"We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society." Angela Davis
Turn Up For Freedom: Notes for All the Tough Girls* Awakening to Their Collective Power published by Common Notions.
Turn Up For Freedom helps youth leaders hone their skills to build personal, emotional, and collective freedom. It centers youth leadership through principled positions, such as being a healer, a protector, a scholar-activist, a community organizer, and being radically joyful, in order to build personal emotional and collective freedom. Through memoir, story telling, and political education, E Morales-Williams grounds these principles in the material experiences of working-class youth and reflects on the possibilities and challenges in practicing them as a collective in under-resourced communities.
“The City of Radical Love: A Philly Story of Oppression, Resistance, and Healing” published by Rutledge Press.
Philadelphia -- a city home to a centuries-long fallacy of freedom and a brutal reality of state-sanctioned trauma -- is also home to an important legacy of resistance and radical healing. As educators, healers, and activists committed to a praxis of Black feminism, the Black Radical Tradition and holistic spiritual practices of our enlightened ancestors, Sood and Morales-Williams seek to build on this layered history, while also locating our practice of yoga in a framework committed to radical healing and collective liberation.
Lecture for OISE at the University of Toronto
In this keynote lecture for Black educators enrolled in Issues in Curriculum and Pedagogy: Black Educator Identity and Practice, Dr. Morales-Williams draws from “Turn for for Freedom” to discuss the radical healing potential of youth leadership development through a liberatory framework that recognizes school as a historical site of harm for Black and working class youth. Listening to bell hook’s guidance that the role of teaching should work towards critical consciousness and healing, this talk and Q + A invites educators to meditate on the necessary questions to actualize that in the classroom for a liberated future.
The lecture and Q+A start at 1:25.