Portal #2
Mapping Visions for Transformative Change
The Social Justice Portal Project was a collaborative think tank that brought together scholars, artists and activists to address the urgent questions of racial and social justice. In 2020–2021, the U.S. and the world experienced multiple crises and confrontations that forced us to interrogate basic assumptions and answer difficult questions about who we are as a nation, and where we are headed.
Launched in 2021, the Portal Project convened a large community of thinkers and organizers–through working groups, public programming and artistic offerings–to explore the fundamental questions: How do we journey from injustice to justice? What do “just transitions,” a term borrowed from the climate justice movement, look like? How do we link movement, theory, history and practice in the service of creating a better world? Three critical areas of movement work served as entry points for our discussions: abolition, economic democracy, and climate justice.
In September 2024, this effort culminated in a our conference entitled Through the Portal: Growing the World We Want, featuring Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur Genius grantees, members of US Congress, and some of the most groundbreaking journalists, artists, researchers, and organizers in their fields.
The Social Justice Initiative is in the process of distilling the lessons from this four year project in a series of booklets, to share many of the ideas and debates from these collaborative and critical dialogues.