Maroon University
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The Social Justice Portal Project’s Maroon University is a week-long radical learning workshop on social justice and freedom-making designed for activists, organizers, community leaders, and educators to reflect on social movement praxes, imagine what freedom could look like, and what it would take to achieve it.
Across diverse social justice movements there is general agreement that fundamental and systemic changes are needed. But there remains critical questions and ambiguities about how movements, from climate justice and abolition to economic democracy and solidarity economies, might create new and better systems that reflect an ethos of justice and prioritizes a sustainable planet.
Maroon societies were fugitive spaces, communities of resistance and building established by formerly enslaved people who freed themselves and created new societies parallel to dominant culture as an active practice of resistance and self-determination. At this pivotal moment for transformative justice work, Maroon University offers space, free from the confines of traditional classrooms and pedagogies, for teachers and learners to deepen their analysis of the current conjunctural crisis; explore critical ideas, debates, and histories; identify both shared understandings and points of departure for new understandings; and strengthen relationships for principled struggle.
Maroon University features renowned speakers, scholars, and practitioners, as well as facilitated conversations with organizers, and time for deep engagement, dialogue and reflection. Past speakers include: Naomi Klein, Mariame Kaba, Robin D. G. Kelley, Derecka Purnell, Kali Akuno, and Jessica Gordon Nembhard.
The next Maroon University will be in 2024.
The Center for Third World Organizing is the official partner of Maroon University.
