One year after the publication of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, we've witnessed a year of both huge abolitionist resistance and a triple pandemic. What’s needed right now, in this moment of transformative justice and abolitionist work?

Join authors of Beyond Survival, artists and organizers Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha alongside local contributors Monica Forrester (Maggies Toronto), Chanelle Gallant, Elene Lam (Butterfly - Asian and migrant sex workers support network), Terri Monture (No More Silence) and Syrus Marcus Ware for a “fireside chat” about Beyond Survival. Guests will share specific and concrete tools for being accountable when you've been abusive and how to conduct community-based missing persons searches from a TJ framework. Q&A to follow.

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement can be purchased here.

Presented by McMaster University's School of the Arts.

Registration for this event is now closed. The event will be recorded and posted again for audiences at a future date.

If you have already registered for the event, an email blast will be sent out once we know more about where and when the recording will be posted. If you did not succeed in registering for the event but want to be aware of watching it at a later time, please email skrtica@mcmaster.ca

We have ASL services provided by Ayoka Junaid and Toronto Sign Language Interpreting Service, and CART services provided by Stanley Sakai for our upcoming discussion on transformative justice and the future, launching Beyond Survival (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ejeris Dixon).

PANELISTS

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.

Monica Forrester is a Two Spirit Trans queer woman of colour. Working and advocating for the decriminalization of sexwork. Currently Program Manager of Maggie’s Toronto Sexwork Action Project and founder of Trans Pride Toronto working to bring inclusion, equality, and awareness of Trans:Non- binary issues.

Chanelle Gallant is a transformative organizer, writer and trainer with a focus on sex and justice. She is a member of the national leadership team for Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) and co-founded the Migrant Sex Workers Project and the first SURJ chapter in Canada. She has published and presented widely on sex and/or social and economic justice. She is working on her first book–a theory of sexual labour.

Elene Lam holds a Master of Law (Human Rights), Bachelor of Law, Master of Social Work and Bachelor of Social Work. She is the founder and executive director of Butterfly (Asian and migrant sex workers support network) and co-founder of Migrant Sex Workers Project. She has been involved in the sex work, gender, migrant and labour movement for almost 20 years. She has provided trainings for community members, services providers and policy markers on sex work, migration, anti-oppression practice and human rights in different countries. She also participated the meeting of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) of the United Nations in Geneva to advocate for the rights and safety of migrant sex workers.

Terri Monture is a Kanien’kehakeh (Mohawk) Wolf Clan from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory in Southern Ontario. She works in the labour movement as a staff representative for the Canadian Media Guild, representing media workers from a variety of organizations including the CBC. Her passion is worker and Indigenous rights and spends far too time thinking about resistance movements and decolonization, anti-capitalist and anti-oppression activities. She is a member of No More Silence and Indigenous Land Defence Across Borders, helping to organize community resistance to oppressive activities in urban settings and at Six Nations.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer, disability and transformative justice movement worker, and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. The Lambda Award winning author of Tonguebreaker, Bridge of Flowers, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap, Love Cake and Consensual Genocide, with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, she co-edited The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. Since 2009, she has been a lead artist with the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid.

Syrus Marcus Ware is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Arts, McMaster University. He is a Vanier scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. Syrus uses drawing, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist culture, and he’s shown widely in galleries and festivals across Canada. He is a core-team member of Black Lives Matter – Toronto, a part of the Performance Disability Art Collective, and an ABD PhD candidate at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. His on-going curatorial work includes That’s So Gay (Gladstone Hotel, 2016-2019) and BlacknessYes!/Blockorama. He is the co-editor or the best-selling Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada (URP, 2020).