The 2nd Annual Activist Collaboration Symposium:

Breaking Down Walls, Building Allliances: Sex, Race & Prison

Saturday, December 1, 2001

This symposium will examine the ways the prison industrial complex produces sexual, racial and economic injustice, and will bring together local and national activists and educators to build networks for justice.

 

9:30am

Welcome and performance by Faith Nolan, African-Canadian lesbian blues singer/songwriter.

 

10am-12pm

Plenary Panel

Julia Sudbury, Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College, serves as a member of the board of Critical Resistance, a prison abolition organization.

Jan Warren, Associate Director of the College and Community Fellowship Program at CUNY, which offers funding and mentoring to former prisoners seeking college education, is herself a former prisoner.

Kathleen Ferraro, Director of the Women's Studies Program at ASU, has published numerous articles on violence against women, and has served as an expert witness in over fifty cases involving battering. Her current research examines the link between women's violent victimization and incarceration.

Cassandra Shaylor, Co-Director of Justice Now, trains community organizers, law students and undergraduates to provide legal services to women in prison. She is also a PhD candidate in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, writing a dissertation on women, race and the prison industrial complex.

Julian Liu, Communications Associate, Center for Economic and Social Rights, has worked at the Fortune Society, providing services to ex-prisoners and editing Fortune News, a nationally-distributed newspaper for prisoners and prison activists. he volunteers with the Audre Lorde Project, a center for lesbian, gay, bisexual, two spirit, and transgender people of color communities.

 

Workshops

12:30-1:45pm

Fighting the Prison/Border System

This workshop, led by members of the Arizona Prison Moratorium Coalition, will address 1) the social and economic effects of prison expansion as part of the larger trend towards militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and 2) the APMC campaign against the proposed construction of private immigrant-only prisons in rural Arizona towns. Such prisons are known to result in economic stagnation and increased rates of domestic and racial violence.

 

2-3:15pm

Queers, Feminists and the Criminal Justice System

This workshop, led by Cathy Busha of the Wingspan Domestic Violence Project, Zelda Harris of the James E. Rogers College of Law Domestic Violence Clinic, and Danielle Mitchell, PhD candidate, will address the relationship between LGBT anti-hate crimes efforts, anti-domestic violence efforts, and incarceration. This workshop will examine a reliance on a racist, sexist, homophobic and classist criminal justice system to solve our problems and will strive to develop alternative strategies.

 

3-4:45pm

Prisoner Education and Re-integration

Led by Jan Warren, Richard Shelton of the UA Department of English, and Nancy Scholtz of the American Friends Service Committee Prison Concerns Program, this workshop aims to support the development of a prisoner education and re-integration project in Southern Arizona and will explore ways that University faculty and students can work together with community activists in developing such a program.

 

5-6pm

Closing Performance by Faith Nolan and reception.