“Occupy Wall Street: Visions and Reflections,” a series of panels about the Occupy movement, will be held on Wednesdays from October 17 through November 28 at 4 p.m. in Franklin Patterson Hall (West Lecture Hall).

The panels, coming on the heels of the first anniversary of the Occupy movement, are free and open to anyone who would like to attend.

Activists, writers, and media-makers from across the country will visit Hampshire for these dialogues. The series is being held in conjunction with a course on the history, theory, and practice of the Occupy movement, taught by literature professor Michele Hardesty and sociology professor Margaret Cerullo.

Panels are as follows:

October 17: Occupation: Why occupy? What is the experience of occupation?
Featuring Laura Gottesdiener and Diego Ibañez of Occupy Wall Street, and Hampshire alum Cullen Nawalkowsky of Occupy Baltimore.

October 24: Decolonization: What are the problems with occupation? How does occupation conflict with liberation?
Featuring three activists involved with Occupy Wall Street: union organizer Michelle Crentsil, writer and activist Manissa McCleave Maharawal, and activist Leah Todd.

October 31: Police: How has Occupy Wall Street been policed? Are the police part of the “99%”? How can we deepen our analysis of police and prisons?
Featuring legal activist Moira Meltzer-Cohen, activist Aidge Patterson of People's Justice, a New York City coalition working for police accountability, and artist and Hampshire alum Divad Durant.

November 7: Imagination: What are the aesthetics of protest? How does one challenge the spectacle?
Featuring creative activists Lindsay Caplan and Mark Read, and independent journalist Sarah Jaffe

November 14: Debt: What is the morality of debt? What do we owe one another? How and why can debt be refused?
Featuring Pamela Brown of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, Marcella Jayne of the anti-foreclosure group No One Leaves (Springfield), and Loren Taylor of the anti-foreclosure group Occupy Our Homes (Chicago).

November 28: Precariat: What has made labor precarious? Are some workers more precarious than others?
Featuring immigrant justice activist Mariano Muñoz Elias and another guest TBA.

For more information, please contact Professor Michele Hardesty at mhardesty@hampshire.edu.

Biographies of Panel Speakers

October 17: Occupation: Why occupy? What is the experience of occupation?
Diego Ibañez is a Bolivian-born activist and organizer, who focuses mostly on student and worker immigrant rights. He loves the logistics of direct action and is passionate about movements around the world. He's been in various forms of direct action: from sit-ins in Alabama and Salt Lake City to sleeping in a Manhattan park to hunger striking in front of a church to attacking Bank of America with furniture or marching in the Bronx with radical organizers. With Occupy Wall Street, he has been involved with the immigrant workers justice working group, organizing with the Laundry Workers Center, among others. He hopes to move and organize in Bolivia soon. He has written for Waging Nonviolence. He also loves to write poetry and short story prose.

#Laura Gottesdiener is a freelance journalist and activist. While living in Zuccotti Park, Laura worked in the Occupy Wall Street Kitchen. After the raid in November, she focused on action planning and media creation, helping to plan reoccupation attempts and to edit Tidal, a theory and strategy journal. She is currently working on a long reporting project about housing activism and Occupy Homes. The body of her work focuses on profiles and human feature stories, with an emphasis on women's experiences.

Cullen Nawalkowsky 93F has participated extensively in the global justice ("anti-globalization") movement, and the struggle around U.S. political prisoners. As a collective member at Black Planet Books, and as a co-founder of the Red Emma's project, he has helped develop and sustain radical spaces in Baltimore that attempt to prefigure a future world of radically democratic decision-making and workplace control. He has worked with Occupy Baltimore since its inception, as a member of the media team and the Occupy the BDC and Schools Not Jails working groups.

October 24: Decolonization: What are the problems with occupation? How does occupation conflict with liberation?
Michelle Crentsil, a member of the People of Color Caucus of OWS, is an organizer for a healthcare union in New York City. In addition to union organizing, her past experience includes youth organizing and welfare rights organizing. She focuses on intersections of race, gender, and class oppressions in her organizing and activist work.

Manissa McCleave Maharawal is a writer, activist, and doctoral student in the Anthropology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her writings on Occupy have appeared in The Guardian, Alternet, Racialicious, N+1, Left Turn, Waging NonViolence, and in several edited volumes. She was involved with various working groups of Occupy Wall Street since September 2011 and is now helping to organize The Free University of New York City.

Leah Todd works on Safer Spaces at OWS and has been a member of Support NY, a collective providing community-based responses to sexual assault and intimate partner violence, for two years. She previously ran the SafeWalk program of RightRides for Women's Safety, where she organized teams on bikes to act as community escorts. She also works on projects to promote safer cycling and spread knowledge of legal rights and the criminal justice system. Leah works at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

October 31: Police: How has Occupy Wall Street been policed? Are the police part of the “99%”? How can we deepen our analysis of police and prisons?
Moira Meltzer-Cohen has been active in educating protesters and youth about their legal rights. Her recent work has focused on developing strategies to combat the ways in which poverty both predicts and exacerbates the impacts of mass incarceration on defendants, their families, and communities. She continues to work for broader recognition and redress of police misconduct in NYC's over-policed communities of color. She holds a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law.

Divad Durant 06F is a multi-media artist, community organizer, and educator. In 2012 he participated in an action called "Three Strikes You're In," in partnership with the Yes Men, to bring attention to the alarming numbers of people of color being stopped and frisked by the NYPD in NYC. He is also working on a feature length experimental documentary called "A Bronx Tale" which uses home video, found footage, performative ethnography, and filmic depictions of his home borough to cultivate the multiple imaginations of the Bronx. He is currently a digital media fellow at National Programming Consortium developing "Tweets to a Black Conscious Youth" a multi-platform media project intended to create a supportive community of Black Conscious Youth. When no one is looking, he sings songs, writes rhymes and reads comic books.

#November 7: Imagination: What are the aesthetics of protest? How does one challenge the spectacle?
Lindsay Caplan is a doctoral candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center and a member of the Occuprint Collective. She currently teaches at Parsons the New School of Design.

Sarah Jaffe is a rabblerouser, occasional blogger, and frequent Twitterer. The former editor of the Labor and Media sections at AlterNet.org, she covered the Occupy movement from the beginning and was a contributing editor on The 99%: How the Occupy Wall Street Movement is Changing America, from AlterNet books, as well as a contributor to the anthologies At The Tea Party and Beautiful Trouble, both from OR Books.

Mark Read is an activist, educator, and artist based in Brooklyn NY. He has worked as an organizer on a variety of creative, interventionist-activist projects, such as Critical Mass and Reclaim the Streets, but is best known for organizing a series of projections on the Verizon building on November 17th, 2011 that were known as the "OWS Bat Signal." More recently he initiated and organized The Illuminator project, a mobile guerilla projection unit/infoshop and library.

November 14: Debt: What is the morality of debt? What do we owe one another? How and why can debt be refused?
Pamela Brown is an activist with the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and Strike Debt. She is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at The New School for Social Research and blogs at emission-control.net.

Marcella Jayne is a Francis Perkin scholar at Mount Holyoke College and an organizer with No One Leaves, and organization based in Springfield that advocates for home foreclosure victims.

Loren Taylor has been heavily involved in "home liberations"—finding and rehabilitating houses abandoned because of foreclosure and providing them to families in need of housing. Earlier this year Loren helped form Occupy Homes Chicago (OHC), a local organization that is part of a national network of similarly-named groups in places such as Minneapolis, D.C. and Atlanta. OHC has become a "congress" of community groups, faith-based organizations and concerned individuals all interested in home liberations. OHC will develop a practical model for doing home liberations on a large scale, with emphasis on building community support and participation. The group is also documenting these home liberations and eager to share this information with anyone interested in revitalizing communities devastated by the housing crisis.

November 28: Precariat: What has made labor precarious? Are some workers more precarious than others?
Mariano Muñoz Elias was raised in Peru, and moved to northern New Jersey as a teenager. He's been active for many years and has organized students and tenants throughout the city. He joined OWS a week after the occupation started and has worked to both, bring the Occupy message to latino-immigrant communities and bring these communities into Occupy. He lives in Brooklyn where he works as a soccer coach.