Grassroots Media Justice Tour
What: Grassroots Media Tour
Who: Featured Speakers (below) and Grassroots Media Makers from around the country
When: October 2008
Where: United States
PRESS INQUIRIES: 510-910-5627
Sponsored by Left Turn Magazine, ColorLines Magazine, Bitch Magazine,
Spread Magazine, Free Speech Radio News, Make/Shift, and other radical and independent media projects from around the US, the Grassroots Media Justice Tour is an exciting movement-building opportunity. Beginning in Fall of 2008, the tour will bring performances, workshops, and inspiration to frequently underserved and underfunded areas of the country, beginning in the South and Midwest.
The tour has two primary functions; First, to get information out - to communicate about current struggles for justice and liberation, from criminal justice organizing in Jena to sex worker activism, from resistance to imperialism in Iraq and Latin America to resistance to school privatization, from immigration rights movements to post-Katrina organizing in public housing.
The tour also seeks to connect communities of resistance, and to build relationships between grassroots activists and independent media.
Participants:
Most presenters on the tour come from communities traditionally underrepresented in corporate media.
Hosts:
The tour will include areas often ignored by the media, with less of an emphasis on the coasts, and with a special effort to reach out to community colleges and historically Black colleges and universities.
Tour Highlights:
* Performances, multimedia, and interactive presentations from grassroots media makers.
* Workshops, trainings, and skill-shares.
* Independent films, magazines, newspapers, CD’s, and books.
FEATURED SPEAKERS
Hadassah Hill is a Brooklyn-based queer femme writer, creative, and activist who performs under the name Axon D’Luxe. She has worked in independent print, web, theater and audio media production for 10 years, and is currently the Art Director of the award-winning $pread Magazine and is producing her second album and a graphic novel. She is committed to empowering individuals to speak for themselves using new technologies, and to creating representations of the diverse communities she embodies using self-taught multimedia techniques. She uses her experience learning technologies to promote and create her own projects to fund her expertise, and teaches a two-hour D.I.Y. New Media workshop on audio and web production and internet promotion.
Her workshops teach individuals and activist collectives how to use freeware and shareware technologies [ie, no-cost software] to:
1) record and edit audio for online distribution
2) name, create [yup, how-to code!], and publicize a web page
3) utilize technologies and networking to promote their projects.
She provides learners with a handout and a webpage full of links and tutorials, as well as inspiration and skills!
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black trouble-maker from Durham, North Carolina. She is the founder of BrokenBeautiful Press, a free and freedom producing publishing portal. Alexis writes for a number of national magazines including Left Turn, Make/Shift and Curve. She is on the editorial committee of SisterPages, the national publication of Sisters of Color Ending Sexual Assault and is a founding member of UBUNTU a women of color/survivor led coalition committed to ending sexual violence and practicing sustainable transformative love. Alexis also works with Southerners on New Ground, SpiritHouse and Critical Resistance. On the tour, Alexis will lead workshops in which participants create collective Zines in 1 or 2 hours and will also present new poetic work.
Jordan Flaherty is a writer 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 national 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.
Jordan is an editor of Left Turn Magazine and has written for a range of publications, from the Village Voice to Clarin in Argentina and Germany’s Die Zeit. He has been published in several anthologies, including the South End Press books Live From Palestine and What Lies Beneath: Race, Katrina and the State of the Nation, and the upcoming AK Press book Red State Rebels. He has appeared as a guest on a wide range of television and radio shows, including CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Headline News, Democracy Now, Radio Nation on Air America, News and Notes on NPR, and many other outlets. He has also produced news segments for Al Jazeera and TeleSur. On the tour, he will be using new video, photos and first-hand accounts to share the grassroots struggle around the Jena Six and New Orleans post-Katrina organizing.
Erin Siegal is a freelance multimedia journalist and the West Coast Director of $pread Magazine. She’s been involved with various Indymedia projects, including organizing around the protests against the ‘03 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meeting, the 2004 Republican National Convention, and the 2005 Group of 8 (G8), as well as with the Boston and New York City Indymedia. Erin’s worked for Free Speech Radio News, Reuters, the Urban Justice Project, and the U.N.
Puck Lo is a radio producer, reporter and writer who works for National Radio Project’s weekly radio show, “Making Contact,” and the world’s only worker-run, international daily newscast- Free Speech Radio News. She’ll be going to Japan this summer to report on the G8 Summit in Hokkaido, and to build links between Asian-American and North American anti-authoritarian people of color, and East Asian activists. In 2005, she covered the World Trade Organization protests in Hong Kong, and reported for Indymedia during the Republican National Convention protests in New York City in 2004. Her political work includes organizing against state violence and dismantling the prison-industrial-complex. She works with Critical Resistance- Oakland, and INCITE! Bay Area, as well as other radical queers and communities of color for self-determination to end all forms of oppression.
On the tour she’ll be training people on how to produce short radio features and headlines for Free Speech Radio News, and longer documentary pieces for “Making Contact.”
Jesse Muhammad: Energetic, inspiring and effective are just some of the words audiences have used to describe the writings and messages delivered by writer, news reporter, artist, publicist and photojournalist Jesse Muhammad. Brother Jesse, a native of Houston, Texas, started contributing to the Final Call Newspaper in 2004 and was appointed as its Southwest Regional Correspondent. In 2005, after receiving rave reviews for his reporting on stories that mainstream media tends to over look, he was appointed as an official Staff Writer for the FCN, which is the only national Black-owned newspaper. Since that time, he has gained worldwide recognition for his consistent coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the continuing struggle of its survivors. In 2007, he was credited with bringing national and international attention to the case of the “Jena Six”, and helped to mobilize the 50,000 plus attendees to the historic “Jena Six” rally in September of that year. He has been a featured commentator on various television and radio shows in Houston, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Louisiana, and as far as Ghana. His writings are now read in many print and online newspapers and magazines throughout the world.
In 2007, he became the co-founder and editor of For Youth Teens and Young Adults (FYTYA.com), which is a Houston based newspaper that highlights the accomplishments of high school and college students. As a member of the Nation of Islam, he has served in the youth and information departments. He is also the representative of the Ministry of Information for the Houston Millions More Movement Local Organizing Committee.
CLICK HERE FOR UPCOMING EVENTS
