Image by Sarah-Ji RheeCo-organizers: Center for Black Diaspora, Women's Center
Co-sponsors: African and Black Diaspora Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies, Women's and Gender Studies
Join us for virtual discussions with Black Feminist abolitionists who have been central to the organizing and building of abolition in Chicago and beyond!
Rachel Caidor is a member of Love and Protect, a Chicago-based collective that provides material, emotional, social, and political support for incarcerated people of color who have been criminalized for surviving and resisting domestic, sexual, trans/homophobic, or state violence. She also works with the Just Practice Collaborative building capacity for people to address sexual and interpersonal violence through community accountability processes.
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018.
Deana Lewis’ scholarly and activist work focuses on trans and non-trans Black women and girls who have experienced state violence. Outside of academia and work, Deana is a member of Love & Protect, a grassroots collective dedicated to supporting marginalized gender identities who are criminalized or harmed by state and interpersonal violence. She is also a founding member of the Just Practice Collaborative, whose purpose is to build communities’ capacities to effectively and with empathy to respond to intimate partner violence and sexual assault without relying primarily on police or other state-based systems.
Beth E. Richie is Head of the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Professor of Black Studies at The University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Richie is the author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation (2012). She is one of the editors of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom (2018) with collaborating teachers from Stateville Prison. Dr. Richie is currently working on a new book titled Abolition. Feminism. Now. with Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, and Erica Meiners.
Ad
#SocialBridging: Letter writing as Freedom Work with Love & Protect, Rachel Caidor and Deana Lewis
Love & Protect is a grassroots collective working to support and free trans and non-trans women, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and trans men of color who have been incarcerated for defending themselves against interpersonal violence.
In this workshop, Love & Protect will share their work and present ways that people outside of jails and prisons can support people who are incarcerated through letters and emails. This support is an important way to work towards freedom and liberation. This event was co-organized by the DePaul's Women's Center & the Center for Black Diaspora.