" I am an embodied scholar. Meaning the body is my text, the site of my research, and the subject I am forever striving to better understand. Sometimes that makes me feel not as smart as my brilliant colleagues who focus on intellectual knowledge, the wisdom in books, science, and empirical evidence. But by studying the body, my body, my ancestral body, my cultural body, I am prioritizing the wisdom we each carry within us, tuning my ability to listen to it, and trusting its ability to teach me how to navigate the structures I have to survive everyday as a Black, queer, and disabled woman. I invite you to discover your own brilliance as I uncover mine, because enlivened, embodied beings have the power to change the world. May we together raze to the ground colonization and its offspring: white supremacy, capitalism, cis-heteronomativity and ableism. Let’s use art to conjure, and create joyful community because, to put it bluntly: it’s not about a seat at the table, fuck the table, burn it! Let’s dance on its ashes, to music of our own making, and together use its materials to create something better, something that leaves no one behind, and is all our own."

- Kai Hazelwood
 

 

What GTM Does

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Instigate relationships, for a moment, a season, or a lifetime, with like minded individuals and communities to co-create our dreams

Make original transdisciplinary artistic works that defy genre

Conjure events with artists from systemically neglected communities and utilize communal healing and celebration as liberatory tactics 

Facilitate embodied knowledge-sharing that prioritize playful experimentation over top-down models of education 

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Who We Are

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I am a Good Trouble Maker, and you can be too! Good Trouble Makers, cultivated by Kai Hazelwood, is an invitation to participate in spinning a web of community and creative mischief, through collaboration, across the world; to get in good trouble together. Inspired by the words of John Lewis, Good Trouble Makers’ projects are committed to making; making art, making room, making change, making good trouble. 

 

Have an idea, or want to see how we can get in good trouble together? Don’t hesitate to reach out at mischief@goodtroublemakers.com

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Reading is What? Fundamental!

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The Future is Disabled: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

"You can do a lot more and be more efficient when you slow down because it means everyone can show up. When you walk slowly, elders, kids and me with my cane don’t get left behind. Plenty of people don’t join or stay active because the pace is breakneck. Disability justice is a movement where people show up as they can, even if they have five minutes a week."

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"In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled―and what if that’s not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it’s possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation?

Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other―and the rest of the world―alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy. 

Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse)."

 

Pleasure Activism: Adrienne Maree Brown

“How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism.”

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My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies: Resmaa Menakem

“In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology.  My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.”

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Queer Art of Failure: Judith Halberstam

“The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.”