New Policing Tech, Same Colonial Empires: Global Policing, Border Controls & Technofeudalism from Turtle Island to Palestine

Join Weaving Our Worlds for an evening on Global Policing, Border Controls & Technofeudalism from Turtle Island to Palestine.

We are witnesses to the growing military-police-prison-border state here and everywhere. We see this with the growing collaboration between enforcement agencies, with the new technologies to surveil and oppress, with the coordination across borders to monitor people and repress movements. Dozens of colonial Canadian police chiefs visited Israel, and the Canadian Armed Forces and RCMP are training the Palestinian Authority in pacification tactics. New surveillance technologies are being battle-tested by ICE and border police on migrants everywhere, and the budget for the VPD & RCMP is constantly expanding with new streams of policing collaborations with so-called community agencies.

We will hear from speakers on Global Policing, Border Controls & Technofeudalism from Turtle Island to Palestine. We will then discuss together what we can do to resist the colonial police state, surveillance, and border imperialism locally and globally, as we move in solidarity with the resistance of Indigenous land defenders, criminalized communities, migrants, and people in struggle everywhere.

All Freedom School events are free and by donation. Registration is recommended but not required.

Accessibility

Snacks will be served.

Masks are mandatory while not eating and will be available onsite.

ASL-English interpretation confirmed.

Please note that the venue has a portable ramp, and we welcome advance notice to avoid any delays making the space accessible for you. Venue Accessibility: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v3_YYoL-MebhsDDJO2J1vDU-W-Z-KaVi280BeqKMd_k/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.2t4x7o4xj5yg

Harm reduction supplies are available onsite.

Please contact the event organizers at drivinginpalestine@gmail.com to let us know how we can make this event more accessible to you, or with any questions.

About the Freedom School and Driving in Palestine

Weaving Our Worlds is hosting this event as part of the Driving in Palestine exhibition of Palestinian-born Rehab Nazzal's photographic works from Aug 9-30. The exhibition is catalyzing a series of programming and community-led events through a Freedom School focusing on Palestinian, Indigenous, intersectional feminist, and anti-colonial liberation struggles. For more information and full schedule: https://drivinginpalestine.cargo.site/

Held in conjunction with Driving in Palestine, the Freedom School rides the wake of the Freedom Flotilla as we come together to assert that from Salish Seas to Palestine, occupation is a crime. Freedom School engages liberation praxis and community building in support of a free Palestine and all who advocate for justice in the face of settler colonialism, militarism, state violence and oppression in our shared and interconnected worlds.

In the free school tradition, we embrace education as critical, political, and liberational for ourselves and our community. Education as a practice of freedom must take place in community, which means that it is free, open, and accessible to all community members.  This is the context in which we seek to activate and renew community solidarity, to bring attention to ongoing atrocities perpetrated by Israel in the West Bank, to bring an end to the genocide and weaponized starvation in in Gaza, and to centre Indigenous solidarity movements for justice in the face of settler colonial regimes of violence, apartheid, and genocide, more broadly.

Here and now, we amplify and insist on what Sarah Ihmoud describes as decolonial love in the face of colonial oppression where, “to practice feminism in the midst of bearing witness to genocide is to embrace love as a radical consciousness, as a radical decolonial politic of fighting for life.” We do this work together, in community because we know that it is through community that we will achieve collective liberation. Only we will save us.

For, as Nada Elia reminds us, “Today, more than ever, there is growing consciousness that our struggles are not parallel—a term which suggests that they will never meet—but intersectional, coming together at various nodes. Our hope is that the enactment of reciprocal solidarity is a long-term movement, not a ‘moment’.”