Josh Honn
English & Digital Humanities Librarian
What inspires you?
Student activists, especially those working with Students Organizing for Labor Rights and NU Community Not Cops. They’ve helped me connect to campus in a much deeper way, express care amidst an often uncaring system, and inspire me to not just dream but work towards the dream of new, better futures.
How have your intersecting identities shaped your Northwestern experience or your life experiences?
I come from a relatively privileged background as a cis white male who grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago, but everything from being into punk rock as a kid, dealing with clinical depression and the carcerality of much of the mental health industry, to being a widower at a very young age has helped me live a life beyond myself, exploring through reading, music, and art, understanding death as a part of life, and the care necessary to make this a life worth living. That doesn’t mean I don’t mess up a lot, because I do, but all of this I hope has allowed me to empathically connect with all kinds of folks across campus and beyond.
What does solidarity mean to you?
There are many roles in the revolution! Solidarity is folks showing up to the best of their abilities to confront and build a much better world than this one.
How can we use our intersecting identities to build solidarity with one another?
When I lost my wife to cancer folks would say things like, “I know it’s not the same, but …” and would then tell me about how they lost a mother or father, brother or sister, friend or pet. The thing is, at its core, it’s all grief, and while we need to acknowledge and tend to difference, we also need to find ways to share our grief (and solidarity) in ways that help us understand each other without qualification. Change and healing can’t be done alone; let’s share it and turn it into something magical.
What kind of future do you imagine?
For starters, one without police, prisons, or militaries, and one where decolonization is not used as a metaphor but is actually a movement to giving land back.
What communities do you belong to? How do they empower you?
I can be kind of an introvert but I think that’s why I love working on campus so much because as part of my day I can meet with colleagues and friends and be inspired and empowered by them. This is particularly true at the Center for Native American & Indigenous Research, which is the most welcoming and vibrant space I’ve encountered in my nearly 10 years here and I’ve missed sharing space with CNAIR folks during the pandemic. I have a lot of family in Chicago and, as a kid who grew up on the internet, I have a large group of friends from all over the world who share my passions for not just social justice but art, poetry, nature, and beauty in general.
If you have already engaged with our Social Justice Tours, what spot, space, or history presented in one of the Tours stuck out to you? What connected you to this history?
The people power of the Black student takeover of the Bursar’s office, for sure, in part because I know just like NU Community Not Cops, not everyone truly listened, truly tried to engage, but history has spoken pretty clearly that we all need to listen and engage, that these streets are indeed our streets, and I’d rather celebrate these students and what they stand for now than wait another 50 years.