Episode Notes: Mutual Aid Justice- Beyond Survival
Added 2020-04-30 18:54:09 +0000 UTC
Watch / Listen: Mutual Aid Justice: Beyond Survival
Description: What does mutual aid look like in the Justice sphere? If you don’t want to call the cops, what else can you do? Many people turn to transformative justice for help. In the nation that incarcerates more people than any other on earth, there are many reasons why a person might not want to call 911. Undocumented, sick, over-policed, dependent on or in love with an abuser? In this episode, Laura talks with the editors of the just-released book Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement.
Transformative justice applies the principles of mutual aid to justice. It seeks to resolve violence for the long term at the peer-to-peer, grassroots level by looking for resolution, not punishment, and relying on community, not the system. Recorded on the eve of New York City’s “stay at home” order, this far-ranging conversation with renowned poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and anti-violence trainer Ejeris Dixon resonates in the time of Covid-19 as families sheltering at home face a spike in domestic violence.
Related Laura Flanders Show Episodes:
•Forward Thinking on Covid-19: Homeless Can't Stay Home
•Beyond Disability Rights; Disability Justice: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
•New Justice: A World Beyond Prisons
•Excerpt: Community Wealth in Freddie Gray’s Neighborhood of Sandtown, Baltimore
Related Articles and Resources:
•Book: Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, Ejeris Dixon (Editor); Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Editor)
•Related Organizations: Audre Lorde Project, Sins Invalid, INCITE , Critical Resistance, African American Policy Forum, Black Lives Matter, Highlander Center
GUEST BIOS:
Ejeris Dixon is an organizer, consultant, and political strategist with twenty years of experience organizing within racial justice, LGBTQ, transformative justice, anti-violence, and economic justice movements. She is the Founding Director of Vision Change Win Consulting where she partners with organizations to build their capacity and deepen the impact of their organizing strategies. Her essay, "Building Community Safety: Practical Steps Toward Liberatory Transformation," is featured in the anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the Lambda Award winning author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap, Love Cake, Consensual Genocide and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. A lead artist with the disability justice collective Sins Invalid, she is a longtime cultural worker, educator and organizer within disability and transformative justice communities.
Featured ‘Music in the Middle’ of the Podcast:
The sound of New Yorkers at home applauding essential workers from their windows. It’s a daily ritual at 7pm to show appreciation while staying at a distance. And that appreciation grows louder by the day!
