Andrea Ritchie, Kazu Haga, Ejeris Dixon, Khury Petersen-Smith and Silky Shah will serve as keynote speakers at the YWCA Madison’s 25th annual Racial Justice Summit, taking place Oct. 7-8.
This year’s theme is “Casting Bold Visions: Healing and Activating from the Roots.”
“This year’s theme meets our community at a critical moment as Madison continues to grieve the killing of Corey Ruiz,” YWCA Madison said in a press release. “As we hold our collective grief, we are called to turn inward and toward one another to reckon with violent systems and conditions that perpetuate harm, and to uproot the beliefs, practices and structures that sustain them. Join us in the spirit of love and imagination as we come together to continue practicing building the worlds we dream of, grounded in the wisdom and knowledge of movement ancestors who have fiercely held onto liberation dreams and created pathways toward more just, life-affirming ways of being.”
Andrea Ritchie, author of Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies and Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, will be the in-person keynote speaker on Oct. 7. Ritchie brings three decades of experience as a Black lesbian immigrant, survivor, attorney and organizer who has helped drive change around the policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
Kazu Haga, a trainer, educator, student and practitioner with more than 25 years of experience in nonviolence and restorative justice, will serve as the opening virtual keynote speaker on Oct. 8. Haga is nationally known as the author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm and Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging from Collapse. He weaves lessons from decades of Kingian nonviolence practice and trauma healing into his movement-building work.
The virtual day will conclude with a generative dialogue featuring movement leaders and visionaries Ejeris Dixon, Khury Petersen-Smith and Silky Shah, with Ray Broad serving as the featured facilitator.
Dixon is an organizer, writer and strategist focused on the liberation of queer and transgender people of color. She also hosts the Fascism Barometer, a podcast and learning hub examining the rise of fascism in the United States and how communities can organize against it.
Petersen-Smith is co-director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he researches U.S. empire, borders and migration and works with activists to oppose violence carried out or supported by the United States around the world, particularly in Palestine, the Middle East and the Pacific.
Shah is executive director of the Detention Watch Network, a national coalition working to end immigrant detention in the United States. She is also the author of Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition.
