How can we encourage the troublemaker within us?
How can we learn to listen to the voice that tells us that something isn’t right and that demands that we challenge the ideas that are being forced upon us? To refuse to merely accept what we are told without question or careful consideration? To perpetually ask why things are the way they are and who benefits from them being so? And, most importantly, always to think and reflect on our lives and our actions and relationships to others?
TROUBLE is a blog created by me, Sara Puotinen. I developed it to give serious attention to making, being in and staying in TROUBLE and to function as a writing, researching and teaching tool. I started it in 2009, while I was still an official academic, teaching in a gender, women and sexuality studies department. Since then I’ve left the academy and expanded to other online spaces.
I wrote in this blog regularly from 2009-august 2013. Then sporadically until 2018. I am very proud of this space and continue to value troublemaking as a virtue. A big part of me would love to turn this into something more–a toolkit? handbook? invitation?–but in many ways my troublemaking and staying has transformed into something else. (How) does the Sara who wrote these entries still exist?