Healing from the Center: Decolonizing the Self and Our Communities

Saturday, November 14, 2009

8:30 am – 4:00 pm.

University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Hemenway Courtyard (“Manoa Gardens”)

LINK TO WEBSITE AND REGISTRATION

Healing is a process of taking back control for our selves, our communities and the land. This conference is a way for participants to deal with different forms of violence that are the results of colonization and to move forward. Real healing begins from the center of each individual and is created through dialogue that changes how we relate to one another while working to decolonize our selves in hope of a better world.

Keynotes: Monisha Das Gupta, Ha`aheo Guanson

Workshops featuring women activists: Terri Keko`olani, Angela Cruz, Kisha Borja, Grace Caligtan, Jennifer Rose, Gigi Miranda and many, many more!

The general timeframe will be as follows (subject to minor changes):

8:30-900: registration

9:00-10:00: opening remarks and ceremony (ha’aheo guanson, darlene rodrigues, monisha dasgupta, ceje organizers)

10:00-12:00: breakout workshops (five simultaneous)

12:00-12:45: lunch

12:45-1:30/1:45: reflections and strategy panel (facilitated; report back from each workshop/sharing)

1:45-2:15: closing words/ceremony (darlene rodrigues)

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Workshop Brief Descriptions:

1) Pacific Women and Demilitarization Struggles

–Perspectives from women activists on organizing strategies, political analysis, personal and spiritual insights on demilitarization and decolonization work at various sites in the Pacific, especially with respect to environmental, economic, political, and cultural sovereignty and justice.

2) Strategic Storytelling

–Situating and practicing the use of narrative and the sharing of our personal/political stories in order to create social change and foster intergenerational, multidimensional levels of healing, reconciliation, recovery of genealogies, and the creation of new possibilities.

3) Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, and Human Trafficking: Transnational Perspectives on Violence Against Women

–Creative, locally-based, grassroots analyses and strategies of social change and the transformation of social norms impacting gender-based violence, and violence against women as it manifests within and between national/international borders.

4) Health, Race, Poverty and the Law

–Critical perspectives identifying the intersections of race, class, and gender subordination in specific communities, especially with respect to the role of the state, the law, and other institutions of power in exploiting these intersections in ways that concretely and severely affect women in communities of color in very specific ways.

5) Environmental Justice

–Context-specific analysis and strategies on achieving environmental justice in the midst of conditions of pervasive militarism and a highly unequal capitalist economic system in illegally occupied Hawaii.

Sponsored by the Collective for Equality, Justice and Empowerment

Website: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ceje/Home.html

Contact information:  ceje@hawaii.edu

Co-Sponsors: Third Path Movement for Reproductive Justice, American Friends Service Committee – Hawai`i, GiRL FeST Hawai`i, Pacific Justice & Reconciliation Center, Hands In Helping Out, UHM SAPFB

Flyer & Artwork: Kamran Samimi / kamransamimi@gmail.com / http://kamransamimi.com