Healing Justice in Black Feminist and Palestinian Liberation Movements

Location: via Zoom. Register at bit.ly/encounter-1023
Date: October 25, 2:00- 3:30 PM ET
Speakers: adrienne maree brown, Devin Atallah, CURCUM; Trina Jackson and Ayman Nijim, Grassroots International

This Solidarity Encounter will be a dialogue between adrienne maree brown, who grows healing ideas in public; Devin Atallah, a member of the Indigenous Palestinian decolonial healing collective CURCUM*; and Grassroots International staff. The conversation will be centered on exploring the meaning and significance of the praxis of healing justice in Black Feminist, Palestinian, and other interconnected social movements working for decolonization and collective liberation. The apocalyptical violences of colonialism have historically and ongoingly created conditions that seek to make life unlivable for the colonized, in ways that are deeply racialized, gendered, sexist, ableist, and classist. Although different, both adrienne’s and Devin’s works center commitments to be a part of collective efforts that are re-imagining ways of living and healing through border-defying radical relationalities, and the promise of decolonial love. Trina Jackson and Ayman Nijim, who coordinate Grassroots International’s US Internationalist and Middle East programs respectively, will facilitate the conversation and tie it back to Grassroots International’s healing justice and Black and Palestinian solidarity work.

adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of several published texts, and cogenerator of a tarot deck and a developing musical ritual.

Devin G. Atallah is an Diaspora Palestinian, a father and caregiver, a healer and guest living in Boston upon lands of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, colonized by the USA. He is a member of an Indigenous Palestinian decolonial healing collective, called: CURCUM كركم. Together with his colleagues at CURCUM كركم, he has co-written “CURCUM’s Trees: A Decolonial Healing Guide for Palestinian Community Health Workers.” He is also an Assistant Professor with the Psychology Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and a leader in the Decolonial Antiracism Research & Action (DARA) Collective for Healing & Liberación (www.daracollective.com).

As an activist, scholar, and practitioner, he focuses on striving towards understanding and directly contributing to intergenerational resistance, healing justice and decolonization/decoloniality.

Trina Jackson is the Senior Solidarity Program Officer – US Internationalist Program and works to support environmental justice social movements in the United States and Puerto Rico. Trina also coordinates the Martín-Baró Initiative for Wellbeing and Human Rights at Grassroots International. She previously served as the Building Equity and Alignment for Impact (BEAI) Fund Director for Grassroots International.

In her organizing work, Trina seeks to explore the intersections of identity and the lived experience; to work for structural and institutional change; to use reflective, participatory and cultural practices for deeper connections between communities directly impacted by oppression; and to construct new narratives that bring about social transformation, cultural shifts, and radical imaginations.

Trina serves on the board of directors for the Center for Story-based Strategy and Haymarket People’s Fund. She is the producer of Grown By Herself, an independent multimedia project that honors the gardening and farming traditions of black women. She has a bachelor’s degree from Goddard College, and a Master’s Degree in Public Policy at Tufts University’s Urban and Environmental Policy program.

Her passions include writing, traveling, photography, and yoga. She lives and works in Boston.

Ayman Nijim is the Solidarity Program Officer for the Middle East at Grassroots International. Nijim is originally from the Gaza Strip, where he worked with traumatized children to articulate and radically imagine a praxis for their healing, reparation, and liberation. Nijim created a project, “Let the Children Play and Heal,” to showcase their inalienable rights amidst consecutive offensives in a tiny enclave: Gaza Strip, and the project, “let the children practice their rights” to dismantle the cycle of oppression in which internalized oppression is mostly related. Nijim is on the advisory board of Gaza Mental Health Foundation. Nijim is a doctoral student of Transformative Social Change with an emphasis on Liberation Psychology at Saybrook University in Pasadena, California. is the Solidarity Program Officer for the Middle East at Grassroots International. Nijim is originally from the Gaza Strip, where he worked with traumatized children to articulate and radically imagine a praxis for their healing, reparation, and liberation. Nijim created a project, “Let the Children Play and Heal,” to showcase their inalienable rights amidst consecutive offensives in a tiny enclave: Gaza Strip, and the project, “let the children practice their rights” to dismantle the cycle of oppression in which internalized oppression is mostly related. Nijim is on the advisory board of Gaza Mental Health Foundation. Nijim is a doctoral student of Transformative Social Change with an emphasis on Liberation Psychology at Saybrook University in Pasadena, California.

*Together with the Lajee Collective in the Aida refugee camp in Palestine, CURCUM Collective is a grant recipient of Grassroots International’s Martin Baro Initiative for Wellbeing and Human Rights