Safer Spaces Policies
Every activist camp, conference, organising space, road trip and now even parties will have one of these. These are basically an attempt to jargonise our desire for people to feel safe in a space.

If you’re new to the scene and have never heard of Safer Spaces…well, sucks to be you because no one, not even the people who run the Safer Spaces workshops, will ever tell you what it means. We like autonomy, you see, so to give people any more of an idea would be far too prescriptive.

The truth is, we just have this vague idea of what is “shit behaviour” and everyone is encouraged to avoid it. Good luck!

Hating on Socialists, AYCC and NUS
Our out of control radical self-image of horizontalism would be threatened if we felt any kind of resonance with hierarchical organisations. Anyway, I heard that those groups are full of factions. We don’t have factionalism in ASEN. We don’t allow it! We have dialectical tensions.

Lapses in chosen diet
Most activists will tell you they are “vegan” or “vegetarian” or “freegan” or that they “don’t eat much meat” for environmental reasons. They all lie. They are really telling you what they’d like to be.

Only the “vegan because I don’t believe in animal oppression” types aren’t lying. They are usually so disgusted by meat/animal products that they’ll never lapse, but these activists are extremely rare.

Pretending not to judge your friends
What can I say? Most judging comes from a combination of envy and self-judgement. Your friend gets pizza with dairy cheese. You are extremely jealous and wish you had that same lack of compassion which would allow you to eat cheesy pizza. Then you hate yourself for that hypothetical lack of compassion, which manifests in judging your friend while they enjoy the greasy, cheesy goodness. (Sigh) It’s a hard life we’ve chosen..

But like my good I-only-don’t-eat-meat-because-it’s-more-convenient-not-to friend says, “We only judge people we love. If we didn’t love them, we’d just hate them.”

The vegan honey debate
Honey is delicious. OMNOMNOMNOM.

Only going to protests because all your friends will be there
Sure, you care about the issue at hand. You care about a lot of things, but it doesn’t mean you’ve got the time or the energy to go to everything. So when push comes to shove, your decision to go to a protest or not comes down to Who Else Is Going.

Interrogating male privilege
It’s fairly easy to interrogate male privilege in student activist circles for the simple fact that males make up only half (or less) of the population. If a man does that “shit male behaviour” that no one explains to them until after it happens, we can generally be guaranteed that at least one feminist in the group will be brave enough to do something about it.

Being “queer”
Anti-queer behaviour is also quite easy to call out because there are SO many queers (LGBT is so 1980’s) around . Queer identity is so unlimited that there are  people even “coming out” as ‘hetero-queers!’

Being white
Never in my life have I been surrounded by so many white people as in ASEN.

(editors note: me either!)

Dumpster diving
Student activists are able to dumpster dive in public places and not be looked down upon – probably because we’re relatively well dressed and don’t actually rely on dumpsters for food. We’re a mere curiosity to passers-by who tend to gush about how outrageous it is that these stores are so wasteful.

Pink&Black Blocs
It seems that most protests these days have one, especially mainstream climate change ones targeted at “everyday Australians”. A group of the right kind of activists with the right kind of anarcho-queer tendencies will create a Pink&Black Bloc to make sure everyone there knows that to “SAVE THE CLIMATE” we need to “SMASH THE STATE”.

The Pink&Black Bloc is usually about as visible as the “Socialism will solve climate change”, “Copenhagen will solve climate change”, “Veganism will solve climate change”, and “Prayer will solve climate change” groups.

Punk haircut cred:
Shaved bits = +5 points
Asymmetry = +5 points
Asymmetrical shaved bits = +10 points
If you can still pull off trendy = -5 points
If you can still pull off mainstream = -6 points
If it makes you stand out to cops = +4 points
Dreadlocks (someone might mistake you for a hippy) = -8 points
Dreadlocks which are clearly not hippy = +6 points
If a friend did it for you = +4 points
If you did it yourself = +7 points
If you paid someone to do it = -8 points
If it happened at a party = +2 points
If it happened at a camp = +3 points
If it happened while squatting = +4 points
If it happened when you were in Melbourne = +7 points
If it happened when you were in some other Eastern state = +3 points

Theories of Change Workshops
A staple workshop of any skillshare camp, conference and on-campus enviro week, Theories of Change Workshops are something all the right kind of activists do several times over because it is a way of legitimising the methods of activism we use. This makes us feel like we are Making a Difference. The workshops also make us feel superior to Socialists and AYCC types because we’re more self-aware than them.

Euphemisms for depression and anxiety
As activists are generally in denial about their terrible mental health habits, these illnesses are commonly known as “being in a bad head space”, “low capacity”, “flaking out”, “not feeling heaps good”, or everyone’s favourite euphemism – “burnout”.

Cultural appropriation
I know you love interrogating your white privilege, because that’s something all good hearted white people do, but sometimes it’s just convenient to forget about some things…

Yoga
*link to cultural appropriation*

Add you own ! in the Germinate blog https://asen.org.auarticle/2010/09/14/stuff-student-enviro-activists-like/