Category Archives: Upcoming Community Events

Breaking Down and Building Up: Anti-Racism and Community

The Anti-Racism, Equity and Justice (AREJ) organization cordially invites you to join us for an evening of breaking down silos and analyzing anti-racism activities in our respective communities in order to build up collaborative relationships and dismantle racism.

We are convening on Wednesday, March 30, 2022 from 4pm-8pm in the Villard Room at Vassar College located at 124 Raymond Ave. Poughkeepsie, NY 12604. We will be providing dinner and entertainment as well!

Please register here ASAP as this is an in person event and space is limited!

Vassar Hosting Two Workshops on Racism with NCBI

The Anti-Racism, Equity and Justice (AREJ) Organizing Team is excited to promote two workshops happening this February facilitated by the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) and sponsored by VC’s Office of Student Growth and Engagement and other offices!

The first workshop will take place on Tuesday, February 1st from 4:00-9:00 PM at the CCMPR and will focus on the experience of Vassar’s BIPOC students, faculty, and administrators. The second will take place the following day on Wednesday, February 2nd at the same time and location and will focus on Vassar as experienced by everyone.

Transformative Justice is our Future and our Legacy

We are excited to help promote the event “Transformative Justice is our Future and our Legacy” as sponsored by the SAVP office! The event will star keynote speaker Ejeris Dixon, who will discuss the meaning behind addressing intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and bias violence in contemporary times, as well as the meaning of blending creative visions for the future we want while holding the multi-generational genius of Black and Queer survivorship.

The event will take place in Rocky 200 or on Zoom on Tuesday, October 26 from 6:30-8:00 pm.

In-person attendees will be required to show one of the following: their Vassar I.D., proof of vaccination, a negative PCR COVID-19 test taken within three days of the event, OR a negative rapid antigen test taken the day of the event. Masks are required regardless of vaccination status. Anyone who RSVPs for Zoom will be sent the event link on the day of the event (and is not required to show proof of vaccination, etc).

We hope to see you there!

A World Without Police & Anticolonial Eruptions Events

The Anti-Racism, Equity and Justice (AREJ) Organizing Team is honored to promote and encourage you to attend Professor Ciccariello-Maher’s talk titled A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete. The event will take place on Thursday, September 23rd at 5:30 pm in Rockefeller Hall 300 and via the Zoom link below:

https://vassar.zoom.us/j/99114237506

Description of Talk: In his abolitionist manifesto, Ciccariello-Maher examines how a society built around policing and that presumes their necessity, sees the police as a one-size-fits-all solution for every social problem: poverty, mental health, a lack of opportunity, or inadequate afterschool or sports programs. Going beyond a diagnosis of the problem, Ciccariello-Maher turns to the long history of abolition and the uprising against the police in the summer of 2020 that cast police abolition into the mainstream imagination to explore what doing so might actually look like. With insights from communities in North American cities, as well as some in Latin America that provide models for protecting and caring for one another without the intervention from the police, this lecture outlines some of the tools communities use to build a world without police and beyond the prison industrial complex.

About the Speaker: George Ciccariello-Maher is visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vassar College. He is the author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (2013), Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela (2016). Decolonizing Dialectics ( 2017), A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete (2021), and Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance (2021). He is also a co-editor of the Duke University Press book series Radical Américas and his dispatches have appeared in The Nation, Jacobin, Salon, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, MR Zine, ZNet, Venezuela Analysis, Alternet, Warscapes Magazine, History Workshop Online, MediaLeft, The SF Bayview, and Wiretap Magazine.

Read, Listen, and Watch – April 2021

The Mellon Research Initiative in Racial Capitalism Presents:
Wan-Chuan Kao, “In the Lap of Whiteness”

What did the premodern hold look like? What cargoes and feelings did it traffic? If the hold, in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s formulation, is a periodizing and racializing technology of modern logistics, the two imbricated vectors do not necessarily coincide. Instead of approaching the premodern hold from a modern biologization of race or from a cultural-political mode of historiography, Kao proposes a method grounded in empathy studies. Kao takes as a litmus test “The Squire’s Tale” by Chaucer, in particular its image of a feminine lap cradling a wounded talking falcon that signifies whiteness as racial capital in the guise of courtliness. An alternative to the extraction model of racial capitalism, Canacee’s empathic lap is one figuration of the premodern hold that attempts to traffic whiteness as its terrible load. Next, Kao considers periodization as the historiographic equivalent to racial passing, arguing that the two phenomena share traits and tactics, and that classification and recognition do not always align. In fact, the empathic scene is often marked by the non-coincidence of subjects—a certain wrongness inherent in a failed encounter—that demands willful interpellation. Kao then turns to the reception history of “The Squire’s Tale” and contend that Spenser and Milton repurpose the text through a Foucauldian contre-move rooted in modernist, Orientalist strategies of differentiating texts, bodies, affects, and histories. Periodization is the racial logistics of time.

https://dhi.ucdavis.edu/events/kao-lap-whiteness

Anti-Asian Racism, White Supremacy and Cross-Racial Solidarity – Virtual Town Hall

Thursday, April 8th, 12:30 – 2 pm
Town Hall on Anti-Asian Racism, White Supremacy, and Cross-Racial Solidarity

On Thursday, April 8, we will bring together activists and nonprofit leaders working to create safety, build multiracial solidarity, and uplift community solutions to eliminate violence against Asian communities without overreliance on policing and other carceral interventions. We will reflect on the impact of these racist attacks, and unpack attempts to whitewash systemic racism and the erasure of gender-based violence. We will discuss deep cross-racial solidarity and interdependence as an organizing lens and practice for a more sustainable path to community safety and explore considerations for PPGNY in our work as a reproductive health care and advocacy organization.

The event will be moderated by Fiona Kanagasingam, Chief Equity and Learning Officer, and Merle McGee, Chief Equity and Engagement Officer, and is held in partnership with our External Affairs team.

Featuring:
Cathy Dang, former Executive Director of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities

Wayne Ho, President/CEO of the Chinese-American Planning Council

Alvina Wong, Asian Pacific Environmental Networks

Read panelist bios here.

Zoom link registration will follow shortly via email. Sign up here.

{Closed Captioning, ASL interpretation, and simultaneous translation available)

In Our Community – Poughkeepsie Healthy, Black and LatinX Coalition

Poughkeepsie Healthy Black and LatinX Coalition 

If you are interested in the Poughkeepsie Healthy Black and Latinx Coaction they meet every second Thursday from 9:30am-11am. You can register here:
https://ppaf.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMqd-mqpzsrGNJsX02m66fnhJuTuwDWD5aO

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.