The Free University of NYC

[gview file=”http://opencuny.org/freeuniversity/files/2016/04/Liberation-Lab-Complete-Info-Pack.pdf”]

**LIBERATION LAB Schedule**
5th Annual May Day Free University with Rename&Reclaim
Saturday, April 30, 2016
11:30am-6:30pm
Washington Square Park, Manahahtaan
Enter at Washington Place and Washington Square West

RSVP/Share on Facebook.
Download Schedule and Complete Info-Pack.

11:30AM – 12PM (arrive early to begin on time!)
Lenape Calibration – Opening Workshop
Beatrice Glow, Artist and Visiting Scholar in The Wayfinding Lab at Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
Hadrien Coumans, co-founder of Lenape Center
Angelo Baca, co-president of the Native American and Indigenous Student Group at NYU
Rick Chavolla, Board Member at the American Indian Community House

12PM – 1:30PM
– Addressing and Intervening Sexism In/Through Language, with Mariel Acosta (City College of New York) and Ernesto Cuba (CUNY Graduate Center)
– Auroville and Other Utopias, with Laura Zelasnic
– Day of Play (In a State of Crisis), with Erika Houle and Emily Caruso (Prioritize Childcare)
– FUCK ICE: Queer Migrant Organizing for Liberation / CHINGA LA MIGRA: Inmigrantes Queer Luchando por Liberación, with/con Josh Wizman and Gerardo Romo (ICE-Free NYC)
– Nuit Debout: A Direct Democracy Uprising, with Marisa Holmes

1:30PM – 3PM
– Areyto Taino Movement Lab, with Thea Martinez
– Towards a Decolonial Cultural Front: Palestine, #BlackLivesMatter, and Indigenous People’s Struggle + Rename&Reclaim, with Amin Husain (Tidal Magazine), Nitasha Dhillon (MTL), and Nick Mirzoeff and Anna Hillary (Rename&Reclaim)
– Our LAST Stand! NO to the Mayor’s City-Wide Gentrification Plan, with Sumumba Sobukwe (Occupy Wall Street/Occu-Evolve)
– Political Prisoners, with NYC Free Peltier and NYC Jericho Movement
– (Post)colonial Present/Presence in Education + Selling Out the Right to Learn: Why Education is Not a Business, with Shruti Krishnamoorthy, Jo Kelcey, Carol Anne Spreen, and Jill Armstrong (New York University)
– Visions of Dissent: The Role of Photojournalists and Media in #BlackLivesMatter and Other Movements, with Natalie Keyssar

3PM – 4:30PM
– How Hedge Funds are Bankrupting Our Universities + Unions and Labor History, with Hannah Fullerton (NYU Student Labor Action Movement) and Maren Stange (Cooper Union Organization of Part-Time Faculty president)
– Introduction to the Philosophy of Stoics and Climate Change, with David Haack
– Movement of the Squares: A Conversation, with Babak Tofighi and Luis Moreno-Caballud
– Power of Imagination – Storytelling and Magic, with Carol Cabrera and Sky King
– Tower Records in the Park: Hip-Hop Architecture Freestyle, with Sekou Cooke (sekou cooke STUDIO/Syracuse University School of Architecture)

4:30PM – 5PM Food Break

5PM – 6:30PM
Performing Dissent Finale
– Abolish the Box, with Andrea Gordillo, Paula Siquiera Mendes, and Jeremy Lesser
– This Ain’t A Eulogy: A Ritual for Re-Membering, with Taja Lindley
– Umbra and Black Arts Poetics in the Village, with David Henderson
– Genealogies Walk, with Molly Davy and Siera Dissmore

FreeUniversityNYC.org + FreeUniversityNYC@gmail.com + Facebook.com/FreeUniversityNYC + @FreeUnivNYC

RenameandReclaim@gmail.com + @Rename_Reclaim

FUNDRAISER for Albert Woodfox (Angola 3) / Film / Food / Letter-Writing!
Sunday, March 13, 5-8pm
Mayday Space
176 St. Nicholas Ave, Bushwick, Brooklyn
RSVP/share: https://www.facebook.com/events/584375965072449

Co-sponsored by Free University-NYC, Campaign to Bring Mumia Home, CUNY Prison Divest, Lynne Stewart Defense Organization, Mayday Space, National Lawyers Guild – NYC Chapter, New Abolitionist Movement, NYC Anarchist Black Cross, NYC Books Through Bars, NYC Free Leonard Peltier, and NYC Jericho Movement (in formation).

This special fundraiser event will honor the February 19 release of Albert Woodfox (the Angola 3’s last remaining member who had been imprisoned in solitary confinement for over 41 years). We will screen the film The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation, share food, write letters to Albert and incarcerated people, and discuss solidarity inside/outside prisons. All donated funds will be given to Albert Woodfox to help his transition to freedom on the outside.

To make an online donation,  click on the “Help Albert!” link on the Angola 3 website, and specify “Albert Woodfox” as the designated recipient.

Please contact us at FreeUniversityNYC@gmail.com if your organization or crew would like to co-sponsor.

This event builds upon our December 13 event “Care Down the Walls: Education, Health, and Housing beyond Prisons” (http://freeuniversitynyc.org/2015/11/24/dec-13-care-down-the-walls-education-health-housing-beyond-prisons-free-university/)

FreeUniversityNYC.org
FreeUniversityNYC@gmail.com
Facebook.com/FreeUniversityNYC
@FreeUnivNYC

Showing Our Love for the People!
Free U Teach-in @Occupy Museums event
Sunday, February 14, 2-5pm
Koch Plaza at Metropolitan Museum of Art
RSVP/share on facebook

Free University-NYC, in collaboration with Occupy Museums, invites you to “Showing Our Love For The People!”
• Learn about Free U’s 5-year background of horizontal popular learning strategies
• Connect the privatization of public art spaces to New York City arts histories and anti-gentrification struggles
• Talk with Free U organizers and help brainstorm 2016 actions

http://kochplaza.org/
Gentrification Primary NYC: Manhattan vs. Brooklyn
A Citizens’ Meeting at Koch Plaza, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sunday, February 14, 2-5pm
Occupy Museums, David Tobis, and the International Forum on Globalization will host a citizens meeting, teach-in, and afternoon of actions at David H. Koch Plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum. The event will bring together experts, activists, and artists for short lectures and discussions on culture, housing, finance, and income inequality.

FreeUniversityNYC@gmail.com
FreeUniversityNYC.org
Facebook.com/FreeUniversityNYC
@FreeUnivNYC

​Care Down the Walls:
Education, Health, & Housing beyond Prisons
Free University

Sunday, December 13
11:30AM – 4PM
Sixth Street Community Center
638 E Sixth Street (between Avenues B & C)
RSVP/Share: tinyurl.com/CareDownWallsFB

*11:30AM*
Welcome / Statement of Intentions

*All Day*
Virtual Writing Workshop: Spaces for the Future
Susan Naomi Bernstein
Describe a real or imagined community space that creates hope for the Future. Your writing can:• Illustrate with thick description and details• Explain emotional significance• Consider symbolism• Document history• Make a case for necessary changes

*12-1:30PM*
Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: Structuralism in Black Literature
Nicholas B. Powers
From Frederick Douglass to Sapphire’s novel ​​Push, learning how to read was intimately tied to freedom. In this teach in, we look at how literacy re-subjectified the blackened body and created a structuralist vision that is the radical seed in Black literature.

Alternatives and Divestment from the Treatment Industrial Complex
Root Cause and Hospital Care Workers Collective
In Part One of this workshop, Root Cause will share a Divestment Presentation (see video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk4pukNYm6Ma) to discuss cutting ties with the Treatment Industrial Complex, using an activity to understand the TIC’s web. Points for discussion: How can we can cut these ties? What are recommendations for different stakeholders? How can we push Rangel to take tax breaks away from prisons (see petition Bit.ly/RevokeREIT) We will identify resources and strategies healthcare workers and community groups need to improve public health while reducing the need for police and prisons.
In Part Two, public hospital workers will share experiences and discuss possibilities of expanding concrete alternatives to abolish prisons that are based on non-hierarchical and transparent forms of collaboration between community groups and healthcare workers. More specifically, we’re interested in how healthcare workers can more effectively collaborate with communities to resist racism, police brutality, and incarceration. Our guiding question: How do we liberate health from surveillance, privatization, and racism?

Introduction to Warrior Sisters and Demo Class
Warrior Sisters – Hetal Sheth
Warrior Sisters is a non profit organization dedicated to ending systemic male violence against women. The group was started in Oregon in 2013 by a handful of women and now has representatives building communities and facilitating free self defense trainings for women and events in cities across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and now in NYC! We draw inspiration from Gulabi Gang, a grassroots women led movement in India, in working to build a culture of resistance and empower women as a collective force. We believe that strong women’s communities are a vital element of assault prevention. We are dedicated to building these communities through discussion, sharing of stories, mutual support, and respect. Join us to hear a short introduction about Warrior Sisters which will be open to all and a demo class right after for women only.

HIJOS in Argentina: Breaking Social Silence – Community Power
Marina Sitrin
I will share the experiences of HIJOS in Argentina so as to help us think together about options for where we place our energy/demands/focus and well as how. HIJOS (Hijas y Hijos por identidad y justicia y contra el olvido y silencio – Daughters and Sons for Identity and Justice and Against Silence and Forgetting), began in the later 1990s in Argentina and in many ways is both precursor and emblematic of the forms of organization of the post 2001 rebellion. Different from the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo and the Abuelas, though in solidarity with them, HIJOS does not place demands upon the government as their strategy for justice, but rather organizes itself so as to address society as a whole. They do this to break a “social silence” that they argue is largely to blame for the dictatorship and mass disappearances of their parents, family members and others in society. The perspective of HIJOS is horizontal – looking to those around them as the source of power – both in attempts to transform society, and as the location of the silence that has supported the status quo. Hundreds if not thousands of people who were active or complicit in the dictatorship live free in society in Argentina. Until recently there was a total silence about this. HIJOS organizes in this silence. HIJOS’s goal is not to speak to the genocidas (those involved in the dictatorship), but their neighbors and society in general. Those who were letting people who committed such atrocities live in peace and silence. The form their protests take is more of a public outing than a traditional protest. It became known as the Escrache. An Escrache is this process of outing, it is a tactic for social awareness, using direct action, theater and education against silence and forgetting.

*1:30-3PM*
Using Meditation to Achieve Outcomes
One Thousand Arms – Kara Dansky
Meditation can help us connect our intention with concrete outcomes. This workshop will cover the fundamentals of meditation practice, mindfulness and awareness, cause and effect, obstacles, and the development of confidence in our ability to achieve our goals, including education, healthcare and housing for all and an end to the prison industrial complex.

Overdose Reversal
Streetwork Project – Graciela
I will teach an overdose reversal & safer injection training. Using naloxone & talking to your communities/networks about safer injection can save lives. Drug users are constantly targeted by police and are at great risk for health concerns, even death, if the stigma & shame around it are not addressed. I will teach how to obtain naloxone (I can bring some kits to give out as well), how to prevent an overdose through safer injection strategies, how to talk about IV drug use without judgment, how to address health concerns, referrals for needle exchanges, how to care for & support injectors in our communities, how to access needle exchanges, and how to administer naloxone as a harm reduction-focused workshop.

Free Your Mind
Beyond Attica/Close Rikers/Stop Mass Incarceration/Riverside Direct Action Response Team – James Litkett
This revolutionary activist poet (wizofjlitkett.weebly.com) will talk about empowering the formerly incarcerated and protecting their freedom in mind, body, and soul so as to not become victims of circumstance.

Teatro Vida: Theater and Public Health, Bronx New York 1990s
Thea Martinez
The facilitator will provide a historical context for discussing the early experiments of government funded programs bringing theater arts into public health education during the AIDS crisis of 1990s. Further discussion will explore how we can utilize theater in and outside The (Prison) Walls to improve public health today. In the second half of the workshop, Thea Martinez will share some of her experiences as actor/educator during the 1990s and offer exercises that introduce the Teatro Vida method to workshop participants.

Attica and Abolitionist Strategy
Critical Resistance – Bryan Welton
How is care an alternative to caging and control, and when is “care” a strategy for remaking repression? Where can we find obstacles, traps, exits, and openings in this moment of prison reform? How can we transform the power and scale of abolition? Critical Resistance members will discuss coalition building and non-reformist reform through their experience in building the Beyond Attica campaign, working to free people and resources from the prison industrial complex toward reconstructing healthy, whole, and self-determining communities.

*3-​4​PM*
Reflections/next steps dialogue
Free University-NYC
We will all come together to reflect on the day, and to lay out concrete strategies for a larger city-wide network that can amplify our projects and gain wider support. We will share recent/upcoming actions to build bridges between our groups, and will brainstorm what themes Free University-NYC can explore in 2016 and beyond.

FreeUniversityNYC.org
FreeUniversityNYC@gmail.com
Facebook.com/FreeUniversityNYC
@FreeUnivNYC #CareDownWalls

“Care Down the Walls:
Education, Health, & Housing beyond Prisons”
Free University

Sunday, December 13
11:30am-4pm​
Sixth Street Community Center
638 E Sixth Street (between Avenues B & C)

Contribute a workshop / volunteer: tinyurl.com/CareDownWalls
RSVP / share on Facebook: tinyurl.com/CareDownWallsFB

We need to strengthen bridges between CARE and PRISON ABOLITION. This is a call for workshops by care workers and prison abolitionists to share our experiences, analyses, and strategies.

The emotional care that upholds our work in education, health, and housing is often unrecognized, or not directly tied to ending the prison industrial complex. Meanwhile, ​the call to abolish prisons at times ignores the role of healthcare workers, educators, and community groups to create alternatives beyond abolition.

At this event, we will discuss how to care for each other at risk of eviction, illness, and incarceration. We will also share resources to support the imprisoned and just released.

Anticipated themes:
– Radical healthcare, past and present.
– Defense / offense of legal aid.
– Housing strategies from Brooklyn to the Bronx.
– Cop-Watch, know your rights, de-arrests.
– Learning love and liberation in the classroom.
– What comes after we shut down Rikers Island?
– Media inside and outside prison walls and care stations.
– Strike for something: turning economic demands into social change.
– Social Reproduction 101: wages for housework, revolutionary feminisms.
– Police & prison abolition histories: Black Panthers, Young Lords, Attica, Pelican Bay, National Immigrant Youth Alliance organizing inside detention centers…

Share your upcoming actions, meetings, reading lists, zines, jail solidarities, support for the recently released with FreeUniversityNYC@gmail.com. We will compile this info in a pamphlet for the event.

FreeUniversityNYC.org
@FreeUnivNYC #CareDownWalls

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