FLOODLINES: The Community and Resistance Tour

Please join us at the Amherst College Stirn Auditorium for FLOODLINES: The Community and Resistance Tour, an exciting movement-building national tour featuring speakers, images, short videos, and inspiration which seeks to communicate about current struggles for justice and liberation, from the current BP Oil Drilling Disaster devastating the Gulf Coast to nooses hung in the northern Louisiana town of Jena.

The tour is intended to connect communities of liberation, and to build relationships between grassroots activists and independent media. This tour is for anyone interested in issues of health care, education, criminal justice, housing, or the ways in which systems of racism, patriarchy and other forms of oppression intersect with these struggles.

In Amherst, the tour will feature Jordan Flaherty, Jesse Muhammad and Victoria Law as they explore topics ranging from women organizing inside prisons to cultural resistance. 

Proudly co-sponsored by Food For Thought Books Collective, Amherst College American Studies, Black Studies, Women and Gender Studies, the Center for Community Engagement and the Lucius Root Eastman Fund.

We will be on hand at the event selling copies of FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, Jordan Flaherty's newest book and Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Victoria Law's latest book.

This event is free and open to the public. 

AMHERST FEATURED SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and community organizer based in New Orleans. He was the first journalist with a national audience to write about the Jena Six case, and played an important role in bringing the story to worldwide attention. His post-Katrina writing in ColorLines Magazine shared a journalism award from New America Media for best Katrina-related coverage in the Ethnic press, and audiences around the world have seen the news segments he's produced for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, GritTV, and Democracy Now. His new book, FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six was released summer 2010 from Haymarket Press.

Jordan has appeared as a guest on a wide range of television and radio shows, including CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Headline News, Grit TV, and both local and nationally-syndicated shows on National Public Radio.  He has been a regular correspondent or frequent guest on Democracy Now, Radio Nation on Air America, News and Notes, and many other outlets. Jordan is an editor of Left Turn Magazine, a national publication dedicated to covering social movements. He has written about politics and culture for the Village Voice, New York Press, Labor Notes, Radical Society, and in several anthologies, including Live from Palestine, What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of the Nation, What is a City, and Red State Rebels.

Victoria Law is a writer, photographer and mother. After a brief stint as a teenage armed robber, she became involved in prisoner support, in particular in supporting incarcerated womenthroughdrawing attention to their issues by writing articles and giving public presentations. Among other projects, she helped start Books Through Bars-New York City, a group that sends free books to prisoners nationwide and has worked with incarcerated women nationwide to produce Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison. Her book Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press 2009) is the culmination of over 7 years of listening to, writing about and supporting incarcerated women nationwide and resulted in this former delinquent winning the 2009 PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award.  In 1995, she became involved with ABC No Rio, a collectively-run arts center on New York's Lower East Side. In 1997, she organized a group of activist photographers to transform one of No Rio's upstairs tenement apartments into a black-and-white photo darkroom for community use. She has also participated in and curated numerous exhibitions at No Rio's gallery. In 2003, she collaborated with China Martens to create Don't Leave Your Friends Behind, a workshop addressing the specific (and often unacknowledged) needs of parents and children in radical movements; and has co-facilitated discussions in Baltimore, New York City, Providence, Montreal, Minneapolis, Detroit and Boston. They are currently editing a handbook for allies of radical parents by the same name.