The Social Justice Portal Project, hosted by the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is a movement-centered collaborative think tank created in 2021 to bring together scholars, organizers, artists and activists to address the urgent questions of racial and social justice. In 2020–2021, the U.S. and the world experienced multiple crises and confrontations that have forced us to interrogate basic assumptions and answer difficult questions about our society and shared future.

Through working groups, public programming and artistic offerings, we engage a large community of thinkers and organizers in exploring the fundamental questions: How do we journey from injustice to justice? What do “just transitions”––a term borrowed from the climate justice movement––look like? How do we link movement, theory, history and practice in the service of creating a better world? We use three critical areas of work as entry points for our discussions: abolition, economic democracy and climate justice.

As a result of these dialogs, we are partnering with Haymarket Books to publish a booklet series that will summarize some of our shared conclusions, lingering questions and differences in perspective. We are planning a virtual conference for early 2022. Stay tuned for other public events.