We chose our name after a group of rabble-rousers in revolutionary France who tried something wild to make the world a better place. They didn’t succeed, but we think they had fun – especially picking their awesome name!
Equality and justice are painfully absent in every aspect of the world, and movements to build them are often meet with ridicule, scorn, or hostility. But instead of succumbing to the shame, we propose conspiring.
We’re not an activist group or part of a specific social movement; rather, we are cultivators. We host parties, share crafts, plant seedlings, and, now, host a podcast all in the effort to give people alternative spaces to build friendships and practice healthy and equitable ways to love each other. We are interested in celebrating struggles, and the continued existence of resistance despite the odds. It’s a relatively new effort for us, but living as we do in a city that can feel quite cold, even in its best organizing spaces, we think it’s work worth doing.
About the Show
In Liberating Libraries, we talk about the fiction we’re reading and how it is informing, poking at, inspiring, or enabling transformative movements for justice. We don’t delve deep ‘into the text’, but we use the work of our faves (like Octavia Butler, Marlon James, Zadie Smith, Ursula le Guin, Isabelle Allende…) to work through ideas and imagine the worlds that could be.
This is an amateur effort: the goal is to get us thinking about fiction and the role it can play in building better futures. Often on the left there is a divide between writing that is analytical (and considered valuable to movements) and writing that is narrative or poetic (and considered less valuable). We want to break that divide, to encourage fellow leftists to read fiction not only for pleasure, but also as a source of inspiration and empathy. We want to celebrate the fiction that liberates us, even when it is complicated, and we want to participate in the liberation of creativity.
We’re not professional editors or critics, just people with ideas and a moderately good sense of how to articulate some of them
Find us on Anchor.fm or through your podcatcher at anchor.fm/conspiracy-of-equality
Liberating Libraries 