Join an educational panel featuring Iranian activists and scholars for a discussion of the struggle in Iran and what we can learn from it.
Chanting “Women, Life, Freedom,” protests continue to sweep Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iranian police.
As our rights in the U.S. are threatened by the government, politicians and the courts, Iranian women and their allies are pointing the way forward to winning rights in far more difficult circumstances. They are fighting for self-determination and the right to control their lives free of outside intervention, including from the United States.
We in the United States have a lot to learn from people in other countries about how to preserve and expand our rights. We embrace the right of all to control their lives free of outside intervention, including from the United States.
Please join Chicago for Abortion Rights for an educational panel featuring Iranian activists and scholars for an exciting discussion about their struggle to win women's rights to control their own bodies and much more!
Speakers:
Mahshid Mir studied medicine in Tehran and after graduation moved to the US for her postdoc fellowship in cardiology at Harvard. Her residency training in internal medicine was at St. Joseph Hospital in Chicago. Mir is a healer in her day job and an activist in her volunteer time, finding the meaning of life in advocating for the right thing and devoting her life to improvement.
Dr. Zohreh Ghavamshahidi is a retired Iranian-American political science professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she was chair of the Women's Studies and Anthropology Departments, and taught courses in international relations and international law. A Fulbright Scholar, she has written extensively about the intersections of gender and religious identities in the Middle East and in the diaspora, and their relationships to state building and common stereotypes.
Roya Karbakhsh is an Iranian-born artist. Her work reflects the inner strength of women as captured through their eyes. As an observer and critic, her detailed works illuminate the feelings of repression and the desire for the collapse of the traditional ‘ways of life’ that are demanded in Iran. Roya’s paintings portray women from different levels of existence, and are brought together in scenes that seem to take place outside the normal perceptions of time. Her focus on the eyes show the spiritual power and the indomitable spirit that resides within the soul of all women. Karbakhsh works as a freelance artist and art teacher in Chicago and surrounding suburbs.
Moderator: Mandy Medley is a socialist feminist and a member of Chicago for Abortion Rights.
This event is sponsored by Chicago For Abortion Rights and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/T9EfOQ7hhVg
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
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More Episodes
Mar 4, 2021
Panthers After the Party: A Conversation on Black Power Afterlives (2-9-21)
Join former Black Panther Party members for a discussion about how to best cultivate and sustain resistance.
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The Black Panther Party (BPP) has made an undeniable impact on the iconography, language, culture and practice of revolutionary struggles since the mid-1960s. Join former BPP members/political prisoners in a discussion about commitment, creativity, continuity, and how to best cultivate and sustain resistance.
Speakers include Ericka Huggins, Hank Jones, Sekou Odinga, and Akinsanya Kambon - all contributors to Black Panther Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party edited by Diane Fujino and Matef Harmachis. This event will be moderated by Nathaniel Moore of the Freedom Archives.
Black Power Afterlives is a powerful and wide-ranging collection examining the persistent impact of the Black Panther Party on subsequent liberation struggles. Purchase it 30% off here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1472-black-power-afterlives
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Speakers:
Ericka Huggins is an educator, leading Black Panther Party member, former political prisoner, human rights advocate, and poet. For 45 years Ericka has lectured in the United States and internationally on Restorative Practices and the role of spiritual practice in creating social change.
Henry “Hank” Jones is a former USA-held political prisoner. He has been an activist since 1955 when he felt compelled by the racist torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. Hank worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in San Francisco from 1963 then joined the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1967. In 2003 he was one of the former Panthers known as the San Francisco 8 targeted by Homeland Security. Hank continues to do social justice, political prisoner and human rights work.
Sekou Odinga is a founding member of the New York Black Panther Party and the International Section of the Black Panther Party. He was a soldier in the Black Liberation Army and a political prisoner for 33 years. Since exiting prison in 2014 he has been a public speaker, writer, political activist and founder of the North East Political Prisoner Coalition.
Akinsanya Kambon is former Lieutenant of Culture for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Sacramento Chapter. He created the Black Panther Coloring Book to bring attention to racial inequality and social injustice. After the Panther Party, Kambon dedicated himself to Pan-Africanism, teaching African spirituality, religions, history, and culture through multimedia art. In 1984 he founded Pan African Art in Long Beach, CA. Continuing the Panther ideology he provides free programs for youth in art, leadership and culture. His ceramic sculptures are presently on exhibition, “American Expressions/African Roots,” at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento.
Nathaniel Moore (moderator) is the archivist and co-director at the Freedom Archives. He holds degrees in African Studies, African-American Studies, and Library and Information Science. He has been active in prisoner support work for the past decade.
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Sponsored by Haymarket Books and The Freedom Archives.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Ko7Qy86zfNg
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, & Racist Nationalism w/ Robin DG Kelley & Harsha Walia
Join Harsha Walia and Robin D.G. Kelley for a discussion about racist border regimes, capitalism and migration, and the ascent of the far-right across the world, marking the release of Walia’s Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.
In Border and Rule, one of North America’s foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation.
Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change generating mass dispossession worldwide.
Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, ruling class, and racist nationalist rule.
Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world.
US readers, purchase Border and Rule 30% off here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1553-border-and-rule
Canadian readers, purchase here: https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/border-and-rule
UK readers, purchase here: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/border-and-rule-global-migration-capitalism-and-the-rise-of-racist-nationalism/9781642592696
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About the speakers:
Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013) and, most recently, Border and Rule. Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One Is Illegal and Women’s Memorial March Committee.
Robin D.G. Kelley is Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and the author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.
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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Fernwood Publishing.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/WRZNfkgSrXo
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Race, Class, and Policing: The Racial Economics of Mass Incarceration
A Spectre conversation with Charles Post, Peter Ikeler, and Calvin John Smiley on systemic racism and the policing of US capitalism.
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Over the last few decades, the US state has thrown millions of people, disproportionately Black and Latino, behind bars in one of the greatest waves of mass incarceration in history.
Join this webinar led by Spectre’s Charles Post, Peter Ikeler, and Calvin John Smiley who will examine the role of systemic racism in the policing of US capitalism.
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Speakers:
Charles Post is an editor of Spectre and a member of the NYC Labor Branch of DSA.
Peter Ikeler is a Brooklyn-based activist and scholar. He is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at SUNY Old Westbury.
Calvin John Smiley is a New York-based scholar and activist. He is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hunter College—CUNY.
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This event is sponsored by Spectre Journal and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/2B2G9zkZR6k
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Breakbeat Poets Live Presents: Lineage of Rain, A Celebration
Are you ready to celebrate Janel Pineda’s Lineage of Rain? With special guests: Kay Ulanday Barrett, féi hernandez, Vanessa Angélica Villareal AND Jihyun Yun?! Hosted by José Olivarez?! Y’all: get ready for the real.
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Speakers:
Janel Pineda is a Los-Angeles born Salvadoran poet and educator. She has performed her poetry internationally in both English and Spanish, and been published in LitHub, PANK, The BreakBeat Poets, Vol. 4: LatiNext, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the U.S. among others. As a Marshall Scholar, she holds an MA in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths, University of London. Janel’s debut poetry chapbook, Lineage of Rain, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books.
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. Barrett’s latest book More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award in Literature by the American Library Association. They have featured at The Lincoln Center, The U.N., Symphony Space, The Poetry Project, Princeton University, NYU, The Dodge Poetry Foundation, The Hemispheric Institute, and Brooklyn Museum. They’ve received fellowship invitations from MacDowell, Lambda Literary, Drunken Boat, VONA, The Home School, VCCA, Monson Arts, and Macondo. They are a 3x Pushcart Prize nominee and 2x Best of the Net nominee. They have written two poetry books, When The Chant Comes (Topside Press, 2016) and More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020). They currently reside in NYC/NJ and remix their mama’s recipes with the company of their jowly dog.
féi hernandez (b.1993 Chihuahua, México) is an Inglewood-raised immigrant trans non-binary visual artist, writer, and healer. Currently, they are the President of the Advisory Board for Gender Justice Los Angeles. They have been published in Poetry, Oxford Review of Books, Frontier, NPR’s Code Switch, BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, PANK Magazine amongst others. féi is the author of Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications, 2020).
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award and the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Rumpus, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Buzzfeed Reader, and Poetry Magazine, where her poem “f = [(root) (future)]” was honored with the 2019 Friends of Literature Prize. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.
Jihyun Yun is a Korean American poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. Winner of the 2019 Prairie Schooner Prize in poetry, her debut collection Some Area Always Hungry [an urgently beautiful collection] was published by University of Nebraska Press in September 2020. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Adroit, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere.
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods. In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Tz02p_U9-g4
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Doppelgangbanger Release: Camonghne Felix Vs Morgan Parker
Two dynamic BreakBeat poets go poem for poem on the themes that inspire them from Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Doppelgangbanger.
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This event is the first in a series of three events curated by Cortney Lamar Charleston in collaboration with The BreakBeat Poets and Haymarket Books, to celebrate the release of his new collection, Doppelgangbanger.
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Speakers:
Camonghne Felix, M.A. is a poet, a writer, speaker, & political strategist. She received an M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, & has received Fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo & Poets House. Formerly the Director of Surrogates & Strategic Communications at Elizabeth Warren for President, Camonghne is the VP of Strategic Communications at Blue State.
Her first full-length collection of poems, Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books), was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. The author of the chapbook Yolk, she was recently listed by Black Youth Project as a "Black Girl From the Future You Should Know." Felix's forthcoming collection of poems, Dyscalculia, and collection of essays, Let the Poets Govern, are forthcoming from One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker’s debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.”
Parker received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, and creator and host of the live talk show Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. She co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico. With Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. Parker lives in Los Angeles with her dog Shirley. She is a Sagittarius.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/LyIQRqJPixY
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
The Fight For the Future Organizing In and Around the Tech Industry (1-22-21)
Join Timnit Gebru, and other important scholars and activists for a discussion of how we resist the corporate power of the tech monopolies.
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Big Tech touches nearly every part of our lives. From vacuuming massive amounts of information about our movements and collecting images of our faces, to dictating where gigwork drivers should go and pushing warehouse workers to fulfill orders, big tech is pervasive in its reach and pernicious in its effect. But workers, organizers, and scholars are pushing back. We are forming unions and organizing collectives with their colleagues. We are sounding the alarm on the ways these technologies exacerbate structural racism and abate the rise of global fascism. And we are starting to win.
In December of 2020 Google fired Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of their Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team, after she refused to accept their attempted censorship of her co-authored article questioning the ethics and environmental impact of largescale AI language models. The termination sparked a new wave of organizing among Tech workers who quickly mobilized to defend Gebru against the corporate giant’s efforts to silence criticism of a key part of their business model. This organizing—following on the heels of the walk-outs against defense contracts and preceding this month’s announcement that Google workers have formed a union—offers important lessons about workers’ power within one of capitalism’s most profitable and important sectors.
Join Timnit Gebru, and other important scholars, activists, and organizers for a discussion of how we resist the corporate power of the tech monopolies who have increasing levels of control over our day to day lives.
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Speakers:
Dr. Timnit Gebru is a co-founder of Black in AI. She was Staff Research Scientist and Co-Lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team at Google before being terminated for demanding an justification for Google’s censorship of her co-authored on article questioning the environmental and ethical implications of large-scale AI language models.
Dr. Alex Hanna is a sociologist and Senior Research Scientist on the Ethical AI team at Google. Her work centers on origins of the training data which form the informational infrastructure of AI and the way these datasets exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality.
Charlton Mcilwain (@cmcilwain) is Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement & Development at New York University, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, and founder of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studie
Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Information Studies where she serves as the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She also holds appointments in African American Studies and Gender Studies. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
Adrienne Williams is a former charter school junior high teacher and Amazon delivery driver, turned labor organizer. Her ultimate goal is to force the powerful to abide by the same laws as the working class, in hopes that equity will lead to freely organizing and advocating for self which will create a happier society.
Meredeith Whittaker is a research professor at New York University, co-founder and faculty director of the AI Now Institute at NYU, and founder of Google’s Open Research group.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/vDtOxrV9Bqc
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks