Professor and Executive Director, Freedom University
Professor Soltis received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia, where she was awarded the Foundation Fellowship. Emiko received her PhD from Emory University and wrote her dissertation on the role of global human rights strategies and local music practices in the mobilization of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an interracial farmworker organization in South Florida. Her research and teaching interests include social movement theory, global studies, music and social movements, U.S. immigration history, and racial formation theory. Having served as a longtime student activist, Emiko is committed to mentoring undocumented youth and providing them with the knowledge and skills they need to be effective leaders in their own freedom struggle.
Title: Good Trouble: Liberatory Education, Direct Action, and the Undocumented Student Movement in Georgia
Dr. Laura Emiko Soltis will share her experience as a teacher at Freedom University, an underground freedom school for undocumented students in Georgia. She will discuss the rise of anti-immigrant policies in the Deep South from a racial and economic justice perspective, and describe how Freedom University has resisted such policies by utilizing a liberatory education model and human rights framework in the classroom, and a multi-level strategy of intersectional coalition building, direct actions, and federal legal challenges in the public arena. Most importantly, Soltis will share what she has learned as a teacher of undocumented students and present a photographic history of their fight against modern segregation in one of the most hostile states in the country.
Vice President, 
Presenters: