Abolition Reparations Investment Safety
2025 ARIS Study Circle Application is Now Live!
In 2021, the SSJ Executive Committee developed the ARIS Framework (Abolition–Reparations– Investment–Safety) as (1) an analytic to understand and connect different strands of struggle among scholar-activists, and as (2) a strategy to convene and organize university-based workers, clarifying the stakes of political mobilization, and generating wide solidarity towards social transformation. We launched the first ARIS Study Circle in Fall 2023. The second Study Circle takes place in Spring 2025.
The ARIS Study Circle focuses on imparting tools for political mobilization and creating a community of scholar-activists across campuses, anchored in Black Study. Participants will learn organizing skills and strategies for nurturing emergent communities of scholar-activists dedicated to making meaningful change within university settings.
The Study Circle is oriented around these principles and traditions:
Political Mobilization of Academic Workers/Scholar-Activists: We explore the ARIS (Abolition-Reparations-Investment-Safety) framework, and discuss concrete strategies for campus organizing. The ARIS Study Circle explores and shares tools, skills, and contacts to build an inter-campus community of Academic Workers and Scholar-Activists.
Black Study: We insist on the struggle for an anti-racist people-led democracy, created out of the ongoing work to abolish anti-Black systems of racial capitalism and carcerality, and to create reparative futures for all our people. Black Study recognizes the living bonds between Academic Workers and their People, bonds that unsettle the conventional boundaries and protocols of the university.
Black Radical Traditions: We look to Black Radical Traditions across the African diaspora as our key sources for the praxis of liberation struggle, labor organizing, and movement-building.
Black Feminist Praxis: Black Feminist Praxis is at the heart of Black Study. We recognize that Black womxn, through their political organizing and their community-building, have long articulated a feminist theory and praxis of intersectional people’s liberation in which “no one of us can be free until we are all free.”
ARIS Study Circle Year 2, February-June 2025
We invite you to join ARIS Study Circle Year 2, where we’ll engage with SSJ’s Abolition-Reparations-Investment-Safety (ARIS) framework to proactively meet this moment head-on.
The Study Circle, anchored in Black Study and SSJ’s ARIS framework, is focused on building an inter-campus network of progressive academic workers dedicated to movement building.
The University, as a central institution in the struggle for democracy, and the material ground for differently-positioned workers facing disparate forms of precarity, is on the frontlines of this struggle.
The Study Circle focuses on tools for political mobilization, strategic defense and organizing of scholar-activists across campuses. The Study Circle builds consciousness and praxis to meet this moment of challenges at the local, national, and international level. As academic workers, we must develop an analysis of the current emergency to guide our organizing work toward advancing democracy in higher education.
SSJ invites a wide and diverse array of academic workers – faculty, staff, grad students, and administrators – to come together around an exploration of Black Study for social analysis and organizing.
Over the course of this 4-month Study Circle, we’ll prepare ourselves for the ongoing struggle, analyze the causes and conditions of the current convergence, strategize for our collective defense, and mobilize to build progressive and coalitional alternatives in the university as a root for wider political mobilization.
We study together to become more adaptive, responsive, and proactive in our collective resistance and organizing. We see emerging opportunities to push forward the agenda for a people-led democracy, and for equitable and redistributive Black, Brown, Feminist, and Queer futures. Join us to defend and advance democracy in higher education, and in society more broadly.
Deadline for applications is January 15, 2025.
If you have any questions about the application or queries, please email [ssjustice.aris] @ [gmail] [.com] and we will be sure to get back to you in a timely manner.