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Annual Diversity is a Way of L.I.F.E. Conference 2014

Rhode Island College
Providence, RI

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SATURDAY, APRIL 19TH, 2014
8:15am-4PM
(note: when purchasing tickets be sure to click the drop down menu to April 19th to ensure that you are purchasing tickets for the conference itself and not just the dinner on the 18th)

Diversity is a Way of L.I.F.E. is an annual conference hosted by the Rhode Island College student organization L.I.F.E. (Live. Inspire. Fight. Educate). The goal is to bring together students, educators, community members, organizers, and all those interested in working to build a better future.

This year's conference theme is Resistance. There will be a focus on past & present work and theories of resistance with the goal of affecting social and structural change.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad is this year's key-note speaker. Bin Wahad is an activist and writer who worked to organize Black Panther Party chapters in New York City and is a co-founder of the Black Liberation Army. He established the Campaign to Free Black and New African Political Prisoners and founded the Institute for the Development of Pan-African Policy in Ghana. Bin Wahad will be delivering a key-note lecture that will undoubtedly inspire current, and soon to be, social activists.

As well as presenting the key-note lecture during the conference Dhoruba will be joining 12 registrants on Friday, April 18th in Alumni Lounge--Roberts Hall, for an intimate dinner and discussion group.

Registration includes a continental breakfast, access to all workshops offered on the 19th, and lunch.

Saturday, April 19th 2014: 8:30am-4pm
Alger 110
Rhode Island College

Seven to eight workshops will be offered during the conference by various community members and organizations.

Workshops include:

Reza C. Clifton: Integrating Online and Interpersonal Activism: A Writing for Survival Workshop
-Are emailed petitions, popular hashtags, viral videos and
online activism sufficient for building resistance against
systems currently hurting marginalized communities? Can letter writing campaigns, protest marches, or statehouse advocacy be successful if you're not organizing on Twitter and Tumblr?

Integrating Online and Interpersonal Activism is a "Writing
for Survival Workshop" by Reza Clifton designed to help
students and community leaders understand how to
organize and encourage resistance among and through
both digital and interpersonal communities and spaces.
At the end of this workshop, participants will 1) learn how
technology can help with working "smarter not harder" on
all types of campaigns; and 2) appreciate how traditional
face-to-face organizing can sustain energy and support
campaigns that may have been launched in digital spaces.

Servio Gomez: Disrupting the Pipeline

-The aim of this workshop is to explore the components of the school-to-prison pipeline by investigating the policies and practices that exclude students from their sites of learning and push them into the criminal justice system. We will be focusing on the contributing factors to school push-out with the intent of developing strategies for disruption. Students, parents, teachers, and other education workers are encouraged to attend.

Greg D. Kowalski: Black Radical Thought in the Age of Colorblindness

-In his now classic "Blood In My Eye", George Jackson wrote 'All revolution should be love-inspired.' Throughout American History Black, Indigenous, and so called "Third World" political movements have formed to combat domestic and imperialist state violence transcending Western Systems of knowledge and "posing the question"--the critical questions that disturb the so-called legitimacy of authority, government, and law.

This workshop will plumb the depths of George L. Jackson and the Black Liberation movements' insistence to 'pose the question,' while positioning Black radical politics as antithetical to Western society's regimes: knowledge (the sciences and academy), policy and law (the 'criminal justice system'), and symbolically (the culture of anti-blackness).

Black Power's insistence that American society constitutes a state of emergency to Black, Brown, and Indigenous people stands in stark contrast to modern leftist-progressive prescriptions to "race relations.". Sociology as an academic discipline in particular, will be taken to task, as well as Rhode Island College itself.

Errol Lomba: Exposing What's Behind the Media Curtain

-This workshop will explore corporate media ownership and
the messages that the dominant power(s) perpetuate
through corporate media about marginalized groups.
Participants will learn tactics for countering and resisting the
dominant power's mediated messages.

Marco McWilliams: Mapping Revolution in Kenya-Mau Mau, Movements and the Question of Violence
-This workshop will explore the ways in which the Kenyan
Land and Freedom movement (popularly known as the
Mau Mau) created a resistance movement so powerful that
it eventually lead to the independence of Kenya from British
Colonial Domination and was hugely influential to Black
Political Resistance in the U.S.

PrYSM Youth Coordinators- Darianny De La Rosa and Eric Khiev Support-Jenny Li (Intern): Youth Organizing = Youth Development + Grassroots Organizing.

-Youth organizing is a powerful tool to transform community, building leadership in youth and community. This workshop will explore some ways youth have build power for the community through advocacy, outreach, solidarity, and political education. Join Youth Coordinators from the Providence Youth Student Movement in discussing this topic.

Andrea Sterling: A Critique of Parasitic "Progressive" Pedagogy; a Black Feminist Perspective

-This workshop will look at the ways in which so-called "progressive" fields in academia can often work to replicate structural oppression in their spaces. The concept of the "safe space" and the question of "ally-ship" will be a main focus, with a levying of indictments against modern Feminist pedagogy and classroom dynamics.

Food Justice Workshop TBA

For more information contact asterling_6156@email.ric.edu

Location

Rhode Island College
600 Mt. Pleasant Avenue
Providence, RI 02908
United States

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