Plenary: Teaching Radical Hope

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Session Type: AALS Programs

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Grand Ballroom B

Floor: Grand Ballroom Level

Rising authoritarianism and popular nationalism, deepening inequities, and retrenchment of rights threaten the futures of many of our clients, making hopefulness perhaps seem misplaced.

For generations, however, the work of abolitionists from Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. Du Bois to Angela Davis, Ruth Gimore, Miriame Kaba and Derecka Purnell – has taught us that, however bleak our current times seem, we must not despair but instead hold onto hope and take radical action. Using abolitionism as a frame for our work requires holding two visions at once. It requires a vision, first, of tearing down instruments of control. But abolitionism also requires, in the words of historian Robin D.G. Kelley, radically imagining what might be built instead. Teaching our students to lawyer with an eye toward this second vision can help them align with communities seeking to create a world in which all people experience a clean environment, safe housing, food security, quality healthcare, meaningful education, and a living wage, and are not subject to family violence, unjust fines and fees, or imprisonment.

During the opening plenary, Derecka Purnell (abolitionist organizer, lawyer and writer) will be in conversation with Professor Robin D.G. Kelley (scholar, historian of social movements and writer), moderated by Norrinda Brown Hayat (clinician and housing advocate). The conversation will prompt us to deepen our commitment to our clients' most radical pursuits, not only in theory but in our teaching and clinical practice.