[opirgyork] Community and Resistance Tour (TOMORROW)

[aruna at opirgyork.ca]

FALL 2010: THE COMMUNITY AND RESISTANCE TOUR

Featuring Jordan Flaherty, Jesse Muhammad and Victoria Law.

Thursday, October 7
6:30pm
OISE, Room 2211
252 Bloor Street W

The COMMUNITY AND RESISTANCE tour seeks to communicate about current
struggles for justice and liberation, from nooses hung in the northern
Louisiana town of Jena to women organizing inside prisons, from resistance
to school privatization to post-Katrina community organizing and cultural
resistance. The tour also seeks to connect communities of liberation, and
to build relationships between grassroots activists and independent media.

This tour is for anyone interested in issues of health care, education,
criminal justice, housing, or the ways in which systems of racism,
patriarchy and other forms of oppression intersect with these struggles.

About the Speakers!:

VICTORIA LAW is a writer, photographer and mother. After a brief stint as
a teenage armed robber, she became involved in prisoner support. In 1996,
she helped start Books Through Bars-New York City, a group that sends free
books to prisoners nationwide. In 2000, she began concentrating on the
needs and actions of women in prison, drawing attention to their issues by
writing articles and giving public presentations. Since 2002, she has
worked with women incarcerated nationwide to produce Tenacious: Art and
Writings from Women in Prison and has facilitated having incarcerated
women's writings published in larger publications, such as Clamor
magazine, the website "Women and Prison: A Site for Resistance" and
make/shift magazine. Her book Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of
Incarcerated Women (PM Press 2009) is the culmination of over 7 years of
listening to, writing about and supporting incarcerated women nationwide
and resulted in this former delinquent winning the 2009 PASS (Prevention
for a Safer Society) Award.

In 1995, she became involved with ABC No Rio, a collectively-run arts
center on New York's Lower East Side, a move that resulted in changing her
lifestyle from delinquency to social justice with an arts focus. In 1997,
she organized a group of activist photographers to transform one of No
Rio's upstairs tenement apartments into a black-and-white photo darkroom
for community use. She has also participated in and curated numerous
exhibitions at No Rio's gallery, many with themes addressing social and
political issues such as incarceration, grassroots efforts to rebuild New
Orleans, Zapatista organizing, police brutality and squatting.
In 2003, she collaborated with China Martens to create Don't Leave Your
Friends Behind, a workshop addressing the specific (and often
unacknowledged) needs of parents and children in radical movements; and
has co-facilitated discussions in Baltimore, New York City, Providence,
Montreal, Minneapolis, Detroit and Boston. They are editing a handbook for
allies of radical parents by the same name.

JORDAN FLAHERTY is a journalist and community organizer based in New
Orleans. He was the first journalist with a national audience to write
about the Jena Six case, and played an important role in bringing the
story to worldwide attention. His post-Katrina writing in ColorLines
Magazine shared a journalism award from New America Media for best
Katrina-related coverage in the Ethnic press, and audiences around the
world have seen the news segments he’s produced for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur,
GritTV, and Democracy Now. His new book, FLOODLINES: Community and
Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six will be released this summer from
Haymarket Press. For more information on the book, see floodlines.org.

Jordan has appeared as a guest on a wide range of television and radio
shows, including CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Headline News, Grit
TV, and both local and nationally-syndicated shows on National Public
Radio. He has been a regular correspondent or frequent guest on Democracy
Now, Radio Nation on Air America, News and Notes, and many other outlets.
As a white southerner who speaks honestly about race, Jordan Flaherty has
been regularly published in Black progressive forums such as
BlackCommentator.org and Black Agenda Report, and is a regular guest on
Black radio stations and programs such as Keep Hope Alive With Reverend
Jesse Jackson.

Jordan is an editor of Left Turn Magazine, a national publication
dedicated to covering social movements. He has written about politics and
culture for the Village Voice, New York Press, Labor Notes, Radical
Society, and in several anthologies, including the South End Press books
Live From Palestine and What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of
the Nation, the University of Georgia Press book What is a City, and the
AK Press book Red State Rebels.

JESSE MUHAMMAD: Energetic, inspiring and effective are just some of the
words audiences have used to describe the writings and messages delivered
by writer, news reporter, artist, publicist and photojournalist Jesse
Muhammad. Brother Jesse, a native of Houston, Texas, started contributing
to the Final Call Newspaper in 2004 and was appointed as its Southwest
Regional Correspondent.

In 2005, after receiving rave reviews for his reporting on stories that
mainstream media tends to over look, he was appointed as an official Staff
Writer for the FCN, which is the only national Black-owned newspaper.
Since that time, he has gained worldwide recognition for his consistent
coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the continuing struggle of its
survivors. In 2007, he was credited with bringing national and
international attention to the case of the "Jena Six", and helped to
mobilize the 50,000 plus attendees to the historic "Jena Six" rally in
September of that year. He has been a featured commentator on various
television and radio shows in Houston, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee,
Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Louisiana, and as far as Ghana. His writings
are now read in many print and online newspapers and magazines throughout
the world.

Sponsored by the Ontario Public Interest Research Group chapters at the
University of Toronto and York University, OPIRG-Toronto and OPIRG-York.

Endorsed by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Basics Community
Newsletter, the Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students at UofT,
Socialist Project, The Centre for Social Justice, and Upping the Anti.

The tour is organized by Haymarket Books, PM Press, Left Turn Magazine,
Community Futures Collective, and other radical and independent media
projects from around the US, the COMMUNITY AND RESISTANCE TOUR is an
exciting movement-building opportunity. Check out the tour website at
communityandresistance.wordpress.com.