Conference to address issues of social advocacy

Portland State will play host to the first-ever Resistance Ecology Conference this weekend, a three-day event that will open with music and introductory presentations on Friday. The event will run through Sunday in the Smith Memorial Student Union.

The conference, which is open to the public and free to attend, is organized by the Student Animal Liberation Coalition, an animal rights advocacy group on campus.

More than 20 speakers are slated to present on a wide variety of topics related to social justice issues.

“Although we’re an animal rights group, this conference is focused on so much more than that,” said Justin Kay, one of the conference’s organizers. “We have panels on…gender construction, environmentalism, vegan identity politics” and more, he said, adding that globalization, prison issues and racial struggles will also be discussed.

By holding the conference, organizers hope to address what Kay described as the “intersectionality” of the various movements. “Resistance ecology is about movement-building,” he said in an email. “It is about cultivating an ecology of resistance that can adapt to the circumstances of domination. The conference advocates for a movement of resistance that is multi-layered, unified, diverse and intersectional.”

The conference has received a significant amount of media attention so far, from radio stations like KBOO in Portland to websites like truth-out.org.

“Everyone seems pretty into the program that we’ve created,” Kay said.

In the final days leading up to the conference, organizers plan to reach out to PSU professors in the social sciences in an effort to attract students who may be interested in attending.

Estimating attendance, Kay said that “several hundred people [attending] throughout the weekend is not abnormal for a conference that has such a niche political base.” He added that making the message stick is a higher priority that attracting a large crowd.

The final time slot at the conference is for an open-floor discussion about the weekend’s topics and the conference itself.

Those interested in attending can visit conference.resistanceecology.org, and questions can be emailed to
[email protected].