Black Study in Action: Education for Liberation

Facilitated by Mariame Kaba on Saturday, June 20 at 2:30pm, this workshop invites participants to reflect on how liberatory education and Black studies contribute to community building and help shape our shared futures. It will unfold in two parts.

In the first part, participants will collaborate to create a short lesson for young people that encourages critical thinking about criminalization. By the end, everyone will have a practical activity they can bring back and facilitate in their own communities.

In the second part, participants will engage in storytelling to explore education for liberation and the ways it has influenced their lives. Attendees are encouraged to bring a photo or object that represents something meaningful in shaping their understanding of Black history or Black studies. The facilitator will invite participants to share the significance of their item, using storytelling as a way to highlight the importance of liberatory education.

This program is co-organized with Sojourners for Justice Press (SJP), an abolitionist feminist micro-press behind the Black Zine Fair in New York City. Founded by Mariame Kaba and co-directed with Neta Bomani, SJP publishes short-form print—zines, pamphlets, chapbooks, broadsides, and other DIY publications—by people working within the margins of independent publishing.

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, librarian/archivist, curator, zinemaker and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba co-leads Interrupting Criminalization, an organization she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. She is the author of the New York Times Bestseller We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) & the National Bestseller Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care with Kelly Hayes (Haymarket, 2023) among several other books that offer support and tools for repair, transformation, and moving toward a future without incarceration and policing. Mariame has founded and co-founded a number of projects and organizations including the Education for Liberation Network, Chicago Freedom School, Sojourners for Justice Press, the NYC Public Library Action Network (PLAN).