Building Publics: Humanities Combating Isolation is a series featuring the work of the SOF/Heyman 2019-2020 Public Humanities Graduate Student and Humanities New York Fellows. This week's Zoominar, "New Pedagogies in Justice," features two of our fellows. Meadhbh McHugh is an Irish playwright and PhD candidate at Columbia University. In association with Columbia’s Justice-in-Education Initiative, her project will develop playwriting and creative writing workshops with incarcerated students at Rikers Island prison facility. Erin Petrella is a PhD candidate in the Classics department at Columbia University. Her project combines her academic, volunteer, and professional experience into a months-long intensive reading and discussion of a classical text with a group of individuals at Rikers, the outcome of which will hopefully include an alternative "edition" of the text, along with an online exhibition.
As a way to support the June 10 global strike called by Particles for Justice, a group of physicists, and the Black Lives Matter movement, attendants will be asked to participate in a creative writing activity designed by the Justice-in-Education Initiative for its Rikers Island Book Club. We will use this opportunity to actively reflect together in writing about the conditions of incarceration and about how our public humanities projects are embedded in the effects of systemic racism. In doing so, the event aims to honor the lives of those who have lost their lives to state violence, and to stand in solidarity with those who seek justice and equity for Black men and women.
http://heymancenter.org/events/new-pedagogies-in-justice/
