Stateless Healing Guide

This guide is an invitation to dialogue. It is based on a belief in the power of human connection and designed for people who want to use Stateless to engage family friends, classmates, colleagues, and communities. Conversations that center politics, race, land/space/belonging and identity can be difficult to begin and facilitate, but this guide is meant to support you in sustaining conversations around identity, activism, politics, colonialism, racism and community organizing. In contrast to initiatives that foster debates in which participants try to convince others that they are right, this document envisions conversations undertaken in a spirit of openness in which people listen actively and share divergent viewpoints with care and respect.

This guide is designed for people who want to use Stateless to engage family, friends, classmates, colleagues and communities in dialogue around issues presented in the film. This discussion guide is meant to inspire people with varying degrees of knowledge about these topics to enter the conversation and hopefully stay in the conversation in order to impact change and awareness.

Clarivel Ruiz has over fifteen years of experience creating media programs and has initiated Dominicans Love Haitians Movement Inc., an arts nonprofit agency positioned to support healing from colonialism’s traumas.