Fam, things are about to get real hard. Harder than they have ever been and we need to hold fast and be smart about how we organize over the next four years.
To protect ourselves we need to talk about digital security and how to practice digital self-defense during a time of unprecedented surveillance of our communities. This training is brought to you by EQUALITY LABS, a South Asian Women’s Gender Non Conforming,and Trans Tech Collective.
This is a security self defense training for your digital movement:
* Secure your phone and computer.
* Secure your network access.
* Secure your data.
* Secure your communications.
The Clemente Course in the Humanities® is a unique educational institution founded in 1995 to teach the humanities at the college level to people living in economic distress.
The course works in conjunction with faculty from leading colleges and universities on five continents. Students learn through dialogue about moral philosophy, literature, history, art history, critical thinking, and writing.
More than ten thousand students worldwide have attended a Clemente course, and over fifty percent have successfully completed it.
The aim of the course is to bring the clarity and beauty of the humanities to people who have been deprived of these riches through economic, social, or political forces. While the course is not intended as preparation for college, many students have gone on to two- and four-year colleges.
The Confined Arts (TCA) is a platform to illustrate and showcase the talents and creative voices of currently and formerly incarcerated artists. This platform provides an outlet for artists to express their voice through the visual and performing arts, poetry, and music as a means to abolish the inhumane narratives and socially degrading stigmas that are used to describe the past experiences and limit the futures of individuals impacted by incarceration. The TCA platform is also open to those artists who work in or around jails and prisons, as well as those who have been impacted by mass incarceration through a friend or family member.
Changing Perceptions: The need for a new narrative: There is a tremendous need to change the perceptions of men and women who are stigmatized and dehumanized because of their past experiences of justice involvement. Having endured the prison system himself, Isaac Scott founded The Confined Arts as a platform and outlet for men and women to use art as a medium to share their narrative, break through new perspectives, and shift perceptions of those affected by mass incarceration. Equally important is the healing power through the arts to not only change the audience perspective but to also change the artist as well. TCA will open dialogue between community member, activist, advocates and elected officials to encourage and motivate justice system reform in the areas of collateral consequences and the restoration of civil liberties such as voting rights.
Public Education: What they don’t know: By sharing unheard narratives of those impacted by incarceration through the visual and performing arts, The Confined Arts offers spaces for public education to shatter misconceptions about people involved in the justice system, including perceptions such as untrustworthiness and irredeemability.
While we fight identity-based inequalities by trying to make systemic change, we also need to bring anti-oppression principles into daily interactions. How can we actively communicate abstract ideas like “respect” or “openness”? At this workshop, you'll learn concrete verbal and non-verbal techniques that work immediately to address power differentials within groups and improve one-on-one communication. Whether you are a teacher, student, or activist, you’ll learn how to improve your effectiveness by communicating to others that you value them as human beings, a central task of building strong relationships and equitable communities.
The video Century’s Container includes excerpts of texts by Judith Butler, Toby Rollo, Mona Saeed Kamal, Hari Kunzru, and Sham-e-Ali Nayeem, and was produced for the public forum “Sense of Emergency,” organized in December 2016 by Andrew Weiner at NYU. It was screened at Parliament of Bodies in Athens in January.
The "Muslim" is this century’s container for the Other; but the definition of the Other is also always changing, while the expulsion impulse remains a constant—just ask Polish Jews, Iraqi Kurds, Bengali Hindus, Turkish Armenians, or Japanese Americans. The same year that we experienced an intense backlash in North America and Europe, the Bangladesh government pushed Rohingya refugees (also "Muslim") back into Myanmar and toward escalating violence, under the eyes of Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
