Selected Work

Organizing, scholarship, and public voice.

A record of the movement work, teaching, and writing behind two decades of building power — from student-debt organizing to reparations to the classroom to national media.

Movement & Organizing

Turning a bold idea into durable power.

I build campaigns and the structures that outlast them — taking a conviction and giving it the strategy, systems, and staying power to change things.

Founding organizer

Occupy Student Debt Campaign

Helped launch the campaign that reframed debt from an individual moral failure into a collective political condition — laying the groundwork for a national movement around student and household debt.

Creator & lead

1T Day

Conceived and launched a national campaign around the trillion-dollar student-debt milestone — developing its strategic frame and coordinating its execution as a nationwide intervention.

Co-architect

Strike Debt

Helped form a durable, post-Occupy project of political education and direct action, bringing together organizers, researchers, and educators around debt as a shared condition.

Co-founder

Rolling Jubilee

The direct-action initiative that abolished millions of dollars of medical debt and extended Occupy Wall Street’s political life beyond the encampments. I brought the project into being — convening the people, resources, and moving parts that made a complex, first-of-its-kind effort work.

People’s truth commission

People’s Investigation of Wall Street

A people-powered truth-seeking initiative examining the financial crisis, housing dispossession, and the racialized harm of global finance. I helped convene a cross-sector coalition — faith leaders, housing and human-rights advocates, and experts in truth-and-reconciliation processes — exploring non-state truth commissions as tools for accountability, repair, and movement building.

Reparations organizing

Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)

Co-led the Vision for Black Lives policy process — helping shape the movement’s reparations platform and its vision for Black political power and transformative repair — and continue in a leadership role in the Reparations Working Group today.

Organizer

Housing justice

A decade of tenant organizing that won the revocation of a fraudulent certificate of occupancy and secured loft-law–protected tenant status — a fight for housing as a human right.

Co-founder

Occupy University

Built a popular-education project of teach-ins and public learning — bringing rigorous analysis of power and economy into open, accessible spaces.

Roots

Early organizing

Began organizing in Los Angeles during the Iraq War with African American Women United for Peace & Justice — the foundation for a lifetime of movement work.

Teaching & Scholarship

Making complex systems legible, politicized, and actionable.

My academic background in philosophy, media studies, and sociology informs how I analyze power, racial capitalism, and technological change — and how I teach others to see and act on them.

Adjunct professor of sociology

John Jay College of Criminal Justice & The New School

Taught courses including The Sociology of Debt, connecting rigorous social theory to the lived economics of everyday life.

Education

Dartmouth · Columbia · The New School

Studied philosophy at Dartmouth College and film in Columbia University’s MFA program; holds master’s degrees in Media Studies from The New School and Sociology from The New School for Social Research.

Writing, Media & Public Voice

Bringing the analysis to a wider public.

Co-author

The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual & Shouldering the Costs

Translated complex financial systems into accessible tools for political education and organizing — resources used widely across the debt-resistance movement.

Columnist

Tidal — Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy

Columnist for Tidal, the Occupy movement’s journal of theory and strategy — writing that helped shape the movement’s intellectual and tactical direction.

Producer & co-host

The Morning Show — WBAI

Produced and co-hosted The Morning Show on WBAI (99.5 FM, Pacifica) — bringing labor, movement, and political voices to the airwaves.

Published writing

Essays & scholarship

Writing has appeared in Social Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, Tikkun, In These Times, and many other outlets.

Broadcast & media

National commentary

Work and commentary featured on Democracy Now!, MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes, The Laura Flanders Show, and The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann.

Documentary & solidarity

Occupied Palestine, 2015

Traveled with fellow filmmakers and organizers — including David Graeber and Andrew Ross — to document resistance and liberation struggles, work that deepened an understanding of power, narrative, and international solidarity.

Service & Boards

Governance & stewardship.

Board & steering service

Boards & advisory

Service across national coalitions for democracy, popular education, and movement convergence: Move to Amend (ending corporate personhood and money-as-speech), The Brecht Forum (popular education and movement culture), and the U.S. Social Forum (movement convergence) steering committee.

Pamela Ann Brown