Today’s memo is a quick one. The manifesto was one of the first things I wrote when we went live with Reconcile Journal last year - it came to me with ease and was on paper in minutes.

A manifesto is an important part of a values-led project, and ours reflects our mission so clearly. What is a manifesto, you ask?

It is the underlying ideology of social movements, based on the shared knowledge of the community. This preexisting shared knowledge is usually about a negative social situation, which gives rise to the sociopolitical descriptions in manifestos.

Importantly, they are ‘a prominent discourse genre of protest, resistance and solidarity.’

[This definition was adapted from van Dijk (2022), which we will likely do a full research digest on in the future. Full paper at the end if you don’t want to wait for it!]

An anchor for everything to come, and a reflection of where we are beginning, here is the Reconcile manifesto:

Let's democratise access to knowledge, disrupting the rules around who gets to produce, interpret and use it.
Let’s make research and critical inquiry a shared social practice.
Let’s move towards collective literacy, equipping ourselves with the tools to read, question, and reshape the real world.
Let’s build new systems where understanding and imagination belong to everyone.
Let’s open the door and make it easy.