The UIC Social Justice Initiative
Past Events
- April 18, 2013 | 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
CLR James: Modern Politics and the Struggles for Human Freedom
Anthony Bogues, Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University
Feminist Responses to Professor Bogues with
Dr. Jennifer Richardson, Research Assistant Professor
Dr. Rose Brewer, SJI Visiting Fellow
Dr. Barbara Ransby, SJI Director
Friday, April 19, 2013 | 12 - 2 pm, Roundtable
Hull House Museum
800 S Halsted St
Please Note: Both events will take place at the same location, but different date/time.
Professor Anthony Bogues is the renowned Harmon Family Professor of Africana Studies, affiliated Professor of Political Science and Modern Culture and Media, and Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. His major research and writing interests are intellectual and cultural history, radical political thought, critical theory, Caribbean and African politics and literature. Professor Bogues is the author of Caliban's Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James (1997); Black Heretics and Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (2003); and Empire of Liberty: Power, Freedom, and Desire (2010) and many more critical works. He teaches courses on Africana political philosophy, cultural politics, intellectual history and contemporary critical theory and comparative literature of Africa and the African Diaspora as well as courses on the history of Haitian society and art.
Refreshments will be provided!
Questions/RSVP: sjiuic@gmail.com
Event flyer
- Friday, April 19th | 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
A Discussion on Social Justice, Paulo Freire and the Concrete Application of Freire's Teachings: Promoting Critical Awareness through Peer Teaching: A Frerian Approach with
Fabricio Balcazar, Ph.D., Professor & Director of Center on Capacity Building for Minorities with Disabilities, Department of Disability & Human Development & Clorinda Ofori-Annor, UIC Freshman Student
Pop Up JUST Art Gallery
729 Maxwell Street
This presentation will describe a three-year experiment in critical education using an adapted version of Paulo Freire’s model of ‘study circles’ to promote critical awareness. The process is being conducted at a local suburban high school using student peer-teachers as facilitators of the group discussions. Participating students engage in group discussions on topics such as oppression, discrimination, alienation and liberation. They are then asked to propose activities to address specific issues of concern in their communities or school. One of the student-leaders will be sharing her experiences with the program implementation.
Questions/RSVP: sjiuic@gmail.com
Refreshments will be provided!
- April 9, 2013 | 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Book Talk: My Name Is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl's Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize
Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Jane Addams Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Social Justice at UIC.
Women & Children First Bookstore
5233 N. Clark St.
From her modest beginnings to, in 1997, becoming only the 10th woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Jody Williams takes the reader through the ups and downs of her tumultuous and remarkable life. In a voice that is at once candid, straightforward, and intimate, she relates how, in 1981, she began her lifelong dedication to global activism, battling to stop the U.S.-backed war in El Salvador. Throughout the memoir, Williams underlines her belief that an "average woman"--through perseverance, courage, and imagination--can make something extraordinary happen. She tells how, when asked if she'd start a campaign to ban and clear anti-personnel mines, she took up the challenge, and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) was born. Her engrossing account of the genesis and evolution of the campaign vividly demonstrates how one woman's commitment to freedom, self-determination, and human rights can have a profound effect on people all over the globe. In 2004, Williams was named by Forbes magazine as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world in its first such list. Since January of 2006, Jody Williams' work has continued via the Nobel Women's Initiative, which she chairs.
For more information
Presented by: Social Justice Initiative at UIC and Women & Children First Bookstore
- April 6, 2013
Bold Conversations at the Global Activism Expo: Restorative Justice. Gender Justice. Global Justice.
Saturday, April 6 - 12:30 PM 4:00 PM
UIC Forum (725 West Roosevelt Road, Chicago)
Join us for difficult, complex, critical conversations as we wrestle with the meaning of restorative justice in different contexts.
Learn, ponder, share, discuss:
After Hadiya and "Nirbhaya": From Chicago to Delhi What Does Justice Look Like?
12:30-2:00pm
Here in the United States, Chicago in particular, street crime has taken the lives of far too many of our youth. In India, the issue of sexual violence has captured headlines. The tragic deaths of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old girl who was shot and killed just a few blocks away from her school, and "Nirbhaya," the 23-year-old woman who was gang-raped by six men in a moving bus in Delhi, raise the question: what does justice for victims and survivors look like?
- Cheryl Graves, founder and Co-Director of Community Justice for Youth Institute
- Mariame Kaba, founder and Director of Project NIA
- Sangeetha Ravichandran, program coordinator at A Long Walk Home's Girl/Friends Leadership Institute
- Alice Kim, director of The Public Square (co-moderator)
- Ryan Lugalia-Hollon, Justice Fellow at the Adler School and member of the SJI team at UIC (co-moderator)
Peace in an Age of Violence: Reparations, Reconciliation, Renewal
2:30-4:00pm
Brutal war has engulfed villages and cities in Mali. Violence in Colombia has forced people out of their homes and left anger, fear and poverty in its wake. Does post-apartheid South Africa offer a vision and a model for war-torn societies? Many countries that have been torn apart by civil war ask: how do we rebuild, how can we make amends, or does accountability trump reconciliation?
- Joaquin Chavez, historian at UIC, research and direct work on reconciliation and reconstruction in El Salvador
- Ali Issa, anti-militarist activist, writer and field organizer for War Resisters League
- Prexy Nesbitt, educator, activist and speaker on Africa, foreign policy and racism
- Astrid Suarez, founder of Columbia vive Chicago
- Barbara Ransby, historian, author, and Director of the Social Justice Initiative and Gender and Women's Studies at UIC (moderator)
Find out more information about the speakers
Find out more about the Global Activism Expo, also featuring a Peace Film Festival and a world music stage
Presented by The Public Square, Social Justice Initiative at UIC, and WBEZ.
- March 14, 2013
Science and Social Justice Speaker Series
Dr. John Rich and Dr. Ted Corbin
"Medicine and Social Justice"
4-6 PM
UIC College Of Medicine Research Building
Moss Auditorium
835 S. Wolcott Ave., Chicago, IL, 60612
- March 6, 2013
Jai Bhim Comrade: Movie and Panel
3 to 7 PM
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum - Residents' Dining Hall
3 to 4:30 pm Panel:
Art, Resistance and Public Protest: Some Possibilities around the Globe
4:30 to 7:00 pm: Movie with Q and A with the film-maker.
Film Synopsis
For thousands of years India’s Dalits were abhorred as “untouchables” denied education and treated as bonded labour. By 1923 Bhimrao Ambedkar broke the taboo, won doctorates abroad and fought for the emancipation of his people. He drafted India’s Constitution, led his followers to discard Hinduism for Buddhism. His legend still spreads through poetry and song.
In 1997 a statue of Dr. Ambedkar in a Dalit colony in Mumbai was desecrated with footwear. As angry residents gathered, police opened fire killing 10. Vilas Ghogre, a leftist poet, hung himself in protest. ‘Jai Bhim Comrade,’ shot over 14 years, follows the poetry and music of people like Vilas and marks a subaltern tradition of reason that from the days of the Buddha, has fought superstition and religious bigotry.
- March 7, 2013
Anthony Bogues, Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University
"Archive. Historiography and the Black Radical Tradition: New Histories and Stories"
4-6pm
Institute for Humanities and Great Cities Institute
701 South Morgan, Lower Level / Stevenson Hall
Chicago, IL 60607-7040
Anthony Bogues raises a profound set of questions about what it means to be human and the practice of freedom. The questions are simply these:
- What stories have not been told?
- What stories must we hear, must we tell for freedom?
- What narratives have been erased, silenced?
For it is in these erasures that we might find a way to justice on this planet. It is in the simple articulation of the fundamental humanity of all the world’s excluded peoples that Professor Bogues weaves a complex articulation of emancipatory possibility in these difficult times. He articulates a radical imaginary steeped in the Black radical tradition, calling deeply into question modernity’s foundation of inferiorization and disposability. Slavery was built on this foundation, extending to the majority of humanity. He awakens us to this fundamental fact: that we must look to the everyday, to the erased, silenced stories to re-imagine and create another world. Here lies the practice of freedom and where movement building must be grounded. We must move from the spectacular to the ordinary to grapple with and transform the deeply rooted and complex inequalities that characterize today. The inheritance of the disposability of much of humanity still pervades consciousness and practice. Thus movement building requires new thinking, creative thinking and new practice. Anthony Bogues asks us to see another not as other, but as human. It is on this ground that emancipatory possibilities for social change and movement building become possible.
Event flyer
- Friday, February 22, 2013
Pop-Up Just Art Space Community Opening
4-7 PM
PUJA space at 729 Maxwell Street
Chicago
Event flyer
- Thursday, November 29th, 4pm - 6pm
Join us for a screening of audio documentary, "How much is a Life Worth."
Documentary description: Through the voices of mental healthcare consumers and activists, this story briefly explores some of the impacts of, and responses to, the closing of 6 public mental health clinics in Chicago in April 2012.
Followed by conversation with Jane Addams College of Social Work Faculty, member of the Mental Health Movement, students, and community members. All are welcome! The conversation with be moderated by Professor Amy Watson of Jane Addams College of Social Work
WHEN: Thursday, November 29th, 4pm - 6pm
WHERE: 729 Maxwell Street at the Pop Up JUST Art (PUJA) Space.
Refreshments served.
SPACE IS LIMITED. RSVP to: Uicsjievents@gmail.com
- November 1, 2012:
What is a Life Worth?
A photo collage of community-based struggles around education, health care, labor, immigration, food justice, and housing in Chicago over the past five years.
- September 25, 2012
Science and Social Justice: What’s the Connection?
with Professor Jon Beckwith, Ph.D. American Cancer Society Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard University Medical School. RSVP to Uicsjievents@gmail.com
- April 22, 2012
Reclaiming the Meaning of Peace
with Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Jody Williams and Stephen Goose, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
- April 28, 2012
WBEZ's Global Activism Expo 2012
UIC Forum, 12 to 6 p.m.
presented by
Chicago Public Media (WBEZ 91.5 FM) and hosted by the UIC Social Justice Initiative. Free.
Get Inspired to Make a Difference
An opportunity to meet local activists in-person and learn about their organizations. The organizations, all of which have been featured on the Worldview series, represent work taking place in over 100 countries. The services they provide range from teaching neonatal resuscitation in Tanzania to building libraries in Haiti, from assisting survivors of sexual violence in the Congo to helping victims of human trafficking in Vietnam, to shipping bicycles, shoes, backpacks, books, medicine, and even bridges to people all over the world. In addition to learning about these incredible organizations, event attendees also have the unique opportunity to shop for interesting fair-trade jewelry and apparel, enjoy great food and music, and mingle with other enthusiasts.