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
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
More Episodes
Nov 30, 2021
Sudan: Revolution & Counter-Revolution
Join us for this forum on the military coup in Sudan and the mass resistance against it.
In 2019, Sudan's mass democratic uprising toppled the country’s despised dictator, Omar al-Bashir, and secured a power sharing agreement between civilian leaders and the military with the promise of elections for a new government. In October 2021 the military reneged on that pledge and carried out a coup, arresting activists across the country. The people have now returned to the streets in mass numbers to defend their revolution.
Speakers:
Raga Makawi is a Sudanese democracy activist living in London. She is principal editor on the Debating Ideas platform at African Arguments, as well as leading publications and website administrator at the Rift Valley Institute (RVI). She is co-author of Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy: The Promise and Betrayal of a People's Revolution (forthcoming in March from Hurst Publishers) and Honorary Research Associate at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA). Previously, she was a commissioning editor with Zed Books.
Muzan Alneel is an activist and writer in Sudan. She is co-founder and Managing Director of the Innovation, Science and Technology Think Tank for People-Centered Development (ISTiNAD) in Khartoum and is a non-resident Fellow of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), focusing on a people-centric approach to economy, industry and the environment in Sudan. She also consults on industrial policy at the Industrial Research and Consultancy Center (IRCC) in Sudan.
Jean-Baptiste Gallopin is a researcher working on the Horn of Africa. The former Sudan researcher at Amnesty International, he has written on the role of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in Sudan’s counter-revolution and the political economy of the Sudanese transition. His writing has appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, the London Review of Books, Democracy & Security, and the Project on Middle East Political Science. He holds a PhD in sociology from Yale.
This event is co-sponsored by Internationalism from Below, the Tempest Collective, Africa is a Country, DSA AfroSocialists & Socialists of Color Caucus, Dissenters, New Politics, Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), Spring Magazine, and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/OihwYEacdpA
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Dec 1, 2021
Abolition Must Be Red: Ruth Wilson Gilmore & Stevie Wilson, Study and Struggle Critical Conversation
A conversation about centering anti-capitalism in the fight for abolition with Stevie Wilson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Study and Struggle organizes against criminalization and incarceration in Mississippi through mutual aid, political education, and community building. We provide a bilingual Spanish and English curriculum with discussion questions and reading materials, as well as financial support, to over 100 participants in radical study groups inside and outside prisons in Mississippi. These groups correspond with groups from across the country through our pen pal program. We regularly come together for online conversations hosted by Haymarket Books. The curriculum, built by a combination of currently- and formerly-incarcerated people, scholars, and community organizers, centers around the interrelationship between prison abolition and immigrant justice, with a particular attention to freedom struggles in Mississippi and the U.S. South.
For our Fall 2021 four month curriculum, we have borrowed and augmented Ruth Wilson Gilmore's argument that “abolition is about presence, not absence. It has to be green, and in order to be green, it has to be red (anti-capitalist), and in order to be red, it has to be international," having added “intersectional” as a fourth analytical category that we hope moves us beyond “single-issue” organizing. Study and Struggle provides a bilingual curriculum to all our imprisoned comrades in Mississippi with the support of our friends at 1977 Books and makes it fully available online for other study groups to use as they see fit.
Our Critical Conversations webinar series, hosted by Haymarket Books, will cover the themes for the upcoming month. Haymarket Books is an independent, radical, non-profit publisher.
For more on Study and Struggle: https://www.studyandstruggle.com/
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Our third webinar theme is "Red" and will be a conversation about what it means for abolition to be anti-capitalist, centering questions of labor, time, and unfreedom.
While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of commissary and mutual aid for our incarcerated participants.
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Speakers:
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press) and the forthcoming book Change Everything (Haymarket) . Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).
Stephen Wilson is a currently incarcerated, Black, queer writer, activist and student. He is a founding member of Dreaming Freedom Practicing Abolition, a network of self-organized prisoner study groups building abolitionist community behind and across prison walls. Follow him on Twitter @agitateorganize.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/E2OWObx5J9A
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Dec 2, 2021
Taking Children, Taking the Land: Nick Estes with Rebecca Nagle
Join Nick Estes and Rebecca Nagle for an urgent discussion of the ongoing attack on Indigenous children and Indigenous land.
Nick Estes puts into historical context recent headlines surrounding the discovery of mass graves of Native children at Canadian residential schools. The removal of Indigenous children from their communities and families has a long genocidal legacy that persists today, well beyond the boarding school era in Canada and the United States. The attack on Indigenous children is an attack on Indigenous sovereignty and land, and there is urgency to uphold protections that are under assault by the right wing, such as the Indian Child Welfare Act.
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Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019), coeditor with Jaskiran Dhillon of Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and coauthor with Melanie K. Yazzie, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, and David Correia of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press, 2021). In 2014 he cofounded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization, and he is cohost of The Red Nation podcast. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Intercept, Jacobin, Indian Country Today, High Country News, and other publications. Estes was an American Democracy Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University (2017–2018) and until 2021 was an assistant professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico. He joins the faculty of the University of Minnesota Department of American Indian Studies in 2022.
Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning journalist and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Nagle hosted Crooked Media’s podcast This Land, telling the story of a Supreme Court case about tribal land in Oklahoma, the small town murder that started the case, and the surprising connection to her own family history. You can find her writing on issues of Native representation and tribal sovereignty in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Guardian, USA Today, Teen Vogue, Indian Country Today, and other publications. Nagle was awarded the 2020 American Mosaic Journalism Prize for her reporting. She has also been named to the YBCA 100 and the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development’s Native American 40 under 40. Nagle lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
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This event is a partnership between Lannan Foundation and Haymarket Books.
Lannan Foundation's Readings & Conversations series features inspired writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as cultural freedom advocates with a social, political, and environmental justice focus. We are excited to offer these programs online to a global audience. Video and audio recordings of all events are available at lannan.org.
Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago. Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left.
Lannan Foundation is a family foundation dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity, and creativity through projects that support exceptional contemporary artists and writers, inspired Native activists in rural communities, and social justice advocates.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/rE52UHthmLM
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Dec 3, 2021
The Consequences of Capitalism with Noam Chomsky
Join Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone as they discuss their latest book, Consequences of Capitalism.
Consequences of Capitalism, a new book by Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone, exposes the deep, often unseen connections between neoliberal 'common sense' and structural power. In making these linkages, the will show how the current hegemony keeps social justice movements divided and marginalized. And, most importantly, we see how we can fight to overcome these divisions. Is there an alternative to capitalism? Chomsky and Waterstone will chart a critical map for a more just and sustainable society.
Get the book, Consequences of Capitalism: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1548-consequences-of-capitalism
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Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages. Recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Optimism Over Despair, and Internationalism of Extinction.
Marv Waterstone is Professor Emeritus in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona, where he has been a faculty member for over 30 years. He is also the former director of the University of Arizona Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies. His research and teaching focus on the Gramscian notions of hegemony and common sense, and their connections to social justice and progressive social change. His most recent books are Wageless Life: A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press; co-authored with Ian Shaw) and Geographic Thought: A Praxis Perspective (Routledge; co-edited with George Henderson).
Janine Jackson (host) is the program director at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) and producer/host of FAIR's syndicated weekly radio show CounterSpin. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Civil Rights Since 1787 (New York University Press) and Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism (New World Library).
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/7-D5jbtnzpI
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Dec 7, 2021
What's Happening in South Africa?
Join us for a conversation about the current crisis of political violence and inequality in South Africa.
The arrest in July of former president Jacob Zuma in connection with an investigation into widespread corruption sparked an eruption of unrest and violence, mainly in the province of his base, KwaZulu-Natal. Yet the upheaval reflects a broader crisis underpinned by the failures of the African National Congress (ANC) to deliver on the hopes of national liberation, and the neoliberalization and contradictions of the ANC in power. Soaring levels of unemployment and inequality – among the highest on the planet – have been exacerbated by the pandemic and government austerity policies. With the approach of municipal elections in November and an emerging new round of violence, our panelists from the online magazine Africa Is A Country will explore the roots of the crisis and the potential for building left organization and social forces capable of challenging the conditions facing the working class and the poor in South Africa today.
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Speakers:
Sean Jacobs is Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School. Founder and Editor of Africa is a Country. Author of Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization (2019). Originally from Cape Town
William Shoki is Staff Writer for Africa Is A Country, and is based in Johannesburg.
Facilitator:
Lee Wengraf is author of Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and the New Scramble for Africa (Haymarket Books, 2018, re-issued by Daraja Press in 2021). Contributing Editor at the Review of African Political Economy.
This event is sponsored by Africa Is A Country, Haymarket Books, Internationalism From Below, Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE).
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/elxz0EeOVww
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Dec 8, 2021
Salvage Live: The Tragedy of the Worker: Communism in the Age of Climate Catastrophe
Join Salvage and Haymarket Books for a discussion of how to avert ecological ruin through Salvage Communism
Facing irreversible climate change, the planet is en route to apocalypse.
To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren’t we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week?
What is to be done to create a planet where a communist horizon offers a new dawn to replace our planetary twilight? What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point?
Annie Olaloku-Teriba and Barnaby Raine will be joined by Richard Seymour and Rosie Warren, two members of the Salvage Collective, for a discussion of capitalism’s death drive, the left’s complicated entanglements with fossil fuels, the rising tide of fascism, and other themes related to the newly published Tragedy of the Worker.
Amidst the ruins and future wreckage of climate catastrophe they argue that Salvage Communism is our only path toward a liberated future on a habitable planet.
This discussion will be part of the ongoing Salvage Live events series, hosted by Haymarket Books.
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The Tragedy of the Worker is available from Verso Books. Order a copy here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3727-the-tragedy-of-the-worker
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Richard Seymour is the author of numerous works of non-fiction, most recently The Twittering Machine. His writing appears in the New York Times, London Review of Books, Guardian, Prospect, Jacobin, and innumerable other places, including his own Patreon.
Rosie Warren is an Editor at Verso and the Editor-in-Chief of Salvage.
Annie Olaloku-Teriba is a writer and podcaster whose research focuses on how neoliberalism has transformed the theory and practice of ‘race.’
Barnaby Raine is writing his PhD at Columbia University on visions of ending capitalism. He teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/AtVPnstgR_A
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks