How do we organize across borders?

On this month's episode, MEDLab’s own Stephanie Abdalla talks to Raza Gillani in a conversation about the not-always-obvious relationship between journalism and organizing and how it can connect issues across borders. He talks about the duality between neighborhood and transnational activism within the immigrants' rights agenda and reflects on the role of social media and other communication technologies in negotiating the relationship between micro and macro activist contexts.  Raza Gillani is a journalist and organizer from Pakistan with a robust trajectory leading social movements in favor of students, worker, and immigrants’ rights both in his home country and in New York City. In Lahore, where he grew up, Gillani co-founded the Progressive Students Collective and the Haqooq-e-Khalq movement, which advocated for the rights of the masses. He is currently a member of the Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) collective in NYC, where he serves as an organizer of South Asian working-class communities, leveraging power through electoral and movement work.  More recently, Raza started Muhadjireen NYC, a social media activist community that connects South Asian immigrants in New York City with local politics through journalistic reporting. This project emerged as a response to the underrepresentation of South Asian demands in the mainstream media, and it aims to promote in-depth coverage of how immigrant areas operate on a social, political, and economic level.