Join us for a panel discussion with organizers Maryam Aziz, Maria Thomas, and author Alex Vitale about what it takes to think beyond policing.

Date: July 2, 2020
Time: 7PM-9PM
Location: HVDSA Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/HuronValleyDSA/)

This panel will be a unique opportunity to connect Alex’s work to distinct local struggles against the carceral state. Maryam and Maria will discuss how they began organizing against the harms of policing in Washtenaw County, MI and how they imagine and work to abolish the conditions under which police and prisons became the solution to problems. Maryam, Maria, and Alex will discuss how a rich body of abolitionist theory and an understanding of the international, national, and local histories of resistance to policing can inform and shape local organizing.

This will be a chance for local folks, as well as those outside Michigan, to engage with how ongoing approaches to reduce policing, in defense of Black lives, can be put in conversation with each other across struggles for collective liberation.

Maryam K. Aziz is a scholar-activist whose research focuses on the use of martial arts, self-defense, and healing work during the Black Power Movement  is a community martial arts instructor with 7 years of anti-hate crime self-defense instruction. She was a former organizer with Ann Arbor to Ferguson, later Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives.

Maria Thomas is a community organizer with Washtenaw County based Liberate! Don’t Incarcerate. She tries to live into the practice of abolition through her daily work in public health, and as an artist, poet, and cultural worker. She is also committed to consistently drawing the connections between the violence of policing and imperialism.  

Alex S. Vitale is author of "The End of Policing" and Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. His writings about policing have appeared in the New York Times, New York Daily News, USA Today, the Nation, and Vice News. He has made appearances on NPR and NY1.

Please register below!