Event Videos

As of this month, Haiti’s humanitarian and security crisis continues to worsen. There are calls for international support amidst mass kidnappings, continued violence and a hunger emergency. To better understand the current situation, watch All Eyes on Haiti: Occupations, Migrations, and Reparations hosted by the UIC Social Justice Initiative, EqualHealth. and the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

Scholars, medical experts, and immigration organizers were joined by activists currently living in Haiti. During the event, guest speakers shared their experiences and the ways that the current political, economic and health crises are impacting their communities.

Click HERE or below to watch All Eyes on Haiti and be sure to share the recording. You can also learn more about Haiti with our new Resource Guide.

The UIC Social Justice Initiative, Latin American and Latino Studies Department, and the Rafael Cintron Ortiz Latino Cultural Center, hosted Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective, a conversation with author Lorgia García Peña and SJI Director Barbara Ransby.

In her latest book, Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña argues that Black Latinidad is a social, cultural, and political formation—rather than solely a site of identity—through which we can understand both oppression and resistance.

Watch this online event today.

Virtual Opening of Exhibition, Belonging: Place, Power, (Im)Possibilities by the Social Justice Initiative (SJI) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Featuring: Photographer, Tonika Johnson Organizer, Taylore Norwood SJI Director, Barbara Ransby SJI Communications Director, Essence McDowell Details: This recording is the online exhibition opening of Belonging: Place, Power, and (Im)Possibilities, the inaugural exhibition at the Chicago Justice Gallery featuring the work of Tonika Lewis Johnson.

About the Exhibit: In a series of portraits and interviews, Johnson chronicles the ways in which young people have been made to feel they don’t belong in their own city (Chicago, IL). While Johnson’s portraits of young peoples’ experiences paint a grim picture of hierarchy, surveillance, entitlement and narrow mindedness, it is not a tale of defeat. Through their own creative agency, young people push back against the politics of racism, exclusion and containment by creating their own “free spaces” and organizations that contest the commons. Learn more at www.BelongingChicago.com or www.sji.uic.edu.

Police, Politics, Power and Race is an online discussion hosted by UIC Social Justice Initiative (SJI) on June 15th. The event explores how the current movement for Black Lives has led to the defunding of police in certain cities, calls for massive investments and new economic models for community empowerment. Guest speakers shared knowledge and analyses of the racial and political implications for Chicago. The event concluded with a performance by singer-songwriter, Jamila Woods.

This video features: – SJI Director, Barbara Ransby – – SJI Associate Director, Essence McDowell – – Artist, Jamila Woods – – Organizer, Kristiana Colon – – Data expert, Trina Reynolds-Tyler – – Human rights lawyer, Renee Hatcher –