Wednesday, April 15, 2020; 5pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public debate moderated by Jacques Laroche and broadcast via thelab.org
Participate via YouTube
The Forum is a bi-weekly experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?
Our first forum is with Astra Taylor, a filmmaker, writer, and organizer. Her most recent film is What Is Democracy? and her latest book, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone is out in paperback May 5th. She is a co-founder of the Debt Collective.
Since 2011 a debt resistance movement has been growing. The Debt Collective, a union of debtors, has been at the forefront of these efforts, innovating new forms of economic disobedience that help people leverage their debts to fight for social change. The Debt Collective’s ground-breaking student debt strike has won over a billion dollars of debt relief to date and helped put student debt cancellation and free college on the national agenda. Building off of Taylor’s work, this talk will look at the interrelation of debt and democracy and argue that debtor organizing has only become more urgent in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing economic collapse, which will push more people into debt and default. Corporate interests are well organized and have secured trillions of dollars of no-strings-attached public money over the last few weeks. The vast majority of Americans are indebted, and they should make their voices heard, demanding debt relief as an essential part of a sane and just response to the coming downturn.
Moderator Jacques Laroche is a computer scientist exploring the intersection of science, politics and society. In New York he was involved in the Occupy movement and worked with Strike Debt to abolish debt. In Miami he helped organize during the gestation of the Black Lives Matter movement. And, most recently, he is serving as an IT consultant for the Debt Collective.
This public debate will be followed by a survey of attendees requesting feedback on the current topic and suggestions for topics / speakers at our next forum.
Please join us.
Hosted with Wolfman Books, Woodbine, Tamarak, and Pro Arts Gallery and Commons.
