Wednesday, September 15th, 7:00 PM ET

Study and Struggle organizes against criminalization and incarceration in Mississippi through mutual aid, political education, and community building. We provide a bilingual Spanish and English curriculum with discussion questions and reading materials, as well as financial support, to over 100 participants in radical study groups inside and outside prisons in Mississippi. These groups correspond with groups from across the country through our pen pal program. We regularly come together for online conversations hosted by Haymarket Books. The curriculum, built by a combination of currently- and formerly-incarcerated people, scholars, and community organizers, centers around the interrelationship between prison abolition and immigrant justice, with a particular attention to freedom struggles in Mississippi and the U.S. South.

For our Fall 2021 four month curriculum, we have borrowed and augmented Ruth Wilson Gilmore's argument that “abolition is about presence, not absence. It has to be green, and in order to be green, it has to be red (anti-capitalist), and in order to be red, it has to be international," having added “intersectional” as a fourth analytical category that we hope moves us beyond “single-issue” organizing. Study and Struggle provides a bilingual curriculum to all our imprisoned comrades in Mississippi with the support of our friends at 1977 Books and makes it fully available online for other study groups to use as they see fit.

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 first webinar theme covers "intersectionality" and will be a conversation about what it means for abolition to be intersectional and how abolition demands a reimagination of relationships, accountability, and what it means to be in community and to care for one another.

While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of commissary and mutual aid for our incarcerated participants.

***Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and will have live captions available.***

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Speakers:

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. She co-authored the guidebook Lifting As They Climbed and published a children’s book titled Missing Daddy about the impacts of incarceration on children and families. Kaba is the recipient of the Cultural Freedom Prize from Lannan Foundation.

Moni Cosby is a Chicago activist, mother, grandmother, writer and abolitionist who was incarcerated by the state of Illinois for 20 years. She has dedicated her life to ending all forms of violence that Black, Indigenous and People of Color, particularly women, encounter daily.