Please Forward!

Thursday: Community and Resistance Tour — Toronto Event!
 
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.
 
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, Socialist Project, The Centre for Social Justice, and Upping the Anti.
 
For more information about the tour: communityandresistance.wordpress.com
 
Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=525599031#!/event.php?eid=142289975816505&ref=mf
 
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.

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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.

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Krystalline Kraus

krystalline kraus is an intrepid explorer and reporter from Toronto, Canada. A veteran activist and journalist for rabble.ca, she needs no aviator goggles, gas mask or red cape but proceeds fearlessly...