Study and Struggle organizes against criminalization and incarceration in Mississippi through mutual aid, political education, and community building. We provide a bilingual Spanish and English curriculum with discussion questions and reading materials, as well as financial support, to over 100 participants in radical study groups inside and outside prisons in Mississippi. These groups correspond with groups from across the country through our pen pal program. We regularly come together for online conversations hosted by Haymarket Books. The curriculum, built by a combination of currently- and formerly-incarcerated people, scholars, and community organizers, centers around the interrelationship between prison abolition and immigrant justice, with a particular attention to freedom struggles in Mississippi and the U.S. South.

For our Fall 2021 four month curriculum, we have borrowed and augmented Ruth Wilson Gilmore's argument that “abolition is about presence, not absence. It has to be green, and in order to be green, it has to be red (anti-capitalist), and in order to be red, it has to be international," having added “intersectional” as a fourth analytical category that we hope moves us beyond “single-issue” organizing. Study and Struggle provides a bilingual curriculum to all our imprisoned comrades in Mississippi with the support of our friends at 1977 Books and makes it fully available online for other study groups to use as they see fit.

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.

Our first webinar theme covers "intersectionality" and will be a conversation about what it means for abolition to be intersectional and how abolition demands a reimagination of relationships, accountability, and what it means to be in community and to care for one another.

While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of commissary and mutual aid for our incarcerated participants.

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Speakers:

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. She co-authored the guidebook Lifting As They Climbed and published a children’s book titled Missing Daddy about the impacts of incarceration on children and families. Kaba is the recipient of the Cultural Freedom Prize from Lannan Foundation.

Moni Cosby is a Chicago activist, mother, grandmother, writer and abolitionist who was incarcerated by the state of Illinois for 20 years. She has dedicated her life to ending all forms of violence that Black, Indigenous and People of Color, particularly women, encounter daily.

Amber Fayefox Kim (she/her) is a nerd, witch, and activist who believes in comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable. She enjoys playing volleyball and billiards with her friends, and loves to dance barefoot in the rain. To learn more about Amber go to AmberFayefoxKim.WordPress.com

April Harris (she/her) is a 45 year old woman from Monterey, California. She is the proud mother of three grown children and two grandchildren. April has published articles in the Los Angeles Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post. She is a licensed Paralegal with a strong background knowledge in criminal justice obtaining her Criminal Law degree from Blackstone Career Institute. April has been incarcerated for twenty five years. She currently resides at the California Institution for Women in Corona California.

Vincent "Tank" Sherrill (he/him) was born Vincent Jamal of the family Sherrill under the constellation of Pisces March 5, 1971 in Oakland (Black Panther Land). He migrated to a thriving Black community on the Hilltop of Tacoma, Washington Whereby in the 80's he would become the first generation of young Black boys highly recruited into the Crips by way of the drug epidemic up the I-5 and other Highways, that by design spread across America targeting Black communities. He is a reborn, unapologetic Blackman, poet, concrete root activist, gangologist, credible messenger, educator, facilitator, organizer, violence disruptor, peacemaker, Black feminist thinker, and prison abolitionist. He is a member of collective leadership. He is an emergent strategist. He is a Son/Sun brother, uncle, cuzzin and comrade...Ubuntu (I am because we are).