Creative Partners
As Emma Goldman once famously said, “If there’s no dancing, it’s not my revolution.” The creative arts have a significant role to play in any movement for transformative social change. Artists are prefigurative and can see and express visions of a better world that inspire us and keep us on the path for social transformation. That is why Transform Network is honored to collaborate with cultural creatives.
“Hope In Focus bears witness to the world as it is and as it could be through contemplative-activist photography committed to walking alongside the world’s oppressed and marginalized - finding hope together in our collective struggle for human dignity, justice, and freedom.”
Steve Pavey, Hope in Focus
Steve is an artist-, scholar-, contemplative-activist –– all of which come together in the vocation of cultivating a way to see, in order to bear witness to the world both as it is, and as it could be. His creative process is deeply shaped by a way of love accompanying and being accompanied by humanity marginalized and dehumanized by Empire. He documents stories and create images together with those shrouded in “otherness” in our collective struggle for liberation. Steve’s photography ultimately bears witness to hope –– hope found within the struggle for human dignity and justice.
Steve has lived an extended period of time in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as worked in over 30 countries around the world, most recently in Palestine, Honduras, and Mexico. While his work is rooted in accompanying the undocumented and migrant-led struggle for freedom and human dignity, his contemplative activism has grown through intersectional solidarity and praxis to include joining with indigenous and black-led movement struggles embodied in campaigns for Black Lives Matters, Not 1 More Deportation, Free Palestine, Mni Wiconi, Abolish ICE, Protect Oak Flats, and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, among many other growing efforts to resist state violence and corporate hegemonic dominance over our lives, communities, and mother earth.
Steve has a Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in Applied Cultural Anthropology and an M.Div. from Asbury Theological Seminary. His research, teaching, and activism experience grows out of critical theory and praxis at the margins of society with a focus on migration, structural and state violence, social movements, power analysis, global apartheid, neo-colonialism, and the political-economy of Christianity.
