Sanctuary webinar 3: Creating safe spaces when facing deportation; building transformative alliances
Channel: FellowshipUSA
Date: 27/06/2021

This international webinar on June 14, 2021 was offered as part of a 4-part series titled Sanctuary & the Global Migration Regime. The spring 2021 series was co-hosted by the  Fellowship of Reconciliation, the International Sanctuary Declaration Campaign, and the Ecumenical Committee on Church Asylum (Germany).

This program, “Creating spaces of safety when facing deportation and building transformative alliances,” featured four speakers. They were:
* Ravi Ragbir is a community activist with the New Sanctuary Coalition NY (NSC), a multi-faith immigrant-led organization that creates support systems for and empowers those navigating the immigration system. NSC’s grassroots programs are designed to shine a light on and disrupt the systems that criminalize immigrants’ existence. Core programs include the pro se immigration clinic, accompaniment, anti-detention, and community organizing and advocacy.

* Adam Bahar was part of a group of refugees who occupied Oranienplatz square in Berlin from 2012 to 2014 and later became a “guest” in sanctuary in a Berlin church. He has been an activist advocating for refugee rights for years. Adam is currently working with Glokal e.V., an organization for political education from an anti-racist and post-colonial approach.

* Rev. Anne Dunlap is the faith organizing coordinator for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a national network of groups and individuals working to undermine white supremacy and to work for racial justice. Through community organizing, mobilizing, and education, SURJ moves white people to act as part of a multi-racial majority for justice with passion and accountability.  Anne co-founded the Denver (Colorado) sanctuary coalition, and was brought into justice work through the sanctuary movement in the U.S. in the 1980s.

* Noor Amr (moderator) is a doctoral student in anthropology at Stanford University, and the coordinator of Concerning Violence: A Decolonial Collaborative Research Group. She holds a M.T.S. in Philosophy of Religion from Harvard Divinity School, where she was awarded the Dean’s Fellowship. Her dissertation research concerns church asylum in Germany, with attention to questions of sovereignty, secularism, kinship, and citizenship. Her work ethnographically examines how sanctuary practices work to reimagine the boundaries of political belonging through performative acts of relatedness.