Feminist Freedom School
Applications are open for the 2024 Feminist Freedom School! Apply at https://bit.ly/combahee50 by March 29. Decisions will be sent on April 15.
2024 Feminist FREEDOM SCHOOL: LESSONS FROM COMBAHEE 50 YEARS ON
In 1974, a group of Black feminists formed the Combahee River Collective and together theorized foundational elements of Black feminist praxis. Three years later, they published a statement that has become a rallying cry for generations of activists building toward a more just world, challenging racism and heteropatriarchy, dismantling capitalism, and ending empire while centering a liberatory radical Black feminist queer politics. This year’s Feminist Freedom School asks, How can the legacies of the Combahee River Collective inform the future we create?
This year’s workshop is facilitated by Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine (author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland), with sessions led by Charles Cobb (author, organizer, and veteran of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Barbara Smith (co-founder of the Combahee River Collective), Safiya Bandele (Director Emeritus of the Center for Women’s Development at Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York), and Asha Ransby-Sporn (abolitionist organizer and co-founder of BYP100).
ABOUT THE FREEDOM SCHOOL
Launched in 2023 and directed by Premilla Nadasen, the Feminist Freedom School is a week-long summer intensive bringing together students and a community of cutting-edge scholars and activists to debate, discuss, and strategize around urgent themes in feminist politics. There is no fee to participate in the Freedom School and all associated costs including food are covered by BCRW. For questions, contact skreitzb@barnard.edu.
2023 FEMINIST FREEDOM SCHOOL: ABOLITION FEMINISM
The inaugural Feminist Freedom School took on Abolition Feminism, co-organized by Premilla Nadasen (BCRW C0-Director and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History) and Sarah Haley (Associate Professor of History, Columbia University).
Ujju Aggarwal teaches a session on Abolition Feminism, summer 2023
INSTRUCTORS
Ujju Aggarwal‘s research examines questions related to public infrastructures, urban space, racial capitalism, rights, gender, and the state. Her work has appeared in Transforming Anthropology; Scholar & Feminist Online; and Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion, and Change. She is the author of Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education, Forthcoming, 2024.
Johanna Fernandez‘s 2014 Freedom of Information (FOIL) lawsuit against the NYPD led to the recovery of the “lost” Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country. She is the writer and producer of Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and coeditor with Abu-Jamal of The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor. She is author of The Young Lords: A Radical History; her next project is on the historical roots of US Fascism.
Rachel Herzing has been an organizer, fighting the violence of policing and imprisonment for over 20 years and is a leading voice in the PIC abolition movement. She is a co-founder of Critical Resistance and is the author of a treasure trove of writing on policing, abolition, and the Prison Industrial Complex; her work has appeared in venues including The Black Scholar, Social Justice, and propter nos., among many others.
Sophie Lewis is an independent scholar, critical utopianist, and freelance writer living in Philadelphia. Dr. Lewis regularly publishes essays in such venues as Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, and peer-reviewed journals like Signs and Feminist Theory, among other prominent outlets. She is the author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family.
Mon Mohapatra is an Indian abolitionist researcher, poet, and propagandist living on ancestral Canarsee land. Her work focuses on national and local jail moratoriums, supporting an end to caste apartheid, anti-surveillance obfuscation practices, and building intergenerational, interclass organizing capacity for abolitionist work in the so called US and beyond. She writes and thinks about disability, gender, ecology and ways of knowing across transnational histories. Her work has appeared in influential outlets including Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry, and Harpers Bazaar.
Derecka Purnell is a human rights lawyer and writer. She works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and training in community based organizations through an abolitionist framework. This work in political community includes organizations such as the Movement for Black Lives and Dream Defenders. She is a columnist at The Guardian and her writing has been published widely, including in The Harvard Journal of African American Policy, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New York Magazine, and Teen Vogue. She is editor of the newly-launched magazine Hammer and Hope and author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom.
Romarilyn Ralston is the Executive Director of Project Rebound. She identifies as a Black, feminist abolitionist with an incarceration experience. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Gender & Feminist Studies from Pitzer College and a Master’s degree in Liberal Arts from Washington University in St. Louis after 23 years of incarceration. She is a long-time member and organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and serves on the leadership committee. Her writing has appeared in Ms. and Abolition Feminism vol. 1 among other venues and is a widely sought-after speaker on the topics of racial justice, feminism, and abolition.
Riley Snorton is a cultural theorist who focuses on racial, sexual, and transgender histories and cultural productions. His writing, lectures, social justice, and artistic engagements have reshaped understandings of the racial constitution of gender. He is coediting the forthcoming volume of The Flesh of the Matter: A Hortense Spillers Reader. He is also the co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (Duke University Press) and the author of Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity.
Emily Thuma is an interdisciplinary historian who works at the intersection of American studies, feminist and queer studies, critical race and ethnic studies, legal studies, and critical prison studies. Her research focuses on social movements and the politics and lived experience of criminalization and incarceration since the 1960s. She has worked in abolitionist organizing since 2000 and is the author of the groundbreaking abolitionist feminist text, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence.
STUDENTS
Cassie Garba (Columbia University)
Eve Glazier (Barnard College)
Ana Sofia Harrison (Barnard College)
Regan Moss (Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health)
Sydney Johnson (Barnard College)
Inica Kotasthane (Barnard College)
Alma Nájcera (Vassar College)
Ava Sullivan-Thomas (Barnard College)
Kristen Santarin (Barnard College)
Camila Pelsinger Villalba (Ph.D. Candidate, University of Oxford)
STAFF
Sarah Haley‘s research and writing focuses on Black feminist histories of the carceral state, abolition, feminist archival methods, gender and queer history. She has organized in the academic labor movement and currently organizes with Scholars for Social Justice. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity.
Sophie Kreitzberg began with BCRW as an undergraduate volunteer who worked across several feminist, queer, and abolitionist projects before joining the BCRW staff as a Baccalaureate Fellow.
Ashe Lewis is a senior at Barnard College majoring in Education and Race and Ethnic Studies. He is interested in Queer, and decolonial studies that center on Blackness and is a BCRW research assistant.
Premilla Nadasen has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing and is most interested in visions of social change, and the ways in which poor and working-class women of color fought for social justice. She has worked with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Damayan Migrant Workers Association, and the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. She is the author of the field-shifting book Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States, Household Workers Unite, and Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. She is currently writing a biography of South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba.
Destiny Julia Spruill is an Arts & Media Assistant at AAPF. She is a musician and graduate of Columbia University, where she studied Political Science with a focus on Public Policy. She is passionate about finding ways to build community through the arts. Previously, Destiny has worked with the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and as the graduate assistant for the Transnational Black Feminisms Working Group at Columbia University.
2023 FEMINIST FREEDOM SCHOOL PROGRAM BOOK (PDF)
Image Credit
Original artwork by Aude Abu Nasr