Thursday, February 13, 2025
6:30 - 8:30 pm
EastSide Cultural Center, 2277 International Blvd., Oakland, CA
The Banned Scholars Project and the EastSide Arts Alliance present a roundtable discussion with scholars and activists Charisse Burden-Stelly, Jodi Dean, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Rupa Marya, and Steven Osuna about building power, countering repression, and organizing beyond the election cycle.
Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. Her research and scholarship engage the Black radical tradition, 20th century Black social and political thought, the intersection of antiblack racial oppression and U.S. state repression, and globalization and economic development in the African diaspora. She is the author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, the co-author of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and the co-editor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings and of Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State. Dr. Burden-Stelly’s writings appear in peer-reviewed journals including Small Axe, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, CLR James Journal, and American Communist History. Her public scholarship can be found in publications such as Essence magazine, The Nation, Monthly Review, Teen Vogue, Boston Review, Black Perspectives, and Black Agenda Report. She is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace and Community Movement Builders.
Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco and earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He lives in San Francisco.
Jodi Dean is Professor of Politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party, Comrade, and Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing, co-edited with Charisse Burden-Stelly. Her book Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle will appear in March 2025 from Verso.
Steven Osuna is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. He received his Ph.D. in sociology with an emphasis in Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a M.A. and B.A. in Chicana/o Studies at Cal State, Los Angeles. With over 20 years of teaching in a public-school setting, Steven is a professor and scholar because he believes public education is a terrain of ideological struggle that cannot be abandoned. He is a scholar of racism and political economy; globalization, transnationalism, and immigration; and policing and criminalization. Steven is currently working on his first book manuscripts on transnational criminalization and neoliberal crises. His writing appears in journals such as NACLA, Ethnicities, Race & Class, the Journal of World Systems Research, the American Quarterly, Chiricú Journal, Emancipations, and edited volumes such as U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance and The Futures of Black Radicalisms amongst others. Steven was born and raised in Echo Park, Los Angeles and is a son of Mexican and Salvadoran working-class migrants. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Homies Unidos-Los Angeles and supports grassroots organizing in L.A.
Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, writer, and composer. She is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco currently on suspension for her stance against the genocide in Gaza. She is a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, an organization of healthcare workers committed to ending state violence as an impediment to health. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice. She is the co-author with Raj Patel of the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. She works to decolonize food and medicine in partnership with communities in Lakhota territory at the Mni Wiconi Health Circle and in Ohlone Territory through the Deep Medicine Circle. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as “Liberation Music.”
Co-sponsors: EastSide Arts Alliance, Gender and Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, Center for Race and Gender, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues