Movement Roundtable: Abolition, Decolonization, and Education

Thursday, September 19, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

EastSide Arts Alliance/Cultural Center, 2277 International Blvd, Oakland

Join the Department of African American Studies and EastSide Arts Alliance for a conversation on abolition, decolonization, and education with local and international movement activists.

Arrive early to check out Bandung Books and the latest exhibit in EastSide's gallery. Geo Maher's books will be available for purchase at Bandung Books.

Refreshments will be served.

Geo Maher is an abolitionist educator, organizer, and writer based in Philadelphia. He has taught previously at the University of Pennsylvania, Vassar College, Drexel University, San Quentin State Pr*son, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas, and has held visiting positions at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Decolonizing Humanities Project at the College of William & Mary, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, and the Institute of Social Research at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

He is the author of five books: (2013); (2016); (2017); (2021); and (2022); and co-editor of the Duke University Press book series .

Mohamed Shehk is the Campaigns Director of of Critical Resistance (CR), a national grassroots organization working to abolish the Pr*son industrial complex. He has supported CR's campaigns to shrink and end policing programs, such as ending Urban Shield, fight against new Pr*son and J*il construction projects, including stopping new jails in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and close down existing cages, most recently in shutting down three state prisons in California and working to end ICE detention in New York. He has also been engaged in amplifying international solidarity with people's struggles outside of the U.S., and supporting the Palestinian movement for liberation.

Morning Star Gali is a member of the Ajumawi band of Pit River Tribe. From 2016-2018 she was a Rosenberg Leading Edge Fellow focusing on the disproportionate impact of the criminal and juvenile justice systems on Native Americans. She has worked as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Pit River Tribe. She continues to lead large-scale actions while helping organize Native cultural, spiritual, scholarly, and political gatherings throughout California. Morning Star is deeply committed to advocating for indigenous sovereignty issues such as missing & murdered indigenous women, climate justice, gender justice and sacred sites protection on behalf of the tribal and intertribal communities that she was raised within.

Harsha Walia is a writer and organizer based in Vancouver, unceded Indigenous Coast Salish territories. She has been a grassroots organizer in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, abolitionist, and anti-colonial movements for the past two decades, including through collectives and coalitions such as No One Is Illegal, Defenders of the Land, Boycott Israeli Apartheid Campaign, and Anti-Capitalist Convergence. Her day gig is in an anti-violence service provider organization supporting survivors of gender-based violence. She is the award-winning author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021) and Undoing Border Imperialism (2013), and co-author of Never Home: Legislating Discrimination in Canadian Immigration as well as Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Barbara Montano at [email protected] or 510-664-4324 with as much advance notice as possible.

Host or Publisher Black Studies Collaboratory