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Devising Freedom Series
May 12, 2014 @ 7:00 am - May 21, 2014 @ 9:00 pm
FreeFoundry Dialogues continue in May with four events (May 12, 14, 19 & 21) looking at our criminal legal system towards building new and authentic safety for us all. Dynamic visiting practitioners and analysts will join local organizers to discuss the “new Jim Crow” of mass incarceration, the policing of gender, transformative justice practice and how social justice movements get built. This is a rare gathering of people who walk the talk of radical imagining. Don’t miss this!
More information on each event is available below and here.
All dialogues 7pm @ The Ukrainian Hall, 140 2nd Ave, NYC
May 12: Still Shackled, Still Surviving
A Visual Journey through 500 Years of Boxes
Our first dialogue is a visual journey through the technology of confinement – starting in slave dungeons inside West African soil and ending inside America’s prisons.
Dr. Viviane Saleh-Hanna of UMass Dartmouth’s Department of Crime & Justice Studies and Ashanti Alston, a former member of the Black Panther Party who spent over a decade in prison, highlight the continuity of physical structures used to construct and maintain white supremacy, as well as the resilience of black freedom struggle recorded in song and in the lives of political prisoners.
May 14: Policing Gender
What’s gender got to do with policing and prison? Did you know that the number of women in prison is increasing at nearly double the rate for men? What does this mean? From profiling and surveillance to popular culture, how is gender constructed, reinforced and articulated through the prison industrial complex?
Kai Lumumba Barrow, visiting from Durham, NC, is a longtime organizer who recently worked as a Senior Strategist for Southerners On New Ground (SONG), a queer liberation organization working throughout the South. Kai is also a painter and installation artist.
Victoria Law is a writer, photographer, mother and the author of “Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women”.
Andrea Ritchie is a police misconduct attorney and organizer in New York City. She co-coordinates Streetwise And Safe (SAS) and is co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.
May 19: Building Movement
How do social movements get built? What is happening right now to end the violence of imprisonment and policing in NYC and throughout the US? Join groundbreaking organizers in dialogue on how movements are built to successfully win concrete changes and push us toward an entirely different way of addressing violence and safety in our society.
Rachel Herzing is Campaign Director of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization building an international movement to abolish the prison industrial complex (PIC).
Joo-Hyun Kang is Director of Communities united for Police Reform (CPR), an unprecedented campaign to end discriminatory policing practices in New York. The partners in this campaign come from all 5 boroughs, from all walks of life and represent many of those most unfairly targeted by the NYPD.
gabriel sayegh is the New York state director of the Drug Policy Alliance. He lives in Brooklyn.
May 21: Transforming Justice
The failings of the criminal legal system are becoming more obvious with each passing day. What other forms of justice do people envision or already practice? Join us for a conversation between people leading the way toward these new practices as they discuss their experiences with community based approaches to violence, their challenges and lessons learned along the way.
Mariame Kaba is the founding director of Project NIA in Chicago, which uses the principles of participatory community justice – often called restorative or transformative justice – which has been shown to meet the needs of victims, reduce recidivism, and improve satisfaction with the legal system.
Danielle Sered is the founding director of Common Justice in Brooklyn, an innovative victim service and alternative-to-incarceration program for youth charged with felonies such as assault, robbery, and burglary based in restorative justice principles.
Ejeris Dixon is an organizer with over ten years experience working in racial justice, economic justice, LGBTQ, and anti-violence movements. Ejeris served as the founding coordinator of the Audre Lorde Project’s Safe OUTside the System Collective.