A virtual discussion on January 19th, 5 - 6 pm EST between Nicholas Fesette (Emory University) and Kat Phan (S.T.O.P.) examining the surveillance, intimidation, & criminalization tactics used against Stop Cop City organizers, activists, & allies, centering the digital best practices & resistance strategies adopted to support the movement & protect all those fighting to prevent the deforestation of the Weelaunee Forest & the construction of a police military training facility.
Nicholas Fesette is assistant professor of theater at Emory University’s Oxford College. He researches how performances—theatrical and mediatized—can contribute to resistant, liberatory, and abolitionist movements—such as #StopCopCity—and also how performance has historically served to support and circulate carceral logics by appealing to the white imagination. His writing is published in the volume Race and Performance after Repetition, as well as in a variety of peer-reviewed journals. His current book project, Performance After Policing: Abolition Dramaturgies in Carceral America, examines the carceral state as a performing structure that continually re-stages race and class oppression. In part, this research draws upon five years’ work as a teaching artist in the Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum-security men’s prison in Upstate New York, where he helped facilitate a collective of incarcerated writers and performers, the Phoenix Players Theatre Group.
Kat Phan is the Advocacy Manager of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.). Previously, she led advocacy and research campaigns on various immigrant justice issues at the city, state, and national level. Prior to that, she led policy and research initiatives in San Francisco’s Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs. Kat has also worked as a data scientist on civic integrity algorithms. Kat received her Master in Public Affairs from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.