The Study and Struggle program is the first phase of an ongoing project to organize against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi through four months of political education and community building. Our Critical Conversations webinar series, hosted by Haymarket Books, will cover the themes for the upcoming month. Haymarket Books is an independent, radical, non-profit publisher.

Donations from this event support the Immigrant Alliance for Justice & Equity of Mississippi.

The third webinar theme is Deconstructing Settler Colonialism and Borders and is a conversation about how settler colonialism and border imperialism are foundational pillars of the US prison industrial complex. It includes reflections on how the fight for abolition can better integrate a decolonial politics into our organizing against policing, prisons, and borders of all kinds.

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Speakers:

Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History. She is also the Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles.

Nick Estes is Kul Wicasa, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe born and raised in Chamberlain, SD next to our relative, Mni Sose, the Missouri River. His nation is the Oceti Sakowin Oyate (the Great Sioux Nation or the Nation of the Seven Council Fires). Nick is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and a member of the Oak Lake Writers Society, a group of Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota writers. In 2014 he co-founded The Red Nation in Albuquerque, NM, an organization dedicated to the liberation of Native people from capitalism and colonialism.

Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism and the forthcoming Border and Rule. Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One Is Illegal and Women's Memorial March Committee.

Lorena Quiroz is a 22-year Mississippi resident. Born in Ecuador, by way of New York, she’s an organizer and mother of three amazing girls; first generation Afro Latinas born in the beautiful Delta flatlands. She is the founder of the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity, an organization whose purpose is to amplify the voices of marginalized, multi-racial, and immigrant communities by active participation in civic engagement in deconstructing barriers that perpetuate racial, xenophobic, socio-economical, and gender identity and sexuality disparities and oppression.

Christine Castro (moderator) is a former migrant student and current postdoctoral fellow, researching the intersections of industrial agriculture and police militarization.