With a timely message about the transformational power of protest, Janaya Khan is a leading activist who engages you in a profound discussion about social justice and equality.
Known as ‘Future’ within the Black Lives Matter movement, Janaya is a black, queer, gender-nonconforming activist (pronouns: they, them, theirs), staunch Afrofuturist and social-justice educator who presents an enlightening point of view on police brutality and systemic racism.
Janaya has been honored with several awards, including the 2015 Bromley Armstrong Humanitarian Award, and has been featured in media outlets, including the Feminist Wire, RaceBaitR, and The Root. Janaya currently serves as executive director of Gender Justice LA, a grassroots multi-racial coalition of transgender people and allies.
Janaya’s eye-opening presentations are underpinned by a deep commitment to social transformation. With compelling narratives, Janaya illustrates how individual lives are affected by inequality and rouses audiences to actively seek justice for all.
- Demanding Social Transformation, Justice, and Equality for All
- Janaya's talk begins on the theme of belonging, and how we can and must all find ourselves in each other in order for real change to happen. In a society designed on creating systems around difference, seeking each other out is one of the most radical things we can do. A key tagline of Janaya's talks are "it's not just about what you stand for, but who you sit with" to help anchor that discussion.From there, they move into how we are amazing at coming together against a thing, but struggle in coming together to build a thing. Ultimately they focus in on why the future we imagine must be one that everyone can see themselves in, not just some, and how to get there. They also like to emphasize how society teaches us to shrink and make small of our experiences no matter where we are located. They believe that activism is an exercise in personal power and helps us to locate ourself in the world and that it doesn't have to be protest; it is also in how we treat people and show up for people. Janaya ties in the central themes of the talk around how to show up as our best and boldest selves to be the person we always believed we could be.