breaks the simplistic binary of oppressor and victim.2. Visual Culture and TestimonyJust as photographs of emaciated bodies in camps forced an awakening, so too can images of bombed Gazan neighborhoods, amputee children, and anguished families. Digital archives and survivor testimonies can anchor these experiences in collective memory.3. Linguistic ReframingTerms like “apartheid,” “settler colonialism,” and “ethnic cleansing” shift perception from tragic conflict to structural violence. Legal frameworks—UN reports, ICC filings—can fortify these terms with institutional legitimacy.4. Media SaturationBypassing corporate media gatekeepers requires a multi-platform strategy: TikTok clips, Substack essays, livestreamed trials of Israeli policy, viral documentaries. Saturation is what makes denial unsustainable.5. Global RealignmentPositioning Palestine within global struggles—Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, anti-colonial movements—expands solidarity. When the Global South embraces Palestinian liberation as part of its own decolonization, moral isolation will deepen.6. Cultural Institutions and EducationJust as Holocaust education became standard in Western curricula, Nakba education can be mainstreamed. Museums, memorials, and fellowships can institutionalize remembrance and scholarship.7. Policy Pressure and Legal ActionPublic consensus is the soil in which policy change grows. Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions, coupled with legal prosecutions of war crimes, transform moral clarity into material consequences.8. Making Occupation a LiabilityWhen supporting Israel becomes politically and financially risky—akin to defending apartheid South Africa—corporate and governmental alliances will fracture. Reputational risk can be a powerful motivator.Conclusion: Cultural Reckonings Are EngineeredIt was not “natural” for the West to reject Nazism. It took defeat, trauma exposure, and decades of cultural labor to enshrine anti-Nazism as a foundational moral principle. Similarly, it is not inevitable that the world will recognize Israel’s oppression of Palestinians as an urgent moral crisis. It will require strategic, sustained, and courageous cultural work.Culture—more than geopolitics or economics—sets the terms of what is morally acceptable. It is the compass that can point humanity toward justice. But only if we are willing to pick it up and use it."
}
,
{
"title" : "Neptune Frost",
"author" : "Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman",
"category" : "screenings",
"tags" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/eip-screening-neptune-frost",
"date" : "2025-07-12 16:00:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/netune-frost-movie-poster.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Thank you for all who joined the special screening of Neptune Frost, with exclusive introduction from writer/director Saul Williams. Stay tuned and become a member for our next edition of our EIP monthly screening series.",
"content" : "Thank you for all who joined the special screening of Neptune Frost, with exclusive introduction from writer/director Saul Williams. Stay tuned and become a member for our next edition of our EIP monthly screening series.Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region’s natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends."
}
,
{
"title" : "Uranus & The Cycle of Liberation",
"author" : "Céline Semaan",
"category" : "",
"tags" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/uranus-and-the-cycle-of-liberation",
"date" : "2025-07-11 16:25:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_Uranus.jpg",
"excerpt" : "I’m definitely not an astrologer. I don’t even know where Uranus is in my chart. But I do know how to read systems and translate them to the public. What I’ve learned, through years of designing for social and environmental justice, is that history doesn’t just unfold. It cycles upwards. And if we learn to pay attention to those cycles, we can prepare—not just to resist collapse, but to shape what comes after.",
"content" : "I’m definitely not an astrologer. I don’t even know where Uranus is in my chart. But I do know how to read systems and translate them to the public. What I’ve learned, through years of designing for social and environmental justice, is that history doesn’t just unfold. It cycles upwards. And if we learn to pay attention to those cycles, we can prepare—not just to resist collapse, but to shape what comes after.Even if you don’t care about astrology, the timing of these celestial movements provides us a way to examine macro trends that we can learn from. History may not exactly repeat itself, but it does echo.Uranus—the planet astrologers associated with upheaval, rebellion, and technological transformation—entered Aries in May 2010 and stayed there until 2018. That cycle coincided with a surge in political uprisings, many of which redefined our understanding of mass resistance in the 21st century.The Arab Spring began in late 2010, starting in Tunisia and erupting across the Middle East. It wasn’t just about corrupt regimes—it was about reclaiming voice, land, and dignity after decades of foreign interference, neoliberal decay, and post-colonial repression. From Tahrir Square to Pearl Roundabout, these movements were leaderless, fast, and media-savvy.Occupy Wall Street followed in 2011, challenging the violent inequality embedded in late capitalism. In 2013, Black Lives Matter emerged after the murder of Trayvon Martin, later exploding into a global uprising in 2014 and again in 2020. Standing Rock (2016) reminded the world that Indigenous resistance was not only alive but visionary. #MeToo (2017) became an international reckoning with patriarchy and sexual violence, a reminder that personal testimony is political terrain.Across these years, protests were decentralized, digitized, and visual. Social media moved from a personal tool to a frontline of collective witnessing. Livestreams replaced press conferences. Memes became political language. Design itself became a protest, and Slow Factory built the visual language for it.This was not coincidental but archetypal, because Uranus in Aries, even symbolically, tells the story of radical ignition, collective fire, visionary unrest.And yet, none of it was sustained. What followed was a backlash: fascist resurgence, climate denial, propaganda wars, and intensified state surveillance. We saw mass demobilization, media fatigue, and widespread disinformation. Many of the movements that sparked global hope were either crushed, co-opted, or burned out.So now, as Uranus moves through Taurus (2018–2026), the terrain has shifted. Taurus is about materiality, land, value, and stability. It demands we not only rise up, which is crucial, but to build. We are asked to not only critique systems, but replace them. Not just “burn it all down”, but radically imagine what’s next.This is the political and spiritual context I hold as I continue my work.At Slow Factory, we spent the past decade offering free education, cultural strategy, and ecological design rooted in climate justice and human rights. And with Everything is Political, we’re building an independent media platform not beholden to corporate donors or foundation filters—a place where movement memory, critical analysis, and cultural clarity live. If we don’t design the next phase of liberation, someone else will design it for us.This work isn’t about virality. It’s about continuity. We are here to hold political memory. To protect the intellectual commons. To ensure that the next generation doesn’t forget who stood for truth—and who profited from silence.The ask is to build the very systems we are all looking for, and for that we deserve the time, energy and support to imagine, design and co-create as a community. We can’t delegate our liberation to politicians, and we certainly won’t see startups capitalizing on the changes our society needs. Perhaps we will witness the hyper privatization of every single service our communities need, but we must strategize for during and after collapse. Funding structures will have to be challenged, as they are designed to sustain themselves and uphold status quo. However, we are witnessing the collapse of every industry: media, education, banking, all industries we rely on, will be challenged. We are going to need to rely on our creative skills and our ability to build true solidarity across our communities towards a common goal outside of dogma and division. It’s a cultural moment, and we are here for it.Resistance isn’t just about protest. It’s about imagination. And imagination requires discipline, community, and space.We are creating that space right here. And together we can co-create together if everybody puts in effort and care. For now, we are imagining what systems of mitigation amidst systems collapse will look like. Will we outsource our infrastructure to highly funded Silicon Valley funded platforms feeding off of public data feeding ads markets and Ai learning in real time from our work? Or are we truly invested in building sovereign media? I personally invest in the latter, and hope you all join us. Because we are the majority, and truly if we align we are unstoppable."
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]
}