Suffolk Law Professor Ragini Shah shares her research with stories from communities in Mexico profoundly affected by emigration to the United States to show how migration extracts resources along racial lines with Professor Shannon Gleeson, School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell University.

Her book, 'Constructed Movements: Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities' centers stories from communities in Mexico profoundly affected by emigration to the United States to show how migration extracts resources along racial lines. Shah chronicles how three interrelated dynamics—the maldistribution of public resources, the exploitation of migrant labor, and the US immigration enforcement regime—entrench the necessity of migration as a strategy for survival in Mexico. She also highlights the alternative visions elaborated by migrant community organizations that seek to end the conditions that force migration. Recognizing that reform without recompense will never right an unjust migratory system, Shah concludes with a forceful call for the US and Mexican governments to make abolitionist investments and reparative compensation to directly counteract this legacy of extraction.

Shannon Gleeson is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Brooks School of Public Policy. Her books include Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-Wage Workplace, forthcoming; Advancing Immigrant Rightsin Houston; Scaling Migrant Worker Rights: How Advocates Collaborate and Contest State Power; Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States; and Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston.

Join Dr. Jonathan Michael Square at Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation for an in-depth exploration of the history of negro cloth and its pivotal role in the American fashion industry, with a focus on its production in Lowell, Massachusetts. The talk will also examine how enslaved individuals utilized textiles as a form of self-fashioning in the face of the deprivation of their self-hood.

Dr. Jonathan Michael Square is the Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design. He earned a PhD from New York University, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. from Cornell University.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of celebrated American women, Megan Marshall has been hailed as a “gifted storyteller” (New Yorker) at “the front rank of American biographers” (New York Times).

Join us to hear about her latest work “After Lives: On Biography and Mysteries of the Human Heart” and gain insight from her discussion with fellow biographer Janice Nimura. Don’t miss their conversation about remarkable women in history and their own lives and work. Special for Women’s History Month.

Cambridge Forum is pleased to feature Omo Moses, son of legendary civil rights organizer, Robert P. Moses, talking about his new book, The White Peril.

The book is a coming-of-age story, a multigenerational diary, a father-son road trip, a searing account of the Black male experience, and a work that powerfully revives Reverend Moses’s demand for liberation. Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather’s sermons and the writings of his father, Bob Moses. The result is a compelling memoir that spans three generations of an African-American family, shining a light on the Black experience, and demanding racial justice. Omo will be joined in conversation by Jack Tchen, the Clement A. Price Professor of Public History & Humanities, and Director of the Price Institute on Ethnicity, Cultures, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University. Tchen, author '"Yellow Peril! An archive of anti-Asian fear" (2016) will be in dialogue with Omo Moses' about Western colonial fears of the non-white Protestant/Christian world. Reverend Moses' remarkable 1919 "White Peril" and Tchen's "Yellow Peril!" get to the roots of liberation struggles, peace-making, and global wellbeing today, especially in the era of climate chaos.

Paris Alston, host of GBH News moderates the discussion.

Listen to Cambridge Forum archived interview with Bob Moses here.

Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen is a historian, curator, writer, and dumpster diver devoted to anti-racist, anti-colonialist democratic participatory storytelling, scholarship, and opening up archives, museums, organizations, and classroom spaces to the stories and realities of those excluded and deemed “unfit” in master narratives.

Omo Moses is an activist, an educator, and a mediamaker. He is the Founder/CEO of MathTalk, an education technology company that creates products that inspire adults and kids everywhere, particularly those in economically distressed communities, to enjoy math. Moses is a member of the MSNBC Grio 100, a Huffington Post Person of the Day, and a Barr Foundation Fellow.

Sophia Hall is the Deputy Litigation Director at Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR), a non-profit legal organization founded at the request of President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. An experienced litigator, Sophia handles a broad range of civil rights matters, with a particular focus on employment and police misconduct litigation. Sophia’s legal work is regularly featured in media such as the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and NPR. In addition to her litigation, Sophia also spearheads Election Protection, a non-partisan voter protection initiative that mobilizes thousands of volunteers statewide to ensure equal access to the ballot box. Sophia has been recognized as “Lawyer of the Year” by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, a “Top Lawyer” by the Boston Magazine, and as one of Boston’s Most Impactful Black Women.

Jennifer Nuzzo is a nationally and globally recognized leader on global health security, public health preparedness and response, and health systems resilience. Together with colleagues from the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Economist Impact, she co-leads the development of the first-ever Global Health Security Index, which benchmarks 195 countries’ public health and healthcare capacities and capabilities, their commitment to international norms and global health security financing, and socioeconomic, political, and environmental risk environments.