The Study and Struggle program is the first phase of an ongoing project to organize against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi through four months of political education and community building. Our Critical Conversations webinar series, hosted by Haymarket Books, will cover the themes for the upcoming month. Haymarket Books is an independent, radical, non-profit publisher.

The second webinar theme is Abolition, Intersectionality, and Care and is a conversation about what it means for abolition to be intersectional and how abolition demands a reimagination of what it means to be in community and to care for one another.

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Speakers:

Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!,” and the creator of the mutual aid toolkit at BigDoorBrigade.com. His latest book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), forthcoming from Verso Press this summer.

Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant police misconduct attorney and organizer whose writing, litigation, and advocacy has focused on policing and criminalization of women and LGBT people of color for the past two decades. She is currently Researcher in Residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality and Criminalization at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, where she recently launched the Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action initiative. She is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, Say Her Name: What it Means to Center Black Women’s Experiences of Police Violence in Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States, Surviving the Streets of New York: Experiences of LGBT Youth, YMSM and YWSW Engaged in Survival Sex, and Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color, in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology and has published numerous articles, policy reports and research studies.

Victoria Law is a freelance writer and editor. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, and co-author of the new book Prison By Any Other Name. She frequently writes about the intersections between mass incarceration, gender and resistance.

Pauline Rogers, is formerly incarcerated, and, co-founder of the Reaching & Educating for Community Hope (RECH) Foundation and Reentry Campus in Jackson, Mississippi. For over 32 years she, along with her husband of 29-years who was also formerly incarcerated, have provided safe and supportive housing for women coming home from prison with zero recidivism to date. An advocate, activist, ordained minister, and forthcoming published author on a mission to help strengthen, and enlighten the role of the Church in prison justice reform.

Jarvis Benson (moderator) is originally from Grenada, Mississippi and graduated from the University of Mississippi in 2019. He currently lives in Washington DC and works on youth leadership development, voting accessibility, and social justice initiatives on campuses across the country.