From anti-pipeline protests to Gaza solidarity student encampments to the indictment of forest protectors in Georgia, we are seeing that as conditions worsen and mobilization increases, political repression of social movements is escalating. With widespread organizing against genocide in Gaza and increasingly militant action to defend the planet and on many other fronts, we are moving into a period where social movement participants are facing mounting surveillance and criminalization. In these times, solidarity and support is essential, particularly as efforts to divide and delegitimize resistance abound. 

This webinar introduces a new tool developed by abolitionist organizers addressing common talking points that undermine solidarity in the face of repression of movements. It invites journalists, organizers, and writers of all kinds to resist divisive frameworks that stigmatize resistance and legitimize unjust legal systems. The hope is to equip commentators to respond to legal repression with nuance and attention to long histories of legal subjugation. Please join us for a presentation of this tool, a discussion of how these dynamics have been playing out in our movements, and how we can build a more robust shared analysis of what solidarity looks like in these dangerous and pivotal times.

***Register through Ticket Tailor to receive a link to the live-streamed video on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and captioning will be provided.***

Speakers:

Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He is a professor at the Seattle University School of Law. Dean’s book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law was published by South End Press in 2011. A second edition with new writing was published in 2015 by Duke University Press. Bella Terra Press published a Spanish edition in 2016. In 2015, Dean released a one-hour video documentary, "Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!", which can be watched free online with English captions or subtitles in several languages. Dean’s new book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next) was published by Verso Press in October 2020. It is also out (or forthcoming) in Spanish, Czech, German, Catalan, Italian, Thai, Korean, and Portuguese.

Zohra Ahmed writes and teaches about the US carceral state and US militarism. She is particularly interested in the interactions between law and political economy and law and social movements in these two domains. She started her legal career as public defender at the Legal Aid Society in New York City. While working in criminal court, she also founded a community court watching project. She entered the academy as a clinical teaching fellow at Cornell Law School, in its International Human Rights Clinic. With her colleagues and students, she represented individuals on death row in Tanzania and the United States and collaborated with groups in both countries challenging life and death sentences, focusing on the cases of incarcerated survivors of gender based violence. She also oversaw United Nations advocacy on behalf of the only human rights organization in the Occupied Syrian Golan. After Cornell, she joined the faculty at University of Georgia School of Law in the fall of 2021, where she taught Criminal Procedure, Criminal Law and a seminar titled Crime and Punishment. She also serves as an advisor to the Community Justice Exchange, the home of the National Bail Fund Network, where she supports grassroots social movement challenging criminalization. She consults with criminal defense teams.

Dylan Rodriguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. He is a faculty member in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. Dylan served as Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies from 2009-2016, Chair of the UCR Academic Senate from 2016-2020, and has worked as the Co-Director of the UCR Center for Ideas and Society since 2021. He is the author of three books, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021) which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is a co-editor of the field shaping text Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016). 

Kamau Franklin is the founder of Community Movement Builders a grassroots organization dedicated to creating sustainable Black communities through organizing and cooperative development. Kamau has been a dedicated community organizer for over twenty-five years, first in New York City and now based in the south. He has worked on various issues including youth organizing and development, police misconduct, community cop-watch programs, freedom school programs for youth, electoral and policy campaigns, large-scale community gardens, and alternatives to incarceration programs. Kamau is a former co-chair of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and a former member of the New York Executive Committee of the National Lawyers Guild. He was the first Legal Program Director of New York City Police-Watch, establishing the first watchdog accountability organization of its kind in New York. He formerly was the South Regional Director of American Friends and Service Committee, Civic Engagement Director of the MS, NAACP, the Racial Justice Fellow/Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, concentrating on federal class action litigation against the New York Police Department on racial profiling. His essay entitled “An Ivory Tower Assassination of Malcolm X” appeared in the book, A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X. His essay “A New Southern Strategy” was published in the book Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, MS.

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This event is cosponsored by Community Justice Exchange and Haymarket Books. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.