PSST: Joshua Safran

March 17, 2017

Text by Portland State Social Practice Talks

Joshua Safran talks about his ongoing work as a lawyer advocating for the wrongly imprisoned and survivors of domestic abuse, and the film Crime After Crime.

The full podcast can be heard here.

Joshua Safran is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, “Free Spirit: Growing Up On the road and Off the Grid.” In addition to his career as an author, Joshua is also an attorney and a nationally recognized advocate for survivors of domestic abuse and the wrongfully imprisoned. Safran spent his childhood hitchhiking, and surviving the elements and a violent stepfather before finding his way to law school. Crime After Crime is the exclusive documentary film on the legal battle to free Debbie Peagler, a woman sentenced 25 years-to-life for her connection to the murder of the man who abused her. Twenty years later, as she languishes in prison, a California law allowing incarcerated domestic-violence survivors to reopen their cases is passed. Debbie finds her only hope for freedom when two rookie attorneys with no background in criminal law step forward to take her case.

For its second season of public conversations, the Portland State Social Practice Talks public conversation series has focused on various aspects of the prison-industrial complex in the United States. These talks have ranged from artists to reform advocates, playwrights to curators, all engaging with, challenging, and questioning the role of prisons in our society. The conversations serve as a form of public research in relation to an ongoing project at the Columbia River Correctional Institution. The goal is learning how different people approach contact with the corrections system, and the potential role of art in this context. The conversations were held publicly at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

The Social Forms of Art (SoFA) Journal is a publication dedicated to supporting, documenting and contextualising social forms of art and its related fields and disciplines. Each issue of the Journal takes an eclectic look at the ways in which artists are engaging with communities, institutions and the public. The Journal supports and discusses projects that offer critique, commentary and context for a field that is active and expanding.

Created within the Portland State University Art & Social Practice Masters In Fine Arts. Program, SoFA Journal is now fully online.

Conversations on Everything is an expanding collection of interviews produced as part of SoFA Journal. Through the potent format of casual interviews as artistic research, insight is harvested from artists, curators, people of other fields and everyday humans. These conversations study social forms of art as a field that lives between and within both art and life.

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