Fragmented Encounters: Reconstructing Black Women’s Lives from the Archive

This conversation on Saturday, July 11 at 4pm invites participants to consider how archival materials can be used to piece together aspects of a person’s life—not as a neutral act of recovery, but as an engagement with contested infrastructures shaped by power, access, and historical violence. Which stories rise to the surface, asking to be told? Which ones retreat into shadow, withheld or forgotten? And how do we learn to listen for both?

Drawing on Sojourners for Justice Press’s publication Searching for Joan, Neta Bomani and Mariame Kaba will explore how they engaged archival records to illuminate a constellation of moments from the life of freedom fighter and revolutionary Joan Bird. Moving beyond extraction, they will reflect on archival practice as a form of transformation: a way of participating in the making of collective memory, counter-record, and self-determined narratives.

In a moment emerging from a long history of censorship and rising authoritarianism, this conversation positions archival work as a necessary political act—one that asks us to see ourselves not only as subjects of archives, but as active participants in shaping what endures, what is remembered, and how.

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).

Neta Bomani is a community organizer, educator, and zine maker based in New York City. She is the co-director of Sojourners for Justice Press—an abolitionist feminist press behind the Black Zine Fair—and co-director of the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC), an alternative education program that brings together art, code, hardware, and critical theory through frameworks of decolonization and transformative justice. Her practice invites people to critically engage with media, embody Black feminist and DIY philosophies, and co-create liberatory systems. She has taught at New York University, Princeton University, and The New School. Her work has been exhibited or collected by the Barnard Zine Library, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and San Francisco Center for the Book.