How We’re Engaging with Questions Related to Race, Gender and Sexual Identities
This place is the result of more than 40 years of research, developing an emerging Healing Biotope and peace research center. We’re committed to learning and growing and want to become a place where people from all over the world, from different contexts and with a wide range of life experiences can feel safe and welcome. We’d like to offer you some words about our community to help you have a sense of what to expect when you visit us.
Tamera’s analysis of violence and injustice has focused mainly on the systems of patriarchy and capitalism – with a particular focus on the collective trauma underlying both. It’s from this understanding that we’ve researched into becoming a cultural model for community and healing in love and sexuality.
In recent years, different learning spaces have formed in our community to deepen this research by looking at the systems of white supremacy and cis-heteronormativity and the way they may have influenced the work we do. We’ve been grappling with these issues and conversations haven’t always been easy. As a community, we’ve yet to reach a common understanding of the significance of these issues or an agreement about the extent to which we will integrate these lenses into our shared peace-making research and practices. We are working towards integration.
Our community members are predominantly from Europe (although we’re in Portugal, most are German and only a few are Portuguese), mostly white, mostly heterosexual and cis-gender, mostly able-bodied and neurotypical. Those of us who are not European come from Palestine, Israel, Chile and North America. A few of us identify as queer and/or non-binary.
While we maintain deep long-term partnerships with people and communities in the geopolitical south, we have yet to create the conditions for a culture of diversity. We are beginning to assess how the composition of our community may have influenced the culture that we’ve built; how it may have conditioned and limited our perspectives and how some of our facilities, ways of acting, thinking, writing and speaking may impact people with different life experiences.
Despite our intentions to raise our awareness, it remains limited and you may still encounter unconscious structures here that can affect people from marginalized backgrounds. We want to improve this situation and would be grateful if you can let us know if you encounter worldviews, attitudes or behaviors that you experience as discriminatory or prejudiced while you’re in Tamera.
We’re working on raising a field of trust and find that in-person contact supports this. We invite and encourage you to address your perceptions directly with the people of the racial justice study group.
- To arrange a personal meeting, you can contact us at equity (at) tamera.org.
- You can also post written feedback (named or anonymous) in the box located at the reception,
- Or offer your feedback anonymously through this form.
For feedback on any other issues, please contact either the people leading your seminar or the reception team.
Thank you for your collaboration. May we find a path towards healing together.