What We Mean When We Say Free Them All: Lessons from the Social Justice Initiative
Join the BCRW Social Justice Initiative Residents La Vaughn Belle, Mariame Kaba, and CeCe McDonald, with Senior Activist Fellow Emerita Katherine Acey, for a discussion of their work as artists, organizers, scholars, and visionaries responding to violence.
Speakers will discuss approaches to addressing interlocking forms of violence that manifest in archives and built environments, in state systems and logics, and in interpersonal relationships. Centering Black trans and non-trans women, girls, and femmes, the Residents’ work intervenes on the legacies and ongoing effects of colonialism and slavery, tears open the wide and tangled net of criminalization, and builds transformative, survivor-led responses to interpersonal harm.
This conversation will welcome questions and contributions from the audience, including seasoned and emerging activists, artists, students, and scholars in these fields.
About the Speakers
Katherine Acey is a longtime organizer who is working on a project on intergenerational activism drawing on the reflections of fellow travelers and her own forty-plus years of organizing around LGBTQ people and elders, Palestine solidarity, Black liberation, and other social justice movements.
La Vaughn Belle is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, photography, and video and public interventions, and best known for her work on the coloniality of the Virgin Islands, in its past relationship to Denmark and its present relationship to the United States.
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She has founded or co-founded and directed numerous organizations and projects, including Project NIA, We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls and Young Women, Love and Protect, and Survived and Punished.
CeCe McDonald is an artist and activist committed to dismantling the prison industrial complex and winning the liberation of all oppressed people.
Events are free and open to the public. RSVP is preferred but not required. Seating is available on a first-come, first-seated basis.