JUST Space: Curating Community Across Metaphorical Borders of Difference

We live in a world where some roles in America's social order have been unwittingly predefined, with people and personalities cast as characters in a motion picture they never auditioned for. Although those alive today may not have been instrumental in the origin of this experiment we call the United States of America, we all have a responsibility to move humanity forward while we are here. The establishment of rules and regulations, policies and procedures that govern how we interact and interface with each other is foundational to community-building across metaphorical borders of difference. A utopia of liberty and justice has not been found, and I posit it does not exist. However, there is hope and possibility for us to move closer in proximity to a more principled humanity. Throughout this work I share a distillation of ideas, constructs, stories, and ultimately a conceptual framework/practical technology that yields qualities of JUST Space. It is an attempt to challenge, advance, and support countering conditions to the contentiousness of inequity, inequality, and injustice. JUST Space is defined as "an ecological context (i.e., social, cultural, political, and economic) between us and our surroundings that is occupied by justice; a milieu of transformational relationships, where awareness, fairness, and remedy live." The elements of JUST Space are care, courage, critical consciousness, and community, and they should be thought of as muscles needed to produce, protect, and preserve the pursuit of liberty and justice. JUST Space is not just the presence of care, courage, critical consciousness, and community; it is also the absence of apathy, inaction, wilful ignorance, blind obedience, and intentional divisiveness. These muscles of JUST Space must consistently be worked out because we all know what happens to muscles that are underdeveloped - they atrophy. When we do not actively exercise care, courage, critical consciousness, and community, we weaken and erode the very foundational musculature that our democratic republic is built upon.

Pages: 251, Paperback, Canon Press Group