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. Our organizational  partner for this event was People's Advocacy Institute.

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The fourth webinar theme is Movement Building and Transnational Freedom Struggles and will be a conversation about how we can build a global movement for abolition, and the types of shared knowledge, strategies, and organizing an internationalist movement to abolish police and prisons will require.

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Speakers:

Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. She is the author of several books, including Women, Race, and Class, Freedom is a Constant Struggle and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is the subject of the acclaimed documentary "Free Angela and All Political Prisoners" and is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Lorgia García Peña is a public facing scholar, activist, and the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a non-profit organization that provides college instruction to undocumented students. She is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions and the co-director of Mind the Gap, Archives of Justice. Currently she is an untenured associate professor at Harvard University.

Medhin Paolos is a filmmaker, researcher, musician and an activist working for LGBTQ and citizenship rights in Italy. She is the director of the acclaimed documentary film "Asmarina" (2015), the co-founder of the Milano Chapter of Rete G2 (the largest citizenship rights organization in Italy) and the creator of the G2 Lab. Her work with immigrant, refugee and LGBTQ communities in Milan, Italy is internationally recognized.

Leti Volpp is a law professor at UC Berkeley who has published multiple pieces on immigration and citizenship law with a particular focus on how law is shaped by ideas about culture and identity. She currently directs the campus-wide Center for Race and Gender.

Makani Themba (moderator) is Chief Strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies based in Jackson, MS. A social justice innovator and pioneer in the field of change communications and narrative strategy, she has spent more than 20 years supporting organizations, coalitions and philanthropic institutions in developing high impact change initiatives.