Read and Resist!

Read & Resist is a collective and collaborative forum bringing together community, activist, and academic voices on all things transformative justice. 

Read and Resist! Background

Formed in June 2020, Read and Resist! is a critical response to COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement and the limited avenues to share radical outlooks on these intersecting crises. We recognise the importance of an accessible, collaborative public platform to share diverse voices during this crisis and beyond. We seek to provide an inclusive platform to host a series of critical perspectives on all aspects of transformative justice in a variety of mediums. Our goal is to bring together and centre an array of community, activist, student and academic voices whose narratives are often erased or confined to the margins of mainstream and academic discourses.  Our VisionRead and Resist is committed to building an inclusive, contributor-led space to share our perspectives in a variety of mediums to and develop our knowledge of all aspects of transformative justice. Our vision is underpinned by an intersectional and abolitionist feminist approach towards transformative justice. In centring our work on transformative justice, we draw, in part, on the work by many activists and writers such as Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson-Gilmore, Dean Spade, Leah Lakshami and the Combahee River Collective. Through collaboration, we aim to build a network of transformative knowledges and collective power. COVID-19 has magnified the myriad of systemic inequalities based on gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, and age central to the functioning of capitalism. Some have responded to the culmination of injustices during the pandemic with transformative, community-based initiatives. However, in the mainstream, others have used the current crisis to double-down on responses that encourage punitiveness, suffering and division. We recognise that we can’t build ourselves out of this current crisis with buildings, institutions and approaches that reproduce racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, agism and economic and environmental injustice. We know that liberty, food, housing, physical and mental health support, non-coercive relationships are integral to stronger, loving and safer societies. With Read and Resist! We create a space to critique the structures and systems that inflict harm, violence and trauma on our communities.

As part of our core approach, Read and Resist! aims: 

• To make visible a range of marginalized, diverse and revolutionary voices. 
• To create an inclusive, welcoming space for all working on all aspects of transformative justice broadly conceived. 
• To critique neoliberal capitalist structures and institutions that support and entrench systemic racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism and xenophobia.
• To provide a platform for those writing and practising transformative justice to participate in a variety of events and activities that broadens the reach of transformative justice e.g. our reading group, podcast, writing retreat, work-in-progress sessions and workshops.
• To share a rolling index of resources to facilitate relationships with and to share knowledge on all aspects of transformative justice. 
• To highlight community led initiatives, campaigning and activist opportunities. 
• To build a stronger transformative justice community centred on care, love, collectivity, and healing.

Our sessions will be held monthly on a Wednesday afternoon 3-5pm through each semester until the vacation period (September-January and February- June) and bi-weekly throughout the summer vacation. Due to COVID-19, all sessions will be held digitally until further notice. 

The broad theme for 2020/2021: Race and Racism in Law with a focus on Black feminist scholarship.

Session 1: Joy, Care, Love and resistance: building the post-COVID recovery with all we’ve got!

Session 2: “Walking While Trans”: Black feminist praxis centring the marginalized

To join, please register here.