Building Local & Global Solidarities as Empires Crumble: A Conversation w/ Dr. Butch Ware

Please join us for a critical conversation with Dr. Butch Ware, an activist, educator, organizer, and movement builder who has spent decades working alongside communities to imagine and build pathways toward justice, dignity, and collective liberation. Driven by a lifelong desire to understand how societies transform, Butch devoted himself to studying how movements are built, how cultural change is produced, and how education can be a force for healing. As an academic historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, his work offers a people’s history—focused on abolition, social transformation, and the role of knowledge in collective uplift. We will learn about his ideas and his embodiment of leadership, grounded in history, shaped by the people most affected, and tested through struggle. Together we will explore:

• What role(s) do everyday people play in the struggle(s) for justice and liberation, locally, nationally, and internationally? How have these roles evolved over time (the past, present, and moving toward the future)?
• What does the long history of Black & Palestinian solidarity teach us about the local and global solidarities that are necessary now?
• What is the place of education in this work? 
• What is the role of electoral campaigns?