The fifteenth Annual Morton Deutsch Awards Ceremony was a resounding success and we thank our community for joining the event! The event was held on April 13th, 2019 as part of the Teachers College Academic Festival. This year, we celebrated the distinguished contributions of an exemplary scholar-practitioner and graduate student. We honored Mariame Kaba as the outstanding scholar-practitioner and Ahram Park’s outstanding graduate student paper, “Nurturing Sites of Inclusion:Care Practices at an Alternative-to-Detention Afterschool Program.”

Mariame Kaba is a community organizer, educator, curator, and prison abolitionist based in New York City. Spanning over 30 years, her work has focused on transformative justice, dismantling the prison industrial complex, ending the criminalization and incarceration of survivors of sexual and domestic violence, and youth development. She’s worked with and co-founded countless campaigns and projects, cementing her status as one of the leading prison abolitionists and organizers in the U.S. Mariame is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Love & Protect and most recently Survived & Punished. Mariame is also a co-organizer of the Just Practice Collaborative, a training and mentoring group focused on sustaining a community of practitioners that provide community-based accountability and support structures for all parties involved with incidents and patterns of sexual, domestic, relationship, and intimate community violence.

Ahram Park is a doctoral candidate in the Communication, Media and Learning Technologies Design Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her interest in examining the relationship between youth, citizenship, media, and social equality has also been fostered through her six-year collaboration at an alternative-to-detention afterschool program for youth ages 7-to-15 years old. Her dissertation was a participatory ethnographic study that highlighted the multi-consciousness of young people as they strive to live through their demographic identities, their involvement in digital and physical spaces, and their status in the justice system. She holds an M.A. degree in International Educational Development. Read Ahram’s paper here.

If you missed the awards, you can see the recording below. As per Mariame Kaba’s wishes, the recorded portion of her talk will not be shared publicly. Click here to view photos from the event.