JUSTICE NOW!: ORGANIZING IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES

2007-02-15T22:21:00.000-08:00

Join us for an historic roundtable discussion
on the new era of immigrant justice
Organized by the NYU Immigrant Justice Collective*

• When: Saturday, March 31, 2007; 12 - 3 PM
• Where: Judson Memorial Church's Assembly Hall, 239 Thompson St.,
NY, NY
• Free and Open to the Public; Refreshments Provided.
• Wheelchair accessible; Please RSVP below to request ASL
interpreting services

Justice Now!: Organizing Immigrant Communities is an open roundtable forum that will bring together cultural workers and activists from diverse movements-- including immigrant rights, labor rights, youth activism, and queer rights-- who are actively working to build new models for immigrant justice organizing. This roundtable will examine questions of detention, deportation, profiling, borders, torture, and surveillance. We believe in using this space to highlight the intersectional, interstitial, and intervening issues within immigrant justice organizing that are often collapsed under the sometimes reductive banner of "immigrant rights." This roundtable discussion will be an opportunity to brainstorm collectively and share best practices and dynamic strategies that respond to the immigration crisis defining
our political times.

MODERATED BY:

Deepa Fernandes, author of "Targeted: National Security and the Business of Immigration" and host of WBAI's flagship morning program, Wakeup Call.

FEATURING COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS FROM:

Asociación Tepeyac de New York
Audre Lorde Project
CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities
DRUM: Desis Rising Up and Moving
Make the Road By Walking/Se Hace El Camino Al Andar
New York Taxi Workers' Alliance
New Immigrant Community Empowerment
Queers for Economic Justice

SPONSORS:

Judson Memorial Church
Program in American Studies, Department of Social and Cultural
Analysis, NYU
Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, NYU
Program in Latino Studies, NYU
Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute, NYU
Center for Multicultural Education and Programs, NYU

CONTACT US:

WEBSITE: http://immigrantjusticeroundtable.blogspot.com
EMAIL TO RSVP: immigrantjustice@gmail.com

* NYU Immigrant Justice Collective is composed of first year graduate
students in American Studies, Department of Social and Cultural
Analysis: Leticia Alvarado, Juan José Bermudez de Castro, Maxime
Berthemy, Sven Cvek, Joanna Dee, Lezlie Frye, Ronak Kapadia, Devin
Murphy, and Lena Sze

What we're about...

2007-02-11T11:54:00.000-08:00

We plan to convene a roundtable forum on the topic of immigrant justice. Because “we conceive of immigrant justice in the broadest of senses, with a critical attention to the divergent racializing processes that affect diverse immigrant and non-immigrant communities of color as well as intersecting questions of gender, sexuality, ability, class, citizenship status, religion, and national origin, which complicate conventional approaches to immigrant rights,” invited participants will include practitioners and activists who are actively engaged in and committed to que(e)rying various models of immigrant justice organizing.

The issues to be discussed under this broad rubric include, but are not limited to, detention, deportation, profiling, borders, torture, and surveillance. Surveillance, in particular, offers many communities and diverse sets of organizers a site to articulate and act against the seemingly endless ways of surveilling bodies in our neoliberal context. For instance, organizers from multiple movements including dis/ability rights, immigrant rights, queer rights, etc. have mobilized against the REAL-ID Act and other contemporary forms of bodily surveillance. It is just this sort of cross-section of local people laboring to comprehend, articulate, and build solidarity around coalition-building immigrant justice issues that we plan to invite.

We will facilitate a dialogue in which the intersectional, interstitial, and intervening issues within immigrant justice organizing are highlighted, rather than subsumed under the sometimes reductive banner “immigrant rights” offered by the larger, less progressive immigrant rights organizations. For instance, what are the connections between HIV/AIDS activism, youth organizing, detention and deportation, economic justice, police brutality, the drugs wars and the Rockefeller drug laws, gentrification, gay asylum court cases, domestic partnership legislation, queer/labor alliances, the security-industrial complex, and welfare legislation; and—extending the conversation beyond the roundtable itself into a material impact for those attending—how can we collectively brainstorm and enact shared practices and strategies in response to obstacles specifically raised by neoliberalism, the simultaneous diminishing of the state and the state’s encroaching power on individuals’ and communities’ rights, and the collusion between public-private/corporate-government, etc?

Because issues of profiling, surveillance, and borders are very often framed solely as legal concepts and we are more interested in the innovative community organizing being done on the ground in New York City.

This event will coincide nicely with the Immigrant Justice Project’s new period of ferment and activity. We plan to work with activists and scholars both inside and outside our institutional location in order to simultaneously help us think through our positions and future work as scholars/activists and create a space in which new ideas and practices can be shared and applied, where appropriate, to this crucial, intersectional work already being done around immigrant justice.

Immigrant Justice Roundtable

JUSTICE NOW!: ORGANIZING IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES

What we're about...