The Justice-In-Education Initiative at Columbia University invites you to:

Music of the Oppressed: Tradition, Un-tradition, and the Unschooling of Music.
Helga Davis and Alkinoos Ioannidis in Conversation

Helga Davis and Alkinoos Ioannidis have independently of each other engaged with the question of music as political engagement from the vantage point of the creator and the performer, especially with what could be called, a la Paulo Freire, “music of the oppressed.” They have been articulating this question in the music that they create and perform, especially from within the context of what constitutes “tradition” in musical education and what the role of the Classics can be in the production of modern music. As teachers, they have taken these questions to their students actively facing the challenges of what it takes to un-school children in music and school them again in a music project that is emancipatory (or e-womancipatory, e-humancipatory) utilizing the long tradition of humanity (mythology, in the case of Helga Davis, or “traditional” music, as Alkinoos Ioannidis does). They are both engaged in reorienting music for children as a pedagogical project, teaching them what music can do for humanity.

Moderated by Stathis Gourgouris, this dialogue will cover what can be possible for music on the stitches, borders, and folds of its being.

This is a joint event with Leros Humanism Seminars (LHS/ΣΛ), a project of Columbia Global Centers, Athens. 

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The Justice-In-Education Initiative at Columbia University invites you to:

Antigone Bound in a Mexico City women’s Prison

Speaker: Andrew Parker (Rutgers University)

In November 2018, Andrew Parker visited Santa Martha Acatitla, Mexico’s maximum security women’s prison as part of a collaboration between the Program in Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, and the Department of Estudios de Género (Gender Studies), UNAM (Mexico’s National Autonomous University). The collaboration was funded by the now-completed Mellon project “Critical Theory and the Global South” (Judith Butler and Penelope Deutscher PIs). The highlight of the visit to Santa Martha Acatitla was the screening for the delegation of a short video based on Sophocles’ Antigone created by the women themselves to protest their imprisonment. In addition to the video, the women have been collaborating with the UNAM Department of Women’s and Gender Studies in several murals documented in Deshacer la carcel (Unmaking the Prison). The event will center around the video as part of a discussion about “arts education” in Mexican and US prisons and on Antigone as a topos that indexes confinement and incarceration cross-culturally.

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The Justice-In-Education Initiative at Columbia University invites you to:

Art as a Practice of Freedom

Mia Ruyter and Kristina Binova in Conversation with Shedrick Blackwell and Amaury Bonilla

“As artists, educators, activists, and scholars, we ask ourselves, what is the best way to share quality arts programming with system-impacted community members? How can we participate in the struggle for prison abolition? This workshop involves art creation, reflection, and a discussion on practice. Although our work is fun and joyful and results in positive human connections, first and foremost, our priority is creating a space to deliver programming that heals, educates, and liberates. The friendship, joy, and community that sometimes happen during our programs are part of creating a liberatory space because education and healing are necessary to free them and all of us from the systems in society that lead to the dystopia of mass incarceration.”

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