Students of Color Conference: Conference Flyer

1st Annual Students of Color Conference: Building a World Without Empires
A space for students to engage with global social justice activism, with particular emphasis on a critical race & intersectional analysis.

By SUA Students of Color Coalition
Date and time: Saturday, February 1, 2020 · 9am - 6pm PST
Location: Soka University of America, 1 University Drive Aliso Viejo, CA 92656
 

Conference Details

Our conference invites scholar-activists, activists, community organizers, student groups from campuses across California to engage in conversations that will challenge an unprecedented time of "student activism" across the world and across time.

Schedule

• 8:30 Registration Begins
• 9:00 AM-9:15 AM - Opening Ceremony
• 9:15 AM-10:45 AM - Panel #1
• 10:45 AM - 11:00 AM - Break
• 11:00 AM- 12:00 PM - Breakout Sessions (Workshops)
• 12:00 PM- 1:30 PM - Resource Fair & Lunchtime
• 1:30 PM- 3:00 PM - Keynote Speaker
• 3:00 PM-3:15 PM - Break
• 3:15 PM - 4:45 PM - Panel #2
• 4:45 PM - 6:00 PM- Keynote Student/Youth Panel & Closing

Who are we?

The Students of Color Coalition is an anti-imperialist, anti-white cisheteropatriachal coalition of students from student of color groups on Soka University of America's campus who look to reclaim their space in and outside of academia, willing to actively organize for our needs. We remind our readers that the Coalition re-emerged in order to address the lack of decolonial praxis inside and outside of the classroom, or in other words, the institutionally sanctioned stripping of our marginalized voices from knowledge production in campus culture.

Why are we creating this conference space?

Students of color have purposefully enabled our own alternative space, as itself an act of resistance:

1. Representation, resources and support for marginalized students in regards to our needs as well as our community's needs
2. A catalyst for social justice activism, a space to equip and empower students for the students, by the students, on behalf of the students to face white supremacy and its multiplicities in manifestation
3. Reclaiming our/our communities' lived experiences as sources of our learning of marginalized students and engaging ourselves with the interconnectedness of our movements and our people's anti-imperialist movements from all over the world-- we are not disconnect from oppressive institutions of power
4. Building community and network within Soka, across campuses, and across ethnic communities
5. Unsettling norms and teaching ourselves a critical analysis of power, while respecting and owning positionality

Objectives

With the absence of the centeredness of critical perspectives we believe need be required and maintained in all educational curricula such as Black/Ethnic Studies, Critical Race/Gender, anti-colonial/anti-imperial concepts, we hereby declare this space one we (re)claim and (re)define for our communities vis a vis grounded experiences and mobilization in the activism and scholar-activism of the very communities we belong to. We look to engage and equip students with knowledge founded on activisms from around the world so as to locate/define our own-- because our institutions are not doing that for us.

Here we are, teaching ourselves how to teach and dismantle our oppressors, teach administration/faculty/institutions, and most importantly how to teach one other.

This year, we peruse the site of a Conference space as an extension for the Students of Color Movements and look to activate one another to commit this year to what it would mean to live in a World Without Empire.

Questions We Aim to Address

1. What is ""student"", ""activism"", ""student activism""?
2. How can we reconcile our activisms with that of global anti-imperialist movements throughout time and in today's context?
3. What is the role of ""students"" in (re)grounding lived experiences and locating ourselves in the revolution we look to enacting? And what is subversive in our ""activism""?