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Podcast

Medical Debt and Racial Justice

Join us for a conversation between Luke Messac and Kenyon Farrow on medical debt and racial justice. This event took place on November 16, 2023. Ruth Wilson Gilmore said, “Debt robs. But debt also disciplines…Today, while the imperial imperatives might be different, the role of debt is the same—to compel consent through the coercion of debt.” One of the major sources of debt is medical costs. In the United States, an estimated 100 million people owe medical debt in some form. Medical debt appears on the credit reports of 43 million Americans, and medical debt collection brought in $1.5 billion in revenue for America’s 7,000 debt collection agencies. Medical debt can be debilitating, resulting in denial of care, lawsuits, seizures of bank accounts, foreclosures, property liens, wage garnishments, and arrests. While medical debt impacts people across race, gender, and class, African Americans and people with low incomes have far more medical debt than other social groups. As emergency physician and historian Luke Messac notes in his new book Your Moneyor Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine, “A number of broader social forces have contributed to this transformation of medical debt. These include structural racism, economic inequality, the late-twentieth-century rise of neoliberal ideology, early twenty-first century efforts to organize health care workers, social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, and shifts in health financing and ownership…third-party financing, health insurance reimbursement, social insurance, financialization, and privatization.” This event brings together Messac with Kenyon Farrow, a public health policy and communications expert, to examine how racism and resistance to a strong social welfare state have shaped changes in healthcare and medical debt, and in the process, harm society overall. They will also explore current policy and political efforts around healthcare access and debt erasure, and how confronting medical debt is a racial justice issue. Speakers Kenyon Farrow is a writer, editor, and strategist, whose work has long focused on public health and infectious disease with a focus on racial, gender and economic justice. He is the Vice President of Policy with Point Source Youth, a national organization working to end youth homelessness. He is the former Managing Director of Advocacy and Organizing with PrEP4All, and also served as senior editor of TheBody.com & TheBodyPro.com and U.S. & Global Health Policy Director with Treatment Action Group (TAG). Luke Messac is an emergency physician and a historian. He is an attending physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Instructor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He received his BA from Harvard University, his MD and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed residency training in emergency medicine at Brown/Rhode Island Hospital. His research focuses on the history and political economy of health care, as well as on diagnostics for emergency care in resource-limited settings. His work has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine and online outlets including Jacobin and Current Affairs. His first book, No More to Spend, is a history of medical neglect and exploitation in Malawi. His latest book, Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine, will be published by Oxford University Press, in November 2023. It tells the story of how the collection of medical debt has become so aggressive, and the impact this is having on Americans’ lives. Twitter: @LukeMessac Get a copy of Dr. Messac’s new book Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/978019767... Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/StTxB7D-UEQ Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

More Episodes

Nov 6, 2025

Against the New McCarthyism: Organizing Resistance in Higher Education

The Trump regime took advantage of the repression of the Palestine solidarity movement under the Biden administration to launch a full-scale assault on higher education. He has unleashed ICE on student activists, branded any dissent against Israel’s genocidal war “antisemitic,” bullied universities into cancelling programs on race and gender, and defunded entire institutions. Join us for this Spectre Live panel of activist educators to discuss how to resist Trump’s New McCarthyism.

Speakers:

Isaac Kamola is a professor of political science at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He is author of Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (2021) and Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (2019). He currently directs the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

Heba Gowayed is a writer and associate professor sociology at CUNY Hunter college and a current Carnegie Fellow. She is the author of Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential (2022).

Vineeta Singh is a fellow at AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, an associate editor of Ethnic Studies Review, and a non-tenure track college teacher. She studies the history of US higher education as a site of racial contestation, so we can put contemporary confrontations about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in the context of the four hundred years of racial capitalism. Her work for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is currently available as a limited run series on the podcast “AAUP Presents.”

Zoé Samudzi is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of African-American and Africana Studies at The Ohio State University. She is also a Global Blackness Fellow with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg, and a fellow with African Museums and Heritage Restitution (AFRIMUHERE).

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Spectre Journal.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AokV9UO14ek

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Nov 7, 2025

Learning to Live in the Dark: Virtual Book Talk

Join Wen Stephenson and Jane Hirshfield for a conversation on faith, humanism, and radical solidarity in the face of fascism and climate catastrophe

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Wen Stephenson's new book, Learning to Live in the Dark is a collection of hard-hitting and deeply personal essays in which the Nation writer and veteran activist traces his search for resolve in the face of our converging climate and political catastrophes

Faced with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss created by these intersecting crises, Stephenson reaches back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon, along with contemporary writers engaged in the climate-justice struggle—including the acclaimed American poet Jane Hirshfield.

For this event, Hirshfield will join Stephenson to take up the urgent question of how to hold on to a radical commitment to a better world when crises beset us from all sides.

Purchase a copy of Learning to Live in the Dark: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2523-learning-to-live-in-the-dark

Speakers:

Jane Hirshfield, among American poetry's foremost voices for the biosphere and writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), is the author most recently of The Asking: New & Selected Poems. Hirshfield's honors include the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Founder in 2017 of Poets for Science, Hirshfield is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Wen Stephenson is a veteran journalist, essayist, and climate-justice activist. A correspondent for The Nation and frequent contributor to The Baffler, he is the author previously of What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other (2015), about the pivotal early years of the U.S. climate justice movement. He is a former editor at The Atlantic and The Boston Globe, where he edited the Sunday Ideas section, and has written for those and many other publications, including Slate, The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Phoenix, and elsewhere. In 2010, he left his career in mainstream media and has since covered, engaged in, and helped organize nonviolent resistance to fossil capital. He lives near Boston.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewPT5_RW8wE

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Nov 10, 2025

Pedagogies for Justice: a Conversation with Educators and Organizers

Join Haymarket Books and Parceo for a discussion on how our pedagogies can ground our organizing in collective struggles for justice.

How do our pedagogies impact and help ground our organizing and the ways we can connect and build upon our collective struggles for justice?

How do we learn (and share our learning) from our organizing in ways that broaden and deepen our movements?

How does our political education impact our organizing, our thinking, our work, our connections and interconnections?

What are the challenges we face in our different spaces in elevating our deep commitments and principles–and action?

Moderator/opening–Lesley Williams, Educator and writer

Panelists:

Mizue Aizeki, Collaborative Research Center for Resilience

Maya Suzuki Daniels, Educator and Organizer

Lara Kiswani, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC)

Merrie Najimy, Veteran Anti-Racist Educator, MTA Rank And File for Palestine

Rebecca Vilkomerson, Funding Freedom

Closing--Nina Mehta, PARCEO

This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books, and PARCEO.


Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRxhKgRwxBw

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Nov 11, 2025

Lessons in International Solidarity: Learning from the Vietnamese Victory over US Imperialism Half a Century Ago

Join internationalist organizers discussing the lessons contemporary international solidarity movements can learn from past struggles against the Vietnam War and in support of Vietnamese liberation.

View the A Luta Continua Zine Series: https://bit.ly/intlsolidarityzines

Download the Solidarity and War in Vietnam Zine: https://bit.ly/vietnamzine

2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the victory of the Vietnamese liberation forces over the imperialist US military. This timing coincides with the release of the zine, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF Is Gonna Win: Solidarity and the War in Vietnam 1955-1975, written by James Kilgore. The zine is an overview of the international solidarity efforts that emerged in the US and beyond in support of the Vietnamese struggle and is part of the zine series A La Luta Continua from Community Justice Exchange.

The launch of this zine comes at a moment when a massive global solidarity movement has emerged in support of the liberation of Palestine. In this webinar, a panel comprised of individuals who took part in the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s, as well as contemporary activists engaged in Palestinian solidarity organizing, will share perspectives on the parallels and differences in the struggles, look at lessons learned from the support for the Vietnamese, and assess how we might learn from that history. The discussion hopes to provoke answers on how we can mobilize more support for Palestinian freedom and build a global movement based on international solidarity and visions of true liberation.

This event is organized by Community Justice Exchange in partnership with Haymarket Books.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF89oS7CtL4

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Nov 13, 2025

Ukraine in the Crosshairs of the Superpowers

A perilous situation faces Ukraine in the aftermath of the recent Trump-Putin summit, in which the partition of its land and people were proposed without a Ukrainian voice at the table. This panel will discuss the regional and global ramifications of Russia’s war of occupation and ways to solidarize with those opposing it.

Speakers:

Tanya Vyhovsky is a Ukrainian American, clinical social worker, and a member of Vermont’s Progressive Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, and recently returned from a trip to Ukraine.

Ilya Budraitskis is a political researcher and socialist activist previously based in Moscow. His essay collection Dissidents among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and The Left in Post-Soviet Russia was published by Verso in 2022.

Denys Bondar, a native of Ukraine, is a professor of physics at Tulane University and is a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network.

Howie Hawkins, USN and Green Party presidential candidate 2020

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Ukraine Solidarity Network.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzHRol0nAhM

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Nov 14, 2025

Haymarket Presents: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on Theory of Water

Join us for the next event in the Haymarket Presents speakers series, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is joined by Uahikea Maile for a conversation on decolonial strategies that look to water as a catalyst for radical transformation. Co-sponsored by Pilsen Community Books

In her powerful new book, Theory of Water, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience—and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.

Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet—one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.

Theory of Water is a genre-bending exploration of that most elemental force–water–through Indigenous storytelling, personal memory, and the work of influential artists and writers.

Speakers:

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician and member of Alderville First Nation. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is the author of seven previous books, including Rehearsals for Living with Robyn Maynard, and the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies. Her newest book is Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead.

Dr. Uahikea Maile is a Kanaka Maoli scholar, organizer, and practitioner from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He is assistant professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Maile’s current book manuscript, Gifts of Sovereignty: Capitalism, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Politics in Hawaiʻi, examines the historical development and contemporary formation of settler colonial capitalism in Hawai‘i and gifts of sovereignty that seek to overturn it by issuing responsibilities for balancing relationships with ‘āina, the land and that who feeds.

This event is co-sponsored by Pilsen Community Books and Haymarket Books, and is part of the Haymarket Presents speakers series.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxWlazKmtQ4

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org