New blog series: Holding the contradictions of radical HR

Since we started, the RadHR core team has been navigating a series of tensions that seem inherent to the space we are occupying; contradictions that have kept us humming-and-hawing over ‘the right way’ we should be doing things. 

These tensions have included (amongst many others):

• Helping share understanding of the law, without creating a ‘chilling effect’ and scaring people away from making more radical choices;
• Exploring the risks and impacts to individuals and organisations of both FOLLOWING the law, and NOT FOLLOWING the law.
• Facilitating participatory open spaces for sharing insights and learning between a wide range of groups and orgs, while trying to uphold an anti-oppressive lens to the work (that isn’t equally shared or understood across everyone in the community);
• Finding ways to integrate and share collective learning from more informal (community or activist) groups and more formal, more professional organisations;

None of these have obvious answers: if we are ‘too radical’, we may only be preaching to the choir; if we are too participatory, we risk marginalised voices getting drowned out by more mainstream ones; if we ignore the law (even when it is oppressive), we may put those who are already most at risk of it, at greater risk. 

These tensions appear in policies that are uploaded to the site, guides that we commission (and co-create), events that we host, and more. And we’d like to make them more explicit, so we can grapple with them together. We don’t want RadHR to be a place where people feel they can find clear-cut ‘answers’ to issues that are anything but!

So we are starting a new blog series: ‘Holding the contradictions of radical HR’. We’ll kick it off with a few specific tensions that we’ve been holding, as a Core Team, but are open to submissions, if you’ve got ideas that might fit the bill.

Message us if you have an idea (even half-baked) that you think could fit the series (we have budget to pay contributors). We may not always have clear answers as to what radical internal policies and processes should look like, but we do have the space to find them if we are willing to stumble through the contradictions together!