With Mariame Kaba & Eva Nagao
December 6, 2023
We ended our fall speaker series with a discussion and screening of One Million Experiments, an experimental documentary film that explores how people are defining and creating safety to build a world without police and prisons, produced by Respair Production and Media, Interrupting Criminalization, and SoapBox Productions and Organizing. The film builds on a podcast of the same name from Interrupting Criminalization, which featured a curated collection of community-based safety projects, many of which were created in the midst of the 2020 uprisings. One Million Experiments (1ME) showcases and celebrates people working to build solutions that are grounded in transformation instead of punishment through long-form interviews with movement workers across the world. The screening was followed by a conversation with organizers behind the 1ME project, Mariame Kaba and Eva Nagao.
Speakers:
Mariame Kaba (she/her) is an educator, organizer, and librarian who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame co-leads the initiative Interrupting Criminalization, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander (now Love & Protect), Just Practice Collaborative, Survived & Punished, and For the People Leftist Library Project.
Kaba’s writing has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, Essence, The New Inquiry, and more. She is the author of the New York Times Bestseller We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Press 2021), Missing Daddy (Haymarket 2019), Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators with Shira Hassan (Project NIA, 2019), See You Soon (Haymarket, March 2022), No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Andrea Ritchie (The New Press, August 2022), Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care with Kelly Hayes (Haymarket, May 2023), and Lifting As They Climbed: Mapping A History of Trailblazing Black Women in Chicago with Essence McDowell (Haymarket, August 2023).
Eva Nagao (she/her) is the Creative Director of Interrupting Criminalization and an organizer based out of Los Angeles. Her work focuses on communications for grassroots organizations and resource development that supports community-based structures working to decrease reliance on policing and punishment. She started her organizing work in Chicago with groups like the Chicago Freedom School, Project NIA, and Liberation Library, among others. Outside of her work with Interrupting Criminalization, she organizes with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and serves as an advisory team member for Dissenters. Learn more on her personal website.
Moderated by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management.
The Abolitionist Politics, Practices, and Horizons speaker series is organized by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice; Faculty Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management; Director, Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy; Professor of Sociology; and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute.