Speakers

Room for Everyone: March 17th - 19th, 2025

In our 4th Annual Transformative Action & Abolition Symposium, Prison Abolition Club hopes to explore themes around accessibility in leftist organizing, how marginalized people can take up and take back space from oppressive systems, and the room that prisons hold in our society.

LC Community Panel: Perspectives on Prisons

  • Adam Gregg, LC ’08 (current LC Law student)
  • Riley McGinley, LC ’27, Speech and Debate
  • Cari Zall, faculty of Graduation School of Education and Counseling
  • Beau Staun-List, LC ’25, Nutrition INSIDE and Lettuce Grow
  • Noelle St. John, Growing Gardens

 

Expert Presentation: Benjamin Ficklin

Image Description: Benjamin is leaning against the wooden railing of a boardwalk with the ocean visible behind them. They are facing towards but looking past the camera. They are wearing a cowboy hat, white short sleeve shirt, buckled belt and jeans.

 

Benjamin McPherson Ficklin (they/them) is a movement organizer, a poet, & an educator. After growing up in Portland as a punk kid protesting the Bush administration’s wars, they worked for seven years doing rapid response & border abolition work with the South Texas Human Rights Center in the Rio Grande Valley. In returning to Portland full-time in 2022, they have developed a court accompaniment program with the Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice & act as one of the conveners of the Deportation Defense Coalition, building a broad-base to fight detentions & deportations in our communities. They are also an organizing member of the International Migrants Alliance, The Oregon to Palestine Coalition, & are the President of ILWU Local 5. Their life as a poet informs their organizing; their hope for a better world is continually transformed by poetry.

 

Embracing Disability Justice Roundtable

  • Elea Chang, Affect the Verb
  • Brianna Bragg, The Uprise Collective
  • Babatunde “Zubbi” Azubuike, Black and Beyond the Binary
  • Benjamin Mann, Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies

 

Black and Pink PDX 

Black and Pink PDX (B+P PDX), is a Portland-based group committed to building solidarity alongside the hundreds of incarcerated LGBTQ+ and HIV+ people all across Oregon. Their fight to abolish the prison industrial complex is rooted in the teachings and experiences of currently and formerly incarcerated people.
Their work centers around our pen-pal and letter writing programs as letter writing is how we build community across prison walls. B+P PDX supports free-world volunteers like you with getting matched to write their inside members (LGBTQ+ and HIV+ people inside Oregon prisons). They also have opportunities for writing one-time letters of support to their incarcerated members. Come learn about all the ways to support!

PDX Organization Open House

  • ClownBloc
  • Resist US-Led War
  • Letters for Palestine
  • International Women’s Alliance
  • The American Party of Labor
  • The Healing Underground
  • Bayan Oregon
  • Black and Beyond the Binary
  • Kalikasan Solidarity
  • The Cupcake Girls
  • Portland Clean Air Committee
  • People Organizing for Philippine Solidarity
  • The International League for People’s Struggle
  • Street Roots