This Sunday, 31 January, Orin Langelle will be in Toronto for a Learning Activism launch party with the book’s author, close friend and colleague, Aziz Choudry at ‘Another Story Bookshop.’ The book was published by the University of Toronto Press. Langelle will give a slideshow of his photographs that illustrate the book, including the cover, as well as photos exhibited at Buffalo, NY’s ¡Buen Vivir! Gallery, which he directs. Langelle will explain history behind the photographs and the struggles they represent. Following the discussion by Choudry and Langelle, there will be a question and answer period.
Aziz Choudry is Associate Professor in the Department of Integral Studies in Education at McGill and Visiting Professor in the Center for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg. He has been on the Board of Directors of Global Justice Ecology Project since its its founding in 2003 by Langelle and Anne Petermann.
The launch party is free and open to the public. RSVP for the event on the bookstore Facebook page.
Below the poster is UTP’s description for the book followed by a paragraph about Langelle written by Choudry that appears in the book.
Described by the University of Toronto Press:
What do activists know? Learning Activism is designed to encourage a deeper engagement with the intellectual life of activists who organize for social, political, and ecological justice. Combining experiential knowledge from his own activism and a variety of social movements, Choudry suggests that such organizations are best understood if we engage with the learning, knowledge, debates, and theorizing that goes on within them. Drawing on Marxist, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial perspectives on knowledge and power, the book highlights how activists and organizers learn through doing, and fills the gap between social movement practice as it occurs on the ground, critical adult education scholarship, and social movement theorizing. Examples include anti-colonial currents within global justice organizing in the Asia-Pacific, activist research and education in social movements and people?s organizations in the Philippines, Migrant and immigrant worker struggles in Canada, and the Quebec student strike. The result is a book that carves out a new space for intellectual life in activist practice.
Choudry from Learning Activism on Orin Langelle:
The photographs that illustrate this book are another important example of preserving movement histories. These photos by US activist and photojournalist Orin Langelle transcend the sometime clichéd “protest” images that we often see. Integrating photography into organizing/education initiatives, especially around climate justice, anti-globalization, food sovereignty, and Indigenous resistance struggles, his work is a historically informed look at social movements, struggle and everyday life. In Langelle’s words, his photographic work aims to ‘counter the societal amnesia from which we collectively suffer—especially with regard to the history of social and ecological struggles. This is not merely a chronicling of history, but a call out to inspire new generations to participate in the making of a new history.’ Langelle writes that he strives ‘not just to document and expose the harsh reality of injustice—much of which is linked with the struggle for the land—but to inspire viewers to participate in changing the world, while helping empower those striving for justice because they know that photographs of their struggle are revealed to a larger audience.’ As Langelle says, in contemporary struggles for change,we cannot afford societal amnesia.
Special Note:
Seven photographs from Orin Langelle’s last exhibit, The End of the Game – The Last Word from Paradise, Revisited are included in a show at the Gordon Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, NY. Langelle’s photos document Peter Beard’s first one-person show at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan in 1977.
The exhibit at the Parks Foundation, Gordon Parks: Collages by Peter Beard, features artwork made by Beard over the course of the long friendship between him and Parks. The exhibit is open through April 23.