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Taking Freedom

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The Taking Freedom book series, a collaboration between The Social Justice Foundation, SEIU’s Racial Justice Center, and MIT Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), is intended to address a wide range of issues, from housing rights, to debt burden, to police reform, and more.

PAR is an approach to research that values the significant knowledge people hold about their lives and experiences. PAR positions those most intimately impacted by research as leaders in shaping research questions, framing interpretations, and designing meaningful research products and actions.

Taking Freedom: Theorizing Audience, Products, and Provocation (An Excerpt)

On an approach to research that works with communities to address important issues they are facing, using "weapons of mass instruction" that help groups make decisions, work together, and mobilize.

Michelle Fine & María Elena Torre

Prisons have no incentive to pay inmates better—to the contrary. Unlike workers in the free market, who (theoretically, anyway) can weigh factors like pay, working conditions, and other benefits when deciding where to work, inmates do not have a choice between employers. If they need the money, or the experience, they must take or leave what the prison is offering.

Taking Freedom: Capitalism, Democracy, and W.E.B. Du Bois’ Two Proletariats

On W.E.B. Du Bois' theory of the working class and how race and class cannot be separated in the United States.

J. Phillip Thompson

We have designed our participatory action research projects to inquire about a problem or struggle within the very institutions that many members of our research teams are engaged in/ working for/prisoners or students of. Thus "provocation," or questioning existing power structures, sits as both a goal and danger, investigating existing power structures and raising serious ethical questions.

Taking Freedom: Reclaiming Our Lineage: Organized Queer, Gender-Non-Conforming, and Transgender Resistance to Police Violence

On the role that queer people of color play in resisting oppressive policing.

Che Gossett, Reina Gossett & A.J. Lewis

PAR is an approach to research that values the significant knowledge people hold about their lives and experiences. PAR positions those most intimately impacted by research as leaders in shaping research questions, framing interpretations, and designing meaningful research products and actions.

Taking Freedom: School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson

On racial segregation in American schools, using the example of St. Louis, Missouri, and its Normandy district.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Prisons have no incentive to pay inmates better—to the contrary. Unlike workers in the free market, who (theoretically, anyway) can weigh factors like pay, working conditions, and other benefits when deciding where to work, inmates do not have a choice between employers. If they need the money, or the experience, they must take or leave what the prison is offering.

Taking Freedom: Modern-Day Slavery in America’s Prison Workforce

On the labor issues connected with using inmates as extremely low-paid workers in state and federal prisons.

Beth Schwartzapfel

PAR is an approach to research that values the significant knowledge people hold about their lives and experiences. PAR positions those most intimately impacted by research as leaders in shaping research questions, framing interpretations, and designing meaningful research products and actions.

Taking Freedom: ‘Build That Wall!’: A Local History

On how politics and fear, rather than the day-to-day risks and realities of life at the U.S.-Mexico border, have historically shaped border policies.

Prisons have no incentive to pay inmates better—to the contrary. Unlike workers in the free market, who (theoretically, anyway) can weigh factors like pay, working conditions, and other benefits when deciding where to work, inmates do not have a choice between employers. If they need the money, or the experience, they must take or leave what the prison is offering.

Taking Freedom: Yes, Black America Fears the Police. Here’s Why.

On the historic role of policing in reinforcing racial inequality and how it has led to black Americans' fear of police.

Nikole Hannah-Jones