Budget Justice: Book Launch, Reading & Conversation with Celina Su

Join author, scholar, and poet Celina Su for a reading and conversation to celebrate the launch of her book , which presents a bold vision that empowers communities to solve our cities’ most pressing problems.

Following her reading, Celina Su will be joined in conversation with policy journalist Liza Featherstone and political activist and organizer Kesi Foster to discuss how everyday citizens can shape policy to tackle everything from rising housing and food costs to unabated police violence, underfunded schools, and climate change–driven floods and wildfires.

The conversation will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing with the author.
This event takes place in The Skylight Room (9100) at the CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to all. Register to attend.

Grounded in specific struggles and with specific communities, Celina Su‘s scholarly, pedagogical, and creative work focuses on everyday struggles for collective governance, centering economic democracy and racial justice. She is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and a Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York, a former Senior Democracy Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and a recipient of a Berlin Prize in public policy. Her writing includes Landia, a book of poetry, as well as three books on the politics of social policy and civil society, three poetry chapbooks, and pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Boston Review, n+1, Harper’s, and elsewhere.

Kesi Foster is the Co-Executive Director at Partners for Dignity and Rights (P4DR). P4DR works in partnership with grassroots community and worker-led organizations across the country and internationally to build a broad movement for social and economic rights. P4DR provides strategic support to campaigns that advocate for policies that guarantees everyone can work and live with dignity.

He was previously the Co-Director of the Youth Power Project at Make the Road New York, where he advanced campaigns for educational justice, immigration justice, and community safety. Before Make The Road, Kesi coordinated the Urban Youth Collaborative, the largest youth-led educational justice coalition in New York City, and worked at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Before joining the movements for educational justice, he held positions at the Right to Vote Campaign, and worked to open up career opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals and public housing residents in New York City.

Liza Featherstone is an author, journalist, essayist, critic and teacher. She has written and reported extensively on left social movements in the United States. She is a columnist at Jacobin and The New Republic, as well as a contributing writer at The Nation. Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation (O/R Books, 2018), and Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart (Basic Books, 2004), among other books. Featherstone’s work has also been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., The American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, The Guardian, In These Times and many other publications. She teaches writing at NYU and Columbia. Featherstone is also an active member of NYC-Democratic Socialists of America and ACT-UAW(local 7902).

Amid political repression and a deepening affordability crisis, challenges everything you thought you knew about “dull” and daunting government budgets. It shows how the latter confuse and mislead the public by design, not accident. Arguing that they are moral documents that demand grassroots participation to truly work for everyone, the book reveals how everyday citizens can shape policy to tackle everything from rising housing and food costs to unabated police violence, underfunded schools, and climate change–driven floods and wildfires.

Drawing on her years of engagement with democratic governance in New York City and around the globe, Celina Su proposes a new kind of democracy—in which city residents make collective decisions about public needs through processes like participatory budgeting, and in which they work across racial divides and segregated spaces as neighbors rather than as consumers or members of voting blocs. Su presents a series of “interludes” that vividly illustrate how budget justice plays out on the ground, including in-depth interviews with activists from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Barcelona, Spain, and Jackson, Mississippi, and shares her own personal reflections on how changing social identities inform one’s activism.

Essential reading to empower citizens, Budget Justice explains why public budgets reflect a crisis not so much in accounting as in democracy, and enables everyone, especially those from historically marginalized communities, to imagine and enact people’s budgets and policies—from universal preschool to affordable housing—that will enable their communities to thrive.

This event is presented by the Center for the Humanities and co-sponsored by the Gittell Urban Studies Collective, the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, and the Departments of Critical Psychology, Earth & Environmental Sciences, and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. Visit our website here for more information:

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