Scenes from PAC 2023

Explore the Past Schedule and Featured Speakers Below!

The 20th annual Practical Activism Conference was held on Saturday, February 25th, 2023 from 10:30am-5pm at the College Nine and John R. Lewis College Multipurpose Room.

In preparation for this year's conference, pro-staff mentor Mark Gardner and student planners Airielle Silva and Nicole Britton spoke to KSQD Talk of the Bay host Christine Barrington to share how 20 years of practical activism has evolved its goal to provide information, tools, and opportunities to generate local and global change. Listen to that conversation here!

Featured Speakers

PAC '23 Keynote Speaker: ALOK VAID-MENON

ALOK (they/them) is an internationally acclaimed author, poet, comedian, and public speaker. As a mixed-media artist, their work explores themes of trauma, belonging, and the human condition. They are the author of Femme in Public (2017), Beyond the Gender Binary (2020), and Your Wound/My Garden (2021). They are the creator of #DeGenderFashion: a movement to degender fashion and beauty industries and have been honored as one of HuffPo’s Culture Shifters, NBC’s Pride 50, and Business Insider’s Doers. Over the past decade, they have toured in more than 40 countries, most recently headlining the Vancouver Just for Laughs Comedy Festival and selling out their runs at the Soho Theatre in London and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They are currently on a world tour of their new show which has been described as "provocative and powerful" (Chortle), a "Potent combination of comedy and poetry" (The Scotsman), and a "Jaw-dropping celestial event" (To Do List London). On-screen, they will make their feature film debut in Netflix’s Absolute Dominion. On television, they have appeared on Netflix’s Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness, and The Trans List. 

*Please note that due to scheduling, Alok will be joining us virtually for the keynote and live Q&A.

PAC '23 Closing Speaker: MELANIE DEMORE

Melanie DeMore (she/her) is a 3-time Grammy nominated singer/composer, choral conductor, music director, and vocal activist who believes in the power of voices raised together. In her presentations, DeMore beautifully brings her participants together through her music and commentary. DeMore facilitates vocal and stick-pounding workshops for professional choirs, and community groups as well as directing numerous choral organizations across the U.S. Canada, and beyond. She is a featured presenter of SpeakOut!-The Institute for Social and Cultural Change, the Master Teaching Artist for Music at UC Berkeley/ CalPerformances; works with everyone from Baptists to Buddhists, and was a founding member of the Grammy-nominated ensemble Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir. She became Music Director for Obeah Opera by Nicole Brooks as part of the Luminato Festival in 2019. She is a charter member of Kate Munger’s Threshold Choirs and conducts song circles with an emphasis on the voice as a vessel for healing. In her own words: “A song can hold you up when there seems to be no ground beneath you.”

Workshop Schedule

Block 1 Workshops (1:00pm - 2:15pm)

• Embodied Leadership: Showing up with Aiki Presence - Deepen your leadership presence in this experiential workshop with professor Silvia Austerlic by learning Aikido principles that will enable you to show up with more self-awareness, choice, and confidence during challenging times.
• Protecting Indigeneity: The Preservation of Culture - Join the fight against colonialism and cultural erasure as we learn about Indigenous people of the Americas and Western Asia and why it is important to keep these cultures alive through times of struggle and erasure.
• A Restorative Dialogue: Assessing Hate/Bias Response in Housing and Residential Life - Come practice restorative justice principles to cultivate a safe and inclusive environment centering student voices and experiences surrounding hate and bias-motivated incidents within Housing and Residential Life and the corresponding response from College, Housing, & Administrative Services (CHES) administration and the Hate/Bias Response Team.
• Disability Justice in Academia and Beyond - Join UCSC's expert professors Vilashini Cooppan, Laura Harrison, Megan Moodie, and Amy Vidali in exploring disability and how you can get involved in implementing the wide range of disability justice. Topics include adaptive fashion, disability mapping across the UC system, the experiences of disabled students and faculty at UCSC, and beyond.
• Representations in Game Media - How does gaming relate to social justice? This panel will examine the concepts of racism, colorism, and gender in the space of game media and how white supremacy culture negatively impacts people in the space, before exploring possible ways to make gaming more diverse and inclusive.

Block 2 Workshops (2:25pm - 3:40pm)

• Generation Justice: Activism as a Practice! - Want to get involved in activism, but aren’t sure where to start? This workshop helps you identify your strengths and skills, examine the impact of intersectionality on involvement in activism, learn how to sustain yourself as an activist, and recognize the social change we can make when we team up and interlink our powers! See the finished zine here.
• Environmental Justice - How do we empower historically excluded voices into solving the climate crisis? Join us for a panel featuring speakers from Oakland-based Youth Vs Apocalypse, UCSC Climate Coalition, and the People of Color Sustainability Collective for a discussion on environmental justice from an intersectional lens, so you can learn how to help solve one of the most urgent issues of our time. 
• Sexploring Your Resources: Let’s Learn about Sex Ed - Let’s talk about sex education and learn about campus resources with guest speakers from the Sexual Health Outreach & Promotion Program (SHOP)! We’ll cover the importance of inclusivity in sex ed, share resources and services offered by SHOP, host a Q&A, and create goodie bags for essential sex ed items, with everything from condoms to tampons!
• Feeling Mixed: Exploring Racial Imposter Syndrome and Colorism - Have you ever felt like you don't quite fit in with your community? Join us for a panel with speakers from UCSC's Mixed Ethnic & Cultural Student Association (MECSA) and an interactive activity about intersectionality and diversity as we explore how mixed-race students experience racial imposter syndrome and colorism.
• U.S. Incarceration and Imagining Abolition - Join us for a moderated discussion panel addressing the past, present, and future of incarceration in the U.S., with a focus on the importance of restorative justice practices. Panelists include Donnie Veal, Underground Scholars Outreach Coordinator; Nane Alejandrez, Executive director of Barrios Unidos; and UCSC faculty member Craig Haney (Psychology). The discussion will be moderated by Underground Scholar and Barrios Unidos Prison Project Intern, Josh Patstone.

Activist Activities 

• Barrios Unidos Interactive Prison Cell - Come learn about the Prison Industrial System and Abolition through this experiential activity hosted by Barrios Unidos, which features a traveling interactive replica of a prison cell and visiting room.
• Banned Books - Do you know what gets a book banned? Come discover banned books from across the country, guess why they’ve been challenged, enter a banned book raffle, and discuss why it’s important to examine this form of censorship!
• Bookmark Making - Create a bookmark to honor something personal about a social justice issue that is important to you, an activist who has moved you, or anything else that inspires you to read and learn more!
• Button Making - Come design a personal button to show off your passion and practical activism by making a statement, highlighting an issue important to you, honoring an activist, and more!
• Historiography - Learn about and reflect on the way dominant groups have controlled narratives throughout history and utilize art to respond in a way that is healing.
• Linguistic Supremacy - Curious about linguistic discrimination? Participate in our interactive activity to learn about the discrimination against accents and dialects vs “standard” English to win a prize.

Conference Schedule