This paper aims to think differently about possibilities for feminist organizing in cities. We use a current experiment with city‐based feminist organizing to explore how it can be possible to work with the local state while at the same time challenging and disrupting understandings and practices that marginalize the diversity of women's needs, contributions and concerns. Trying to work “inside” the local state while maintaining an “outside” critical perspective involves a tricky balancing act between being inside enough to have credibility and effectiveness within the business of city politics and administration, and outside enough to maintain strong connections with the community and grassroots support. In managing this balancing act, we argue that the organization enacts a strategic use of prefiguration both within the organization and when engaging the local state.
Th e authors report on their exploratory study examining the learning process embedded in mediation. Th eir research procedures involved directed refl exive journaling followed by group discussions to generate insights into how mediation practitioners experience learning in mediation. Th e signifi cance and role of emotion emerged as central to the dynamic of this learning process. Th e research indicates that the experience of positive and negative emotions attached to learning needs to be allowed and attended to within the mediation dynamic. Th is suggests that mediation practitioners need the competence to follow and understand their own learning-attached emotions as well as those of the parties.A lthough emotion has often been observed as an integral aspect of confl ict, it is only in recent years that the role of emotion in the negotiation and mediation of confl ict has received much attention (Shapiro 2002;Schreier 2002). Th is attention has emphasized, among other topics, the role and presence of emotion attached to the substance of the confl ict itself (Lund 2000;Jones and Bodtker 2001;Jameson et al. 2009). We build on this attention by introducing questions and possibilities concerning the presence and role of emotions associated with the learning process embedded in the mediation of confl ict.Our research began as an exploratory inquiry into the experience of the learning process within the practice of insight mediation. What emerged was the overwhelming presence of emotions attached to the learning process itself. While focused on the learning process within insight mediation, we suggest that our observations have relevance to discussions
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