The Transformative Potential of Awareness Labour

Even when designed by and for members of (multiple) oppressed groups, nightlife is generally an unsafe experience. In response to this, awareness teams have emerged internationally in recent years, ensuring that members of these groups can continue to participate in nightlife. Based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with activists in Graz, Austria, contextualised with autoethnography as well as a discourse analysis of policies and recommendations from activists in the broader Austrian and European contexts, I explore in this paper how awareness labour can contribute to transformative justice. I argue that by preventing the most vulnerable members of oppressed groups from being excluded from nightlife and educating everyone who engages with them within nightlife about oppression and privilege, awareness labour sits at the intersection of care and activism. As such, it bears potential to effect social change by teaching a broad segment of society about different practices of coming together that are not based on exploitation, extraction, or oppression. Awareness labour broadens our understanding of activism by intervening in the unjust distribution of care. The paper concludes by proposing areas for further research to determine how to realise the transformative potential of awareness labour.