2020 Program Topic:
Video and Filmmaking/Podcasts/Multimedia

In this session we'll be hosting a live podcast recording of Momentum: A Race Forward Podcast with Chevon and Hiba.

As we face the multiple collective crises of 2020, we need journalism and information produced by and for oppressed communities. Building on the conversations held at Allied Media Conference and Facing Race 2018, this session will gather journalists and media activists to strategize about producing journalism that supports movements, reflects grassroots communities, and fights white supremacy and racism. We’ll talk covering the uprisings, the effects of COVID and economic crises on communities of color, and safeguarding democracy. Most importantly, we’ll build community among movement journalists and media activists in order to share resources and support one another.

The session will be facilitated by Press On, a southern movement journalism collective which has a strong presence in North Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana. The session will include political education about histories of journalism and resistance in the South. We will draw on the work and wisdom of southern media organizations and movement organizers to collectively build strategies for supporting, sustaining, and expanding the liberatory practice of journalism. Small group breakouts will focus on building community among movement journalists and sharing resources.

All periods of change require a collective leap of imagination. In recent years, the Trump administration and racist Right have enflamed culture wars to advance white supremacist rule and racist violence. But at the same time, artists, athletes, culture-bearers, cultural organizers, and narrative strategists have moved millions to embrace radical racial justice narratives and ideas. Black and Indigenous people and other people of color working in the culture expand our desire for racial justice and sense of possibility. How are people innovating and advancing racial justice narratives? How do we think about the cultural battleground now in this time of uprisings? Race Forward is proud to present this plenary of leading cultural organizers, thinkers, and influencers.

Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at the #KeepAleFree campaign, a national effort to build pathways of protection from deportation for reproductive justice organizer Alejandra Pablos. Team members Gloria, Yvette, Ale & Castro will dive through the campaign's intersectional organizing work (legal, communications & ground organizing) and how they use cultural digital organizing to creatively disrupt the mainstream portrayals around immigration, criminalization, and reproductive justice. The team engages in this work through a perspective that is dedicated to dismantling prison, detention centers, and governmental agencies.