Join Kris Hermes, activist and author of Crashing the Party: Lessons and Legacies from the RNC 2000, along with UMN graduate student Charmaine Chua, and UMN PhD candidate Rahsaan Mahadeo at Boneshaker Books on Friday, March 11th at 6pm for a Conversation on Policing and Dissent. Hermes, Chua, and Mahadeo will begin the evening's conversation by answering a range of questions after which the floor will be opened up to everyone present for a community discussion.

Questions for discussion may include:

• How has policing of protests evolved over the last several decades?
• How can we compare and contrast the policing practices at organized protests versus spontaneous rebellions?
• How does racism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression inherent in everyday policing intersect with the political policing of counterinsurgency and counterintelligence?
• What lessons have activists learned from previous mobilizations and how can they inform future protests?
• What are some models of collective resistance to the policing of dissent and state repression?

About Crashing the Party:

Over the past 15 years, people in the United States—and dissidents in particular—have witnessed a steady escalation of the National Security State, including invasive surveillance and infiltration, indiscriminate police violence, and unlawful arrests. Crashing the Party shows how these developments—normally associated with the realities of a post–9/11 world—were already being set in motion during the Republican National Convention protests in 2000. It also documents how, in response, dissidents confronted new forms of political repression by pushing legal boundaries and establishing new models of collective resistance.

About the presenters:

Kris Hermes is a Bay Area–based activist who has worked for nearly thirty years on social justice issues. Organizing with ACT UP Philadelphia in the late 1990s spurred his interest in legal support work and led to his co-founding and years-long involvement with R2K Legal. Since 2000, Hermes has been an active, award-winning legal worker-member of the National Lawyers Guild and has been a part of numerous law collectives and legal support efforts over the years.

Charmaine Chua is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, where she has taught courses on race and policing in America, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She is primarily involved in supply chain organizing, the incarcerated workers' organizing committee, and coordinating a court and jail solidarity group after getting arrested in Los Angeles during a march for Michael Brown in 2014.

Rahsaan Mahadeo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota whose scholarship is informed by his biography. He does his best to keep one foot in the academy and one foot in the community by working with local youth and social justice organizing on and off campus. Rahsaan is a member of Whose Diversity?—a collective of undergraduate and graduate students committed to questioning the University of Minnesota’s commitment to “diversity.” In February of 2015, Rahsaan along with 12 other members of Whose Diversity? were arrested, jailed and sanctioned by the University of Minnesota and the Hennepin County Sheriff. In December of 2015, Rahsaan and his co-organizer David Melendez beat the student conduct charges brought against them by the University of Minnesota. Rahsaan is currently completing his dissertation exploring how youth of color in urban space make sense of time. He specifically examines how time is racialized and how race is temporalized. Part of his research also looks at how youth of color in urban space transgress time to produce insurgent temporalities. Before beginning his graduate studies, Rahsaan spent over seven years working as a social worker in Providence and Boston.

Copies of Crashing the Party will be available after the talk for purchase and signing.