Dean Spade
LightNews LightNews
banner
deanspade.bsky.social
Dean Spade
@deanspade.bsky.social
17K followers 21 following 190 posts
linktr.ee/deanspade
Posts Replies Media Videos
deanspade.bsky.social
From my conversation on the Green Dreamer Podcast. Listen to the whole conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

Solidarity not charity!

You can find much more about this in my book Mutual Aid which is free on the Anarchist Library. I just wrote an updated edition that is coming out March 31.
February 4, 2026 at 7:22 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
This is an excerpt from a conversation about how I’ve never had a cell phone and how that has impacted my boundaries with work and collaborations. In this clip, I discuss how the idea that everyone should be reachable at all times is unrealistic and sometimes less efficient.
February 3, 2026 at 2:58 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
My friend Holiday Simmons and I will be doing a livestream conversation on my Patreon this Monday (Feb 2) at 1PM EST.

Holiday is a Black Cherokee, genderqueer, two-spirit social worker and the host of the Trans Cookout Podcast. Please join us live or catch the video after.

patreon.com/deanspade
Picture of Holiday, a Black person in a pink shirt, glasses, and beige cowboy hat with a goatee and pink braids, against a dynamic blue background. Text reads, livestream conversation with Holiday Simmons Monday 2/2 - 1pm EST www.patreon.com/deanspade
January 31, 2026 at 6:42 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
In this clip, I discuss the idea that cell phones are important because it helps people reach you in an emergency, and because cell phones make us safer. I’ve heard this a lot, but I don’t buy it.

You can watch our whole conversation at patreon.com/deanspade for free!
January 30, 2026 at 8:40 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
I sat down with Peter Gelderloos to talk about his decades of work exposing the damaging impact that pacifist discourse has in resistance movements, stigmatizing people who fight back boldly. You can hear the whole interview wherever you listen to podcasts or watch the video on YouTube.
January 26, 2026 at 5:39 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
For Episode 17 I got to sit down with Peter Gelderloos, someone whose writing has been central to my political development since I first encountered his book, How Nonviolence Protects the State, in the early 2000’s.
January 22, 2026 at 8:42 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
Excited to share my interview with Holly Whitaker, author of Quit Like a Woman and host of the Co-Regulation podcast. I have been very inspired by Holly’s critical feminist analysis of how the alcohol industry and the ubiquity of 12-step impact how we perceive drinking and sobriety.
January 8, 2026 at 11:09 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
Wrote about what happens when conflict appears in our movement spaces and how to move through it instead of abandoning our work in @npquarterly.bsky.social !

nonprofitquarterly.org/navigating-c...
Disappointment, Conflict, and Burnout in Care and Resistance Work People often experience a special kind of disappointment in resistance work. We join groups to do something that we really care about. Often, we are relieved to finally find people who see things the way we do, excited to be understood and have accompaniment and solidarity. We have high expectations for each other. And then we find out that we're all very human and imperfect. I have found that burnout is not usually just a result of being tired. Most people I've talked to who feel burned out and leave movement work, during the laset 28 years that I have been in these movements, are actually in pain because of unresolved conflict. They joined work they really cared about, something went wrong that made them feel betrayed or left out or disappointed, and that is the pain of the burnout. It wasn't just the hard work; it was the loss of trust, the feeling of being blamed or stigmatized, or not being listened to. Abolitionism and Transformative Justice I've spent the last decades in the movement for police, prison, and border abolition. I believe we shouldn't have of those structures. Abolitionists use a concept called "transformative justice" to describe the work we do to address conflict without using police. There is a lot of conflict, harm, and violence in our communities, we know the police don't help and only make it worse. Transformative justice practices do three things: 1. Work to figure out and provide what the person or people who have been harmed need to heal and participate in community, to not be isolated by what happened to them, and to be listened to, even though we can't undo what happened. 2. Work to figure out and provide what the person or people who did the harm need to stop doing it. 3. Work to figure out what the community surrounding the harm could do to make it less likely--how did we all set up a situation that made this more likely? When Big Reactions Happen One thing that is surprising and challenging about the emotional dynamics of conflict is that we do the most harm to others when we are feeling aggrieved, victimized, left out, and/or resentful. It's counterintuitive because these are the moments when we are focused on what others did wrong and how we are hurting. But those are the times we are most likely to do something harmful, like go and write the really messed up email to somebody, treat somebody with the cold shoulder, gossip negatively about people in our group or about another group in town, post a bunch of stuff on Instagram that's really inflammatory, or violate someone's privacy. As strange as it might seem, it's when I'm feeling like the victim that I should ask for help from a friend to figure out what the right-sized response is, or to figure out if I'm still too upset to decide how to respond and need more time. It's not that we aren't legitimately sometimes victimized, but the victim narrative in our heads can cause us to skip our value assessment and then do stuff that later we wish we hadn't done. It's not bad to feel this way, but we should consider what to do with these feelings since they are inevitably going to come up in our groups and in ourselves. Centering Belonging I was recently talking to somebody who's doing a conflict support process with a group that's had a major difficult conflict. And one of the things the person is doing is individually reaching out to the 40 or 50 people who all were involved in the group over these many years where these hard things were happening. The people from the group have been telling the conflict support person, who's not even in the group, "It just means so much to me that you're listening to me." We live in societies that minimize our experiences of pain and harm. And so, we join movement groups and we hope we're finally going to be part of something where we're heard and seen. And then we have a bad experience where people don't hear us or see us at some point. And then we wreak havoc. We're like, I have to tear down everybody in this group, and this group itself, because I'm feeling all of my historical cumulative pain of being dismissed. If we could catch each other in the moment of pain and listen, I think it could be a huge change in the likelihood of those conflicts escalating to the most disorganizing behaviors between us.
December 29, 2025 at 7:41 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
In this episode, Morgan Bassichis and I talk about giving and receiving feedback directly as a way to build relationships, and prevent conflict from escalating to destructive and disorganizing levels.
December 24, 2025 at 5:33 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
Grateful to Ciro for animating this clip from the recent episode where Morgan Bassichis and I talk about how to deescalate a crush. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
December 23, 2025 at 3:57 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
The second edition of Mutual Aid is coming out on March 31 from @versobooks.bsky.social
December 19, 2025 at 11:21 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
Thrilled to share this conversation with Shira Hassan, a brilliant writer, organizer, facilitator, and friend who has influenced harm reduction and transformative justice work, and my own thinking and practice, for decades.
December 11, 2025 at 9:19 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
A new review of LIAFUW is coming out in Daughters!

Daughters is a magazine featuring over 35 incarcerated voices speaking to conditions of confinement with interviews, essays, poetry, legal news, legislative updates, and art! To support their work, subscribe here:

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
"Prisons are designed to keep us isolated. When we connect with our dear ones, every second is precious and the stakes are high. This added pressure means we have to strive to be as intentional as possible to make each moment count." - Endjah S. (SCI Cambridge Springs) "As a longtime prison abolitionist, Dean Spade is offering all of us insight on how to live, f*ck, be present, and survive with contextualized compassion for ourselves and others." - Endjah S. (SCI Cambridge Springs) Daughters cover image: beautiful illustration of two Black women on the top and bottom of the page with interconnecting braid hair and daffodils over their chests. They are over top a bright red border which as the words "Daughters" and "#13" and "Fall 2024" and "Let's Get Free's Magazine" over top with a bright yellow border. "Daughters is a faith-based, political publication founded by Sarita Miller (SCI Muncy) that aims to illuminate issues and perspectives, specifically those of women, pertaining to the crisis of mass incarceration."
December 10, 2025 at 2:51 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
Crushes can be fun and enlivening, but sometimes they are ill-timed or ill-suited, and it can be hard to shake them off. In this episode, Morgan Bassichis and I discuss one of the most popular tools from Love in a F*cked Up World the book: 7 Steps for De-escalating a Crush.
November 26, 2025 at 10:57 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
Here are a few thoughts about confidentiality and conflict, and in other news, I'm teaching a class about romcoms, consent, and the romance myth with Mia Schacter (@consent.wizardry) Wednesdays and Sundays, December 3-14, 11am-1pm PT / 2–4pm ET. Sign up at consentwizardry.com/guiltypleasure
November 23, 2025 at 11:17 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
How do you know if you should leave an organizing group or collaboration you are part of? Morgan Bassichis and I talk this through in this video, and you can watch the whole episode on youtube or listen wherever you get podcasts.
November 19, 2025 at 5:57 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
Kelly Hayes’ writing and her Movement Memos Podcast episodes about AI have been immensely useful to me and I recommend them. In this clip from our recent conversation, Kelly talks about how AI is emerging in a context of alienation and dehumanization.
November 18, 2025 at 3:22 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
In this excerpt from my interview with Mariame Kaba, I talk about how avoidance is a reasonable response to a coercive society, but also can get in our way when it becomes a habit.

Watch the whole episode on Youtube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
November 17, 2025 at 4:33 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
@jessicalanyadoo.bsky.social is back answering more listener questions on Part 2 of this AMA episode!

Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch the full episode on YouTube.
November 13, 2025 at 2:32 AM
deanspade.bsky.social
In this clip from my recent conversation with David Palumbo-Liu, we talk about the difference between identifying behavior in others and identifying it in ourselves.

Listen to the whole episode of Speaking Out of Place wherever you get your podcasts.
November 11, 2025 at 5:17 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
Episode 10 is out! In this episode, I talk to Kelly Hayes, the brilliant journalist and organizer whose writing and podcast so many of us rely on to make sense of the world.

Watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
October 22, 2025 at 4:51 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
In this clip from Episode 9 of Love in a F*cked Up World, the podcast, the brilliant Weyam Ghadbian talks about whether the prevalence of insecure attachment might stem from the widespread forced displacement generations of people have experience because of colonialism, war, and ecological crisis.
October 15, 2025 at 7:23 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
The Berlin Poly Meetup is hosting me for a discussion of Love in a F*cked-Up World on Oct 26. Please join as at 5pm at Lovelite! ❤️
Pink, red, and yellow diagonal striped background with a cover of Love in a F*cked-Up World and text that reads, "Book Launch + Q&A with Author, October 26 5pm Lovelite, Organized by Berlin Internationals Polyamory Group"
October 15, 2025 at 7:04 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
Morgan Bassichis introduced me to the idea that intentionally generating bad ideas for impossible actions, bad poetry, bad writing can loosen the rigid, critical mind that impedes our creativity.

Find more content like this and join the conversation on patreon.com/deanspade.
October 14, 2025 at 1:30 PM
deanspade.bsky.social
Shuli Branson recently invited me on The Breakup Theory podcast to talk about a listener letter from someone who had a difficult experience with a community accountability process and was left feeling isolated and defeated.

You can listen to the whole episode wherever you get podcasts.
October 10, 2025 at 5:41 PM