It’s All Policing, It’s All War: Chicago Organizers on Connecting Abolition and Demilitarization
ASL will be provided. Live transcription is available here.
The prison and police abolition movement and the anti-war movement are often thought of as separate, siloed formations. However, in practice, organizers working to end racist, colonial, imperialist, patriarchial, ecocidal violence understand these to be the same fight.
Join us for a conversation with Benji Hart, Asha Ransby-Sporn, and Timmy Châu, three Chicago-based organizers who have been working in anti-war and abolition work in various organizations including Dissenters, People’s Response Team, and Assata’s Daughters. We’ll discuss lessons learned in the Chicago context, what it means to do work on abolition in the US from an internationalist perspective, how this work is changing in the current moment, and what we anticipate will be needed in the coming struggles. The conversation will be moderated by Dean Spade.
Accessibility
Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This event is free and open to all. Please register here. This event is made possible by the Patricia Wismer Professorship in Gender and Diversity at Seattle University.
Image credit: Alec Dunn, from DE-MIL-I-TA-RISE | Dissenters portfolio and booklet by Justseeds Artists Cooperative.
About the Speakers
Timmy Châu is a Vietnamese facilitator, attorney and community organizer based in Chicago. He has spent over ten years supporting and building grassroots organizations and brings extensive experience in movement strategy, policy advocacy, and organizational capacity-building. He began his advocacy working to support communities impacted by police violence as a youth organizer with We Charge Genocide and the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials. He is former Executive Director of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts / Education Project (PNAP) where he worked to build inside/outside networks of mutual support and advocacy between incarcerated and freeworld activists, scholars, thinkers, and artists. He’s also co-founder of Dissenters, a new youth-led anti-war organization. Currently, he’s the Community Outreach Lead of the National Parole Transformation Project (NPTP), a network of lawyers, community-members and advocates working toward decarceration by challenging punitive parole systems through grassroots advocacy and impact litigation housed at the MacArthur Justice Center.
Benji Hart is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator whose work centers Black radicalism, queer liberation, and prison abolition. Their words have appeared in numerous anthologies, and been published at Time, Teen Vogue, The Advocate, The Funambulist, and elsewhere. They have led popular education and arts-based workshops for organizations internationally, and presented at the American Repertory Theater, the National Museum of African American History & Culture, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Phillips Academy Andover. Their performances have been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Den Frie, BRIC, and Museo del Chopo. They have held fellowships with Yaddo, MacDowell, the Amsterdam University of the Arts, and are a 2023 Lab Artist with Chicago Dancemakers Forum.
Asha Ransby-Sporn is a Chicago-based community organizer and writer deeply committed to people’s movements. She was a co-founder of BYP100, an organization of young Black people fighting for racial, economic, and gender justice by waging grassroots organizing campaigns across the U.S. As a college student, Asha launched the first successful campaign to get a U.S. university to financially divest from the private prison industry. In 2014, she was apart of the We Charge Genocide youth delegation to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland where she testified on police violence in Chicago. Asha was the Co-Director of Organizing at Dissenters, a national youth anti-war organization from 2020 through 2022. Asha has led and been a part of community based campaigns that have won ballot referenda on investing in mental health, blocked a weapons manufacturer from a multi-million dollar tax break, secured local investments in alternatives to policing, and effectively raised the minimum wage. Most recently, Asha was the South Side Field Director leading the volunteer field program for Brandon Johnson’s winning mayoral campaign in Chicago with United Working Families.
Dean Spade has been working in movements to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He is a Professor at Seattle University School of Law and the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!,” and the creator of the mutual aid toolkit at BigDoorBrigade.com. His latest book is Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next).