Rethinking Power and Resistance Conference Footage

As part of its Embrey Women’s Human Rights Initiative, a five year grant project that “generated and supported projects to create an educational culture for gender and racial justice,” the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin organized Rethinking Power & Resistance: Gender & Human Rights from Texas to the Transnational Americas, a two-day international conference held at the Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin, Texas, on October 5-6, 2012.

Rethinking Power & Resistance was organized by a broad-based group of UT faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students from Women’s and Gender Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Theatre and Dance, Anthropology, Law, English, University of Texas Libraries, and the Multicultural Engagement Center as well as community organizers from Austin-based groups such as Mamas of Color Rising, Alma de Mujer, allgo, Transgender Jail Project, Texas After Violence Project, Conspire Theatre, and La Semilla Childcare Collective. The Rethinking Power & Resistance organizing committee envisioned a conference that would bring organizers and activist scholars together and foment collaborative work beyond the conference. As such, the conference centered around three community-university collaborations with the Transgender Jail Project, Conspire Theatre, and the Polochic Evictions Counteraction and foregrounded the themes of arts as advocacy, pedagogies of alliance, and resisting criminalization.

In addition to these three collaborations, academics and activists from throughout the Americas presented their research and activism on gender justice and human rights. The conference prioritized networking, workshops, and interdisciplinary activism for scholars, social justice organizers, and community members who engage in and question the use of human rights language to address issues of gender justice. Conference attendees and participants collaboratively examined the relationships of women, LGBT communities, and communities of color to women’s human rights as they pertain to issues such as economic rights, environmental justice, immigration, incarceration/detention, land rights, political repression, reproductive justice, resource sharing, sexuality, and more. The conference aimed to explore new movement strategies for gender justice which: work at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity; work with and in tension with human rights language (addressing autonomous uses of human rights strategies and the harm of neoliberal human rights appropriation); work in or in relationship to the Americas; and build on connections among community organizers and activist scholars while interweaving our local context with transnational work.

The conference closed with “Mama Said Knock You Out 2,” a women in hip hop benefit concert for Mamas of Color Rising. The concert took place at the now defunct venue, The Collective, and featured live painting by TooFly, hip-hop performances from Invincible (Emergence Media; Detroit, Michigan), Las Krudas (Cuba/Austin, Texas), Lah Tere (Mama's Hip Hop Kitchen; Chicago, Illinois), Yoli and T-Fly (The Cipher; Austin, Texas), Tiger Lily (Riders Against the Storm; Austin, Texas), Tru Bloo (Oakland, California), and DJ sets by DJ Trinity (The Living Room Project; Oakland, California) and DJ T-Kay ("Hip Hop Hooray" on KOOP Radio; Austin, Texas). Mz Marlah, of the “Soul Vibrations” radio show on Austin radio station KAZI, hosted the event.

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