Farewell to the Inaugural Social Justice Institute Cohort
BCRW extends our warmest thanks to the inaugural cohort of the Social Justice Institute, Activist-in-Residence Tourmaline Gossett, Activist-in-Residence Cara Page, Activist-in-Residence Tarso Ramos, Researcher-in-Residence Andrea J. Ritchie, and Activist-in-Residence Dean Spade ’97.
Stay tuned for an announcement about the incoming 2018-2020 cohort!
Project Highlights
Video
Invisible No More: Racial Profiling and Police Brutality Against Women and LGBTQ People of Color
Lecture by Andrea J. Ritchie
Medical Industrial Complex Timeline Excerpt
By Cara Page, with support from Nicola Glen Douglas CU ’18
This timeline offers an excerpt of landmark legislation and policies that shaped the eugenic framing of public health, immigration reform, colonization, slavery, and surveillance. Click here to view the timeline on a full screen.
Original Film
Atlantic is a Sea of Bones
Directed by Reina Gossett, Produced by Sasha Wortzel and Hope Dector
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS, Day With(out) Art 2017
Video Series
Survived and Punished
Conceived by Mariame Kaba, Directed and Produced by Dean Spade and Hope Dector
Click here for the full series.
Digital Toolkit
Queer Trans War Ban
A collaboration between Dean Spade and queer and trans activists, anti-war activists including veterans, and cultural workers
Click here for more on this project.
Fall 2018 Event
Building From the Left: Strategies to Disrupt the Right
A panel discussion featuring Tarso Luís Ramos
Learn more about the Social Justice Institute Activists and Researchers in Residence
Cara Page is a Black Feminist Queer cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer. Over the last twenty-plus years, she has fought for LGBTQGNC and People of Color liberation, and organized in the Southeast with movement builders such as SONG, Project South, and the Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative and has built with many organizers, healers and cultural workers across the country. As an Activist-in-Residence, Page continued her decades-long study on historical and contemporary eugenic practices and medical experimentation to shape a public discourse on the historical and contemporary role of eugenic violence as an extension of state control and surveillance on Black and Immigrant communities; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Transgender, Queer, and Gender Nonconforming people; people with disabilities; and Women of Color. Using transformative justice strategies to confront and shift the practices of the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC), Page’s work reveals the centrality of traditions of collective safety and wellness to political liberation.
Page researched and produced an interactive timeline that highlights landmark legislation and policies that shaped the eugenic framing of public health, immigration reform, colonization, slavery, and surveillance. This project was produced with support from BCRW Research Assistant Nicola Glen Douglas (CU ’18). Additionally, Page curated, wrote, and directed “Psalm for the Mismeasured and Unfit,” a performance installation on the medical industrial complex at the 43rd annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence, with choreodirector and creative collaborator Ebony Noelle Golden, curatorial assistant and researcher Nicola Glen Douglas, and ensemble performers Vesta Walker, Jaime Dzandu, Audrey Hailes, Jehan Roberson, Sara Abdullah, and Vesta Walker, Jaime Dzandu, Audrey Hailes, Jehan Roberson, Sara Abdullah, and videographer NY Native Video.
Page also shared her work on a panel “Police Responses to Violence” at the conference Invisible No More: Resisting Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color in Troubled Times on November 3-4, 2017, and “its known and unknown powers/ to bind and dissociate”: Forensic Surveillance and the Policing of Biology, a panel at the 43rd annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence on February 16-17, 2018.
Tarso Ramos is Executive Director of Political Research Associates. Under his leadership, PRA has expanded existing lines of research documenting right wing attacks on reproductive, gender and racial justice by launching several new initiatives on subjects that include the export of U.S.-style homophobic campaigns abroad, the spread of Islamophobia, and the Right’s investment in redefining religious liberty toward discriminatory ends. Before joining PRA, Ramos served as founding director of Western States Center’s Racial Justice Program, which works to oppose racist public policy initiatives and support progressive people of color-led organizations. As director of the Wise Use Public Exposure Project in the mid-90s, he tracked the Right’s anti-union and anti-environmental campaigns.
As an Activist-in-Residence, Ramos has been working on addressing authoritarianism and misogyny as well as examining gender and White Supremacy. Among the warning signs of authoritarianism is the mobilization of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and religious bigotry and the emergence of violent, organized street forces. Growing misogyny, the Incel movement just one example, appears to have been recently accelerated by open hostility to women from Trump and overly normative gender roles promoted by the Christian Right. Ramos is thus working to understand better the relationship between authoritarianism and misogyny, the ways in which misogyny is currently being mobilized by the Far Right/Alt Right and being used and supported by the Trump Administration, as well as learning from the ways in which it has been resisted historically and globally by feminist movements. In collaboration with Loretta Ross, Ramos is planning to convene a group of strategists and scholars to situate misogyny and current authoritarian practices within the long history of US White supremacy, generate new ideas for further research and collaboration, and develop frameworks to combat and transform these trends.
On November 13, Ramos is participating in a panel discussion at Barnard, Building from the Left: Strategies to Disrupt the Right, open to the community to probe how the left can develop more robust strategies to undermine and disrupt the powerful ascendance of the U.S. Right, and build a transformative intersectional social justice agenda that encompasses reproductive justice, LGBTQ rights, racial and immigrant justice, civil liberties, and economic justice. This event is free and open to all.
Andrea J. Ritchie has dedicated the past two decades to challenging abusive and discriminatory policing against women, girls, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people of color. Over the past two years, as a Researcher-in-Residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Criminalization, Andrea J. Ritchie has made significant contributions to expanding and deepening conversations and movements around policing and mass incarceration. In 2017 she partnered with the Ford Foundation, Wellspring Advisors, and esteemed scholar-activist Beth E. Richie to convene a group of over 100 organizers, advocates, and philanthropic partners to map out a strategy for challenging criminalization through an intersectional lens in the current political climate, culminating in the publication of The Crisis of Criminalization: A Call for a Comprehensive Philanthropic Response, the latest in BCRW’s New Feminist Solutions series. Also in 2017, she published Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Beacon Press), the first full-length publication to tackle issues of profiling, policing, and criminalization of communities of color through the lens of women’s experiences, and to uplift over two decades of resistance to police violence centering women, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people of color. Since then, she has published a number opinion pieces making critical interventions in current debates around the war on drugs, police sexual violence, immigration enforcement, policing of young women, prostitution enforcement, responses to mental health crises, policing of motherhood, and more. She has appeared in the Washington Post, and on HBO, NPR, Yahoo News, and the Laura Flanders Show, and has traveled the country to speak on campuses and national conferences about issues of policing and criminalization. She also hosted three conferences focused on the themes explored in Invisible No More at Barnard College, University of Illinois-Chicago, and U.C. Berkeley, co-authored two policy reports on responses to increasing criminalization and intensifying immigration enforcement: Centering Black Women, Girls and Fem(me)s in Campaigns for Expanded Sanctuary and Freedom Cities, and The Impact of the Trump Administration’s Federal Criminal Justice Initiatives on LGBTQ People & Communities and Opportunities for Local Resistance, and published a study and discussion guide for Invisible No More for use by educators, organizers, book clubs, and individual readers.
Dean Spade ‘97 is Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law where he teaches Administrative Law, Poverty Law, and Law and Social Movements. He founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in 2002, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to low-income transgender, intersex and gender nonconforming people. SRLP also engages in litigation, policy reform and public education on issues affecting these communities. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (2011, Rev. Ed. 2015).
As an Activist-in-Residence, Spade developed videos and other activist-educational resources, including Queer Trans War Ban and No New Youth Jail. Spade collaborated with BCRW to produce the video series No Body is Disposable, focusing on the critical intersections of disability justice, prison abolition, and queer and trans liberation. This series was produced in collaboration with Sins Invalid, a disability justice organization that centers the work of queer and trans artists of color. Another series, Survived and Punished, supports campaigns to free people who are incarcerated for defending themselves against gender and sexual violence. This series is produced with Survived and Punished, a grassroots survivor defense organization. He also co-produced the video series I Use My Love to Guide Me and No One Is Disposable.
Tourmaline is the former membership director at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and director of the Welfare Organizing Project at Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ). An activist, writer and filmmaker, she is a recipient of the George Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship by the Open Society Foundation for her work with LGBT people navigating criminalization. In 2009 she was the Stonewall Community Foundation Honoree for her collaboration with Sasha Wortzel on Happy Birthday, Marsha!, a film detailing the lives of Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. In 2013, Tourmaline was awarded the BCRW Activist Fellowship for her work at the intersections of trans justice and prison abolition, and to support her ongoing work to document and elevate the histories and legacies of trans women of color.
As an Activist-in-Residence, Tourmaline produced original films, video series, and other activist-educational resources. Among these film projects include Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, an original film commissioned by Visual AIDS for ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS: Day With(out) Art 2017, and The Personal Things, a film about legendary trans elder Miss Major Griffin-Gracy with animation by Micah Bazant. She also collaborated with BCRW to produce a number of video series, including I Use My Love to Guide Me and No One Is Disposable.
She also organized and hosted a collaborative art exhibit and conversation called We Move Together: Disability Justice and Trans Liberation, featuring work on disability justice, prison abolition, and queer and trans liberation in collaboration with Sins Invalid, a disability justice organization that centers the work of queer and trans artists of color, and the Trans Life and Liberation Art Series, which amplifies the struggles and resiliency of trans femmes of color.
Image credit: Tarso Luís Ramos, Andrea Ritchie, Amber Hollibaugh, Dean Spade, and Cara Page. Photography by Matt Harvey. http://www.tb-credit.ru/articles.html http://www.tb-credit.ru/znk.html