The People's Archive: We The People
Inspired by Kinfolk Tech’s monument to Philadelphia's No Arena Movement—when communities in Chinatown, Black North Philadelphia, and across the city organized in solidarity to defeat a proposed 76ers arena that would have displaced thousands—this session featuring Brea Baker, Claire Maracle, and Doctor Aymar Jean Escoffery examines how collective power emerges when communities refuse to be pitted against each other. The fight wasn't just about stopping one development; it was about Asian, Black, Latinx, and working-class white Philadelphians recognizing that gentrification, displacement, and corporate extraction are interlocking systems of oppression that require interlocking resistance.
We explore how movements archive solidarity in action, how coalitions preserve the memory of standing together across difference, and how communities document their victories to teach future generations that another world is possible when we organize as one. Through conversations with organizers, oral historians, and cultural workers from cross-racial justice movements, we ask: how do we remember coalition-building as intentional practice, not accident? How do archives capture the hard work of solidarity—the translation, the trust-building, the showing up across lines of race, language, and neighborhood? How does preserving these stories equip us to resist the divide-and-conquer tactics that capital always deploys? This session treats the archive as a site of solidarity itself: when we remember together, we build power together. No one is free until we're all free—and the archive must reflect that truth.
ASL interpretation will be available for this event.
About The Panelists
Brea Baker
Brea Baker is a writer and activist whose book, ROOTED: The American Legacy of Land Theft & The Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, details her family’s experiences across the South and makes another case for reparations to include land distribution. ROOTED has been celebrated in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Apple Books, the New York Times, iHeart Radio’s The Breakfast Club, Harper’s BAZAAR, Ms. Magazine, and was honored as a BCALA 2024 Nonfiction Honor award winner. With a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University, Brea believes deeply in political imagination and the need for nuanced storytelling that doubles as ancestral veneration.
She also regularly contributes reported op-eds and personal essays to ELLE and Refinery 29 Unbothered with other bylines in Harper’s BAZAAR, The Nation, Oprah Daily, THEM, Coveteur, The Progressive, Mission Magazine, Nonprofit Quarterly, and Inside Philanthropy. Brea is a collective member of BLIS (Black Liberation, Indigenous Sovereignty) as well as the Highland Project, and is on the board of YWCA USA, The Gathering for Justice, and Black Farmers’ Market NC. She is currently working on her next book — a biography of Jazz Age artist and nightclub owner, Bricktop.
Clare Maracle
Claire Maracle is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, raised as a guest on Muscogee, Osage, and Cherokee land. This experience directly informs their work in rematriation and their conviction that language is the key to transcending displacement. As Executive Director of Words of the People, their leadership is driven by the belief that fluent futures are built not through preservation alone, but through unyielding visibility and the active, creative celebration of living languages.
An interdisciplinary artist and organizer, their leadership spans over a decade of arts activism. Claire’s work bridges storytelling, liberation, and collective care. They co-founded Poetic Justice, bringing literacy and poetry workshops to carceral settings, (now in every prison in Oklahoma) that provided a framework for education as liberation. They served as Creative Director & Lead Educator for Louder Than a Bomb Oklahoma, instrumental in helping Tulsa launch the first regional offshoot of the Chicago program. Claire dedicated their time to mentoring youth in spoken word as a tool for self-determination and collective healing. Their poetry has appeared in This Land Press, Emerge Magazine, New Words Press, Frontier Poetry, Wayfarer Magazine and elsewhere.
Aymar Jean Escoffery
Dr. Aymar Jean "AJ" Escoffery is the Margaret Walker Professor of Communication Studies and Founder of the Media and Data Equity (MADE) Lab at Northwestern University, Faculty Director of the MS in Leadership for Creative Enterprises, and Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center. He is the author of Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television (NYU Press, 2018), Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal our Culture (MIT Press, 2025), and The Cookout: A Guide to AI: Ancestral Intelligence (For the Birds Trapped in Airports, 2025). He is the co-author of The Media Reparations Manifesto (Polity, forthcoming) and Beyond the Screen: A Decade of Unfiltered Storytelling (For the Birds Trapped in Airports, 2025), which chronicles 10 years of the streaming platform OTV | Open Television, which he co-founded. His research & development has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, MacArthur Foundation, and Wallace Foundation, among others.