2022
Salonee Bhaman, Senti Sojwal, & Haeyoung Yoon
“Anti-Asian Violence: An Intersectional Feminist Lens”
The Rose Sheinberg Committee -- NYU Law’s project on cutting edge issues of gender, race, and class -- presents our 28th Annual Lecture, “Anti-Asian Violence: An Intersectional Feminist Lens.” It is with grieving, sadness, solidarity, and radical optimism that we foreground an issue so contemporary and relevant in our city and country today. This lecture was a tripartite discussion led by organizers with experience combatting the distinct oppression Asian American women and femmes face. Salonee Bhaman and Senti Sojwal of the Asian-American Feminist Collective will be in dialogue with Haeyoung Yoon, formerly of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities.
Salonee Bhaman is a scholar and historian who writes, thinks, and teaches about work, housing, care-giving, sexuality, and immigration. She is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Yale University. Her research interests focus on histories of race, gender, social welfare, migration, and labor in the twentieth century United States. She is a member of the NYC Asian American Feminist Collective leadership committee, and her dissertation is entitled “The Borders of Care: Immigration, Welfare, and Intimacy in the Era of AIDS,” exploring struggles for social provision and the politics of care work during the first years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Her writing has been featured in the Washington Post, Truthout, the Boston Review, and the Radical History Review, and she currently serves as a co-editor of the Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities series hosted by the Asian American Writers Workshop. She holds a BA from Columbia University and an MA/MPhil from Yale University.
Senti Sojwal (she/her) is an India-born, NYC-bred writer, communications strategist, and reproductive justice advocate based in Brooklyn. She is Media Relations Director at The Center for Popular Democracy, the nation’s largest multiracial organizing network and has been named one of “15 AAPI Feminists Everyone Should Know” by Buzzfeed News. Previously, she was creative director at women’s health startup Tia, led brand & digital strategy at Planned Parenthood of Greater New York and communications & outreach at Sakhi for South Asian Women. For three years, Senti ran the award winning Feministing Five column at Feministing, where she interviewed the likes of Mitski, Lizzo, Aparna Nancherla, and Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors. She is a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, which has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, Teen Vogue, Vice, Bust, and Ladygunn, among others.
Senti is committed to intersectional gender justice advocacy and movement building. Her writing on reproductive health and feminist issues has been featured in the Huffington Post, Rewire, Mic, and more. She currently serves as co-editor of the Black / Asian Feminist Solidarities project at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She holds a BA from Hampshire College in Gender Studies & Politics and a Masters in Public Health from New York University.
Haeyoung Yoon is Senior Director of Policy at the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Over the course of her career, Haeyoung worked on low-wage and immigrant workers rights issues. Prior to National Domestic Workers Alliance, Haeyoung was Distinguished Taconic Fellow at Community Change, working on immigration issues. She also worked at the National Employment Law Project as the Director of Strategic Partnership and a Deputy Program Director. Haeyoung co-directed a program area that combines policy design, campaign support, advocacy, research, and strategic communication to expand economic opportunity and security for working people in our economy. She currently serves as a member of the Biden-Harris Administration COVID-19 Equity Task Force.
Haeyoung also has extensive litigation experience. At the Urban Justice Center, she represented low-wage and immigrant workers working in service industries, including domestic work, restaurant, and construction in wage and hour litigation. She was one of the lead counsel in Iqbal v. Ashcroft, a civil rights case on behalf of two South Asian and Arab immigrant men who were wrongfully detained and subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment and discrimination in a detention center in the aftermath of 9/11. She was awarded a Trial Lawyer of the Year Finalist by Public Justice in 2006 for Iqbal v. Ashcroft. Haeyoung co-directed the Immigrant Rights Clinic at the New York University School of Law.
2021
Cara Page
“New Cosmologies for Freedom in the 21st Century”
Conceived at the onset of the pandemic, this event was designed to introduce the NYU Law community to healing justice, a framework that identifies how we can holistically respond to generational trauma and violence with collective practices that transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds. We learned a lot from Cara Page, an architect of the healing justice movement.
With “New Cosmologies for Freedom in the 21st Century,” Page offers a Black Feminist reflection on our current historic moment of fascism, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism, and explores how healing justice and transformative justice can build the power, care, and safety that we need to thrive.
Cara Page is a Black Queer Feminist cultural and memory worker, curator, and organizer. For more than 30 years, she has organized with Lesbian/ Gay/ Bisexual/ Transgender/ Queer/ Gender Non-Conforming/ Intersex and Black, Indigenous and People of Color liberation movements in the US and Global South at the intersections of racial, gender & economic justice, healing justice, and transformative justice. She is leading a new archival/memory and cultural change project, Changing Frequencies, which seeks to unveil, hold accountable, and abolish the Medical Industrial Complex as a tool of state violence, policing, and social control.
She is one of the architects of healing justice, a political strategy envisioned by many in the South and deeply rooted in Black Feminist traditions and Southern Black Radical Traditions of the Global South. The healing justice framework identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene in generational trauma and violence to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts, and minds. Through this framework, we continue to build political and philosophical convergences of healing inside of liberation movements and organizations.
Page is co-founder and current leadership team member of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. She is also the former executive director of The Audre Lorde Project and former national coordinator of the Committee on Women, Population & the Environment. She is a recent recipient of the Open Society Foundation Soros Equality Fellowship (2019-2020) and an ‘Activist in Residence’ at the Barnard Research Center for Women.
Page organizes nationally and internationally with groups like Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Project South,INCITE! Women & Trans People of Color Against Violence, and the National Queer & Trans Therapist of Color Network. Her organizing looks toward building racial, gender, and healing justice strategies for liberation, care, and protection.
Dorothy Roberts is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and the law. She holds joint appointments at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey School of Law and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology, where she is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies.
Her pathbreaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and The Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law. Among Roberts’s recent scholarship is the sweeping essay "Abolition Constitutionalism," which appeared as the Foreword to the Harvard Law Review’s volume on the 2018 Supreme Court term.
2019
Elizabeth Yeampierre
Executive Director, UPROSE, co-chair, Climate Justice Alliance
Climate Justice: The Challenges of the Global Majority
Introduced by: Juan Cartagena
Watch the 2019 Rose Sheinberg Lecture
Elizabeth Yeampierre is an internationally recognized Puerto Rican attorney and environmental and climate justice leader of African and Indigenous ancestry. She is the co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance and Executive Director of UPROSE, a Latinx community-based organization driven by an inter-generational, multi-cultural, and community-led vision. She serves on the Solution Project’s steering committee.
Prior to assuming her position at UPROSE, Ms. Yeampierre was the Director of Legal Education and Training at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund; Director of Legal Services for the American Indian Law Alliance; and Dean of Puerto Rican Student Affairs at Yale. She founded the NYC Climate Justice Youth Summit, a space where young people of color learn to engage their communities in climate justice work. She created the Climate Justice Center, NYC’s first bottom-up climate adaptation and community resiliency planning project. She is a long-time advocate and trailblazer around just, sustainable development, environmental justice, and community-led climate adaptation and resiliency in Sunset Park. In 2015, she helped lead the People’s Climate March Mobilization—a march of over 400,000 people—ensuring that the frontline was made up of young people of color. She is a co-founder of the BEA-I (Building Equity & Alignment for Impact).
Ms. Yeampierre has received numerous accolades for her work. She was named one of the top 100 Green Leaders by Poder Hispanic Magazine and has received such awards as the 2015 Earth Day New York & NRDC Advocate of the Year Award; 2011 National Alliance for Hispanic Health Vision, Innovation, Dedication, and Advocacy Award; American Bar Association Commission on Hispanic Legal Rights and Responsibilities 2011 Award; and the La Federación Nacional de Pioneros Puertorriquenos Award 2010. She was the first Latina Chair of the US EPA National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. She was the opening speaker at the first White House Forum on Environmental Justice in 2008. In 2015, she was one of the opening speakers at Pope Francis’s Climate Change Rally.
2018
Mariame Kaba
Survived and Punished
Introduced by: Joey L. Mogul
Watch the 2018 Rose Sheinberg Lecture
Mariame Kaba grew up in New York City, the daughter of immigrants from Guinea and the Ivory Coast. Her parents encouraged empathy for oppressed people and action for change. In 1995 she moved to Chicago and for more than two decades was, in the words of Chicago Magazine, “a linchpin of virtually every important activist effort in the Windy City.”
Kaba founded and directs Project NIA, a grassroots organization working to end youth incarceration. She founded multiple other organizations, including the Chicago Freedom School, which provides training and education for young people and adult allies to create a just world, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls and Young Women, the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander, and the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action team. Her blog, Prison Culture, is an essential resource for anti-prison activists. Kaba is a founding advisory board member of the Chicago Community Bond Fund, a revolving bond fund that supports individuals whose communities cannot afford to pay bonds themselves and who have been impacted by structural violence. Kaba is a 2016-17 Soros Justice Fellow, where she expanded her work to end the criminalization of survivors of violence.
Kaba helped launch the We Charge Genocide campaign, which in 2014 presented evidence of police brutality in Chicago to the United Nations. On May 6, 2015, the Chicago City Council unanimously passed unprecedented legislation providing reparations to the Chicago Police torture survivors and their family members, becoming the first municipality to provide systemic redress for racially motivated police violence. Both Kaba and Joey L. Mogul were critical leaders in that historic effort.
Kaba co-founded her current organizing and political home, Survived and Punished (S&P), in 2015. S&P organizes to de-criminalize efforts to survive domestic and sexual violence, support and free criminalized survivors, and abolish gender violence, policing, prisons, and deportations.
2017
Maria Elena Durazo
Vice President, UNITE HERE
Introduced by: John Wilhelm
Watch the 2017 Rose Sheinberg Lecture
Maria Elena Durazo is vice president for UNITE HERE international labor union, which represents more than 270,000 hospitality workers in the hotel, gaming, food service, manufacturing, textile, distribution, laundry, transportation, and airport industries in the US and Canada. Under her leadership in 2016, UNITE HERE and its Las Vegas local, the Culinary Union, led an unprecedented citizenship drive, helping more than 2,000 residents apply for citizenship. This campaign launched the union’s large-scale door-knocking campaign in Nevada, the only swing state to go blue. In Phoenix, Maria Elena and UNITE HERE helped lead the campaign in which voters defeated the anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio. She has served as Democratic National Committee vice chair since 2013.
Maria Elena started organizing with Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union Local 11 in 1983 and was elected its president in 1989 after she launched a campaign to transform the local into an accountable democratic organization. In 1996, Maria Elena was the first Latina to be elected to the executive board of HERE international union, and in 2003, she led the national the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. From 2006 through 2014, she was the first woman secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, representing the interests of more than 300 local unions and over 600,000 workers. Maria Elena secured allies on the Los Angeles City Council and County Board of Supervisors to push through a minimum wage law that requires large Los Angeles hotels to pay workers at least $15.37 an hour—one of the nation’s highest base wages. In 2010, Maria Elena was elected vice president of the National AFL-CIO Executive Council.
Maria Elena has been elected to numerous national positions within the Democratic Party. She served on several City of Los Angeles commissions. Maria Elena is a graduate of Saint Mary’s College of California and earned a law degree from Peoples College of Law in 1985.
Maria Elena Durazo is the proud daughter of Mexican migrant farmworkers.
2017
Kathy Boudin
Columbia University Criminal Justice Initiative, Supporting Children Families and Communities
Gara LaMarche
President, Democracy Alliance
Urvashi Vaid
LGBT Activist and CEO, The Vaid Group
Vince Warren
Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights
2016
Linda Sarsour
Executive Director, Arab-American Association of New York
Watch the 2016 Rose Sheinberg Lecture
Linda Sarsour is a Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American Muslim racial justice and civil rights activist, community organizer, and mother of three. She is the Executive Director of the Arab American Association of New York, and is widely recognized among American Muslims for her focus on intersectional movement building.
Linda has worked tirelessly to increase the civic empowerment of Muslim Americans. In New York, she was a co-founder of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York City, which seeks to support responsible Democratic candidates and increase the number of registered and active American Muslim Democratic voters in New York city. Nationally, she is the co-founder of the first Muslim American online organizing platform, MPOWER Change, an organization dedicated to building American Muslims’ grassroots political power while advancing social, spiritual, racial and economic justice for all people.
Linda has been at the forefront of major civil rights campaigns including calling for an end to unwarranted surveillance of New York’s Muslim communities and ending police policies like stop and frisk. She co-founded Muslims for Ferguson to build solidarity amongst American Muslim communities and encourage work against police brutality, and is a member of the Justice League NYC.
Linda was instrumental in the Coalition for Muslim School Holidays. In 2015, New York City became the largest school system in the country to officially recognize two Muslim high holy holidays in its academic calendar. Linda has received numerous awards and honors including “Champion of Change” by the White House, YWCA USA’s Women of Distinction Award for Advocacy and Civic Engagement and the Hala Maksoud Leadership Award from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
2015
Andrea Ritchie
Senior Policy Counsel at Streetwise and Safe
Introduced by: Urvashi Vaid
Watch the 2015 Rose Sheinberg Lecture
Andrea Ritchie is a civil rights attorney who has led groundbreaking research, litigation, and advocacy efforts to challenge profiling, policing, and physical and sexual violence by law enforcement against women, girls and LGBTQ people of color for the past two decades. In her work, Ritchie confronts the role played by police as the front lines of the criminal punishment system, building and sharing knowledge, skills, and strategies for resistance within communities targeted by the police.
Ritchie helped found and coordinate Streetwise & Safe, a leadership development initiative for LGBTQ youth of color that educates youth about their rights and helps them develop strategies for safety and for long-term change. She now serves as Senior Policy Counsel. She is on the Steering Committee of Communities United for Police Reform, a citywide campaign challenging discriminatory policing practices in New York City, and is also a member of the LGBT Advisory Panel to the NYC Police Commissioner, playing a leadership role in its effort to revise the NYPD Patrol Guide to give officers greater guidance and training in interactions with LGBTQ New Yorkers.
Ritchie coauthored A Roadmap for Change: Federal Policy Recommendations to Address the Criminalization of LGBT People and People Living With HIV (Ctr. for Gender & Sexuality Law at Columbia Law, 2014), Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon 2011), Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in the United States (Amnesty Int’l, 2005), Education Not Deportation: Impacts of New York City School Safety Policies on Immigrant Youth (Desis Rising Up and Moving, 2006), and consulted for Caught in the Net: The Impact of Drug Policies on Women and Families (ACLU, Brennan Center for Justice & Break the Chains, 2005).
Ritchie is a 2014 Senior Soros Justice Fellow, and graduated magna cum laude from Howard University School of Law in 2000.
2015
Ai-jen Poo
Founder Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and Co-Director of Caring Across Genereations, Presents "Waking Up the Caring Majority: Why We All Need to Care About the Aging of America"
Introduced by: Gara LaMarche
Watch the 2015 Rose Sheinberg Lecture
Ai-jen Poo is the Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and Co-Director of Caring Across Generations. Founded by Ai-jen in 2010, NDWA is the leading organization working to build power, respect, and fair labor standards for the 2.5 million nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers in the U.S. She began organizing immigrant women workers in 1996 as an organizer at CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities in New York City, and in 2000, she co-founded Domestic Workers United (DWU), a city-wide organization of domestic workers. DWU led the way to the passage of the nation’s first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010.
Realizing that the rapid aging of America — what she calls the Elder Boom — would require all of us to take action on care issues, Ai-jen helped launch Caring Across Generations in 2011. A movement to unite all caregivers and those they care for to create the systems and supports that allow all of us to live and age with dignity and independence, Caring Across Generations now counts more than 200 partners in their work to build the Caring Majority and support the Care Force.
Ai-jen is a 2014 MacArthur Foundation fellow, a 2013 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and was named to TIME’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2012. Among her early accolades are the 2000 Open Society Institute New York City Community Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Leadership for a Changing World Award, the Ernest de Maio Award from Labor Research Association, the Woman of Vision Award from Ms. Foundation for Women, Crain's "40 Under 40" list, and New York Moves Magazine "Power Women" Award. Other fellowships include the Alston Bannerman Fellowship for Organizers of Color, the Twink Frey Visiting Scholar Fellowship at University of Michigan Center for the Education of Women, and the Prime Movers Fellowship. In 2010, Feminist Press recognized her in their "40 Under 40" awards. In honor of the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day, Ai-jen was recognized by Women Deliver as one of 100 women internationally who are "delivering" for other women. In 2011, she received Independent Sector’s American Express NGen Leadership Award. In 2012, Ai- jen was named in Newsweek’s 150 Fearless Women list. Ai-jen serves on the Board of Directors of Momsrising, National Jobs with Justice, Working America, and the National Council on Aging.
2014
Winona LaDuke
Founder and Co-Director, Honor the Earth
Watch the 2014 Rose Sheinberg Lecture
Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe) is an internationally acclaimed author, orator and activist who has devoted her life to protecting the lands and life ways of Native communities. LaDuke is founder and Co-Director of Honor the Earth, a national advocacy group encouraging public support and funding for native environmental groups. With Honor the Earth, she works nationally and internationally on issues of climate change, renewable energy, sustainable development, food systems and environmental justice. In her own community in northern Minnesota, she is the founder and Executive Director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of the largest reservation-based non-profit organizations in the country, and a leader on the issues of culturally-based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy and food systems. Her work includes efforts to protect Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering.
In 1994, Time magazine named LaDuke one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age, and in 1997 she was named Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year. Other honors include the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Thomas Merton Award, the Ann Bancroft Award, the Global Green Award, and the prestigious International Slow Food Award for working to protect wild rice and local biodiversity. In 2007, LaDuke was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. LaDuke also served as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket in the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections.
LaDuke, a graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities with advanced degrees in rural economic development, has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues, and is the author of six books, including The Militarization of Indian Country (2011), Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming (2005), All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999), and Last Standing Woman (1997).
2013
Kathy Boudin
Director, Criminal Justice Initiative: Supporting Children, Families and Communities, Columbia University School of Social Work
Introduced by: Chesa Boudin
Watch the 2013 Rose Sheinberg Lecture
2011
Debbie Almontaser
Founding Principal, Khalil Gibran International Academy
Introduced by: Donna Nevel
Watch the 2011 Rose Sheinberg Lecture
2011
Dolores C. Huerta
Co-Founder and First Vice-President, United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO (UFW)
President, Dolores Huerta Foundation
Introduced by: Christina Rodriguez, Professor, NYU School of Law
Watch the 2011 Rose Sheinberg Lecture
2010
Anthony "Van" Jones
Senior Fellow, American Center for Progress
Policy Advisor, Green For All
Introduced by: Gara LaMarche
Watch the 2010 Rose Sheinberg Lecture
2008 (Fall)
Monica Roa
Programmes Director, Women's Link Worldwide
Introduced by: Janet Benshoof, President, Global Justice Center
2008 (Spring)
Tracie L. Washington<
President & CEO, Louisiana Justice Institute
Introduced by: Julia Beatty, Program Officer, The Twenty-First Century Foundation
2007
Eva Jefferson Patterson
President and Co-Founder, Equal Justice Society
Introduced by: Drucilla Ramey, Executive Director, National Association of Women Judges
2005
Ellen M. Barry '78
Founder, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
Introduced by: Lynn M. Paltrow, Founder and Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPAW)
2004 (Fall)
Esther Chavez Cano
Founder & Director, Casa Amiga in Juarez, Mexico
Introduced by: Eve Ensler, Author of The Vagina Monologues
2004 (Spring)
Constance L. Rice '84
Co-Director, Adancement Project
Introduced by: Professor Anthony G. Amsterdam
2003
Baroness Helena Kennedy
Queen's Counsel
Introduced by: Michael Ratner
2001
Vivian Stromberg
Executive Director, MADRE
Introduced by: Monica Aleman
1999
Judge La Doris Hazzard Cordell
Superior Court of Santa Clara County, California
Introduction by: Jean E. Fairfax, Activist and Philanthropist
1998
Judge Constance Baker Motley
Senior Judge in the Southern District of New York
Introduced by: Leroy D. Clark
1997
Dr. Julianne Malveaux
Economist and Journalist
Introduced by: Marcia Ann Gillespie, Editor in Chief of Ms. Magazine
1996
Professor Dessima Williams
Brandeis University
Introduced by: Kimberle Crenshaw, Columbia University Law School
1995
Gay McDougall
Executive Director, International Human Rights Law Group
Introduced by: Ruth Messinger, Manhattan Borough President
1994
Bernardine Dohrn
Director, Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law
Introduced by: Haywood Burns
1993
Antonia Hernandez
President, Mexican American Legal Defense Fund
Introduced by: Sally Hernandez-Piñero