What if schools in Black communities functioned as sites of containment rather than bastions of education? What of the technologies of control that we associate with prisons were actually developed in schools first? Connie Wun and Yusef Omowale will discuss these questions and much more in a conversation moderated by Damien Sojoyner. Framed around Sojoyner’s book First Strike, the event promises to be thought provoking and engaging.

Connie Wun, Ph. D., is the Founder and Director of Transformative Research: An Institute for Research and Social Transformation and an American Association for University Women Postdoctoral Fellow at Mills College. Her areas of expertise include community-driven research, violence against girls and women of color, school discipline and carcerality.

Yusef Omowale is the Director of the Southern California Library. SCL is a community library and archive located in South Los Angeles that documents and makes accessible histories of struggles that challenge racism and other systems of oppression.  Founded over 50 years ago, the Library holds extensive collections of histories of community resistance in Los Angeles and beyond.