Stanislaus State to host Social Justice Conference this week

The head of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth will headline the Social Justice Conference put on Thursday and Friday by the California State University, Stanislaus, College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

The keynote address by Fania Davis will be Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in Snider Hall. She will speak on shifting discipline from punitive to restorative from the standpoint of her own efforts in Oakland. Inspired by the virtual elimination of youth incarceration in New Zealand through restorative juvenile justice legislation, Davis and others joined to create the Oakland initiative in 2005.

Preceding her speech, social justice educator and activist Victor Lewis will speak at 6 p.m. Lewis is founder and head of the Radical Resilience Institute. He co-wrote “Lessons from the Color of Fear,” a curricular resource for the documentary of the same name.

Sasha Abramsky will be the closing keynote speaker on Friday at 7 p.m. in Snider Hall. Abramsky is an award-winning journalist and author of “The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives.” He lives in Sacramento and is a senior fellow at the New York City-based Demos think tank.

The full conference will include events throughout both days at various points on campus. Topics that will be addressed include food justice and the Prison Education Project. There will be a showing of the documentary “Ni Aquí, Ni Allá”, followed by a panel discussion on Dreamers at 2:10 p.m. Thursday, and a panel on homelessness at 1 p.m. Friday.

This story was originally published November 3, 2015 at 2:27 PM with the headline "Stanislaus State to host Social Justice Conference this week."