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Podcast

Iranian Women Show the World How to Fight for Our Rights

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

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Apr 21, 2025

The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration

Join us as we celebrate the launch of The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration edited by Brandon Shimoda and Brynn Saito. The event will begin with words from poet and concentration camp survivor Mitsuye Yamada followed by readings and conversation with Cathlin Goulding, Michael Ishii, Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Emily Mitamura, Paulette “Tkl' Un Yeik” Moreno, Carolyn Nakagawa, Michael Prior, and Anne Yukie Watanabe.

This event is co-sponsored by Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct action project of Japanese American social justice advocates and allies working to end detention sites and support directly impacted immigrant and refugee communities that are being targeted by racist, inhumane immigration policies.

Pick up a copy of The Gate of Memory here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/...

Intro song for live broadcast: "There Is No Moment In Which They Are Not With Me" by contributor Patrick Shiroishi off his album Evergreen

Speakers:

Cathlin Goulding is an educator and curriculum designer. A former public school teacher, she codirects YURI Education Project, an education consultancy that helps PK-12 educators teach and tell Asian American histories. Her grandparents and mother were incarcerated at the Jerome and Gila River camps. She lives in Queens, New York.

Michael Ishii is a healer, artist, and community organizer. His mother and her family were incarcerated at Minidoka concentration camp and his upstate NY relatives were massacred during WWII. Much of his life has been devoted to the work of nonviolence and healing multigenerational trauma related to Japanese American WWII incarceration.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year, and Mothersalt, forthcoming from Alice James Books in May. She teaches poetry and creative writing at Left Margin LIT in Berkeley, and her grandparents and great-grandparents were incarcerated at Rohwer and Lordsburg.

Emily Mitamura is a Yonsei poet and scholar of race, gender, empire, and film. With commitments to women of color and Third World feminisms, their work takes up archival, relational, and bodily hauntings in the afterlives of mass and colonial violence. Her family was incarcerated at Poston and Heart Mountain.

Paulette “Tkl' Un Yeik” Moreno is a civil rights leader, poet, and speaker. Her grandfather, George Kamachi Miyasato Sr, and her Uncle George Miyasato Jr, were incarcerated during World War II in Lordsburg, NM and Minidoka. Paulette and Harriet Miyasato Beleal, her mother, are journeying to share their vision of truth that reflects Worth.

Carolyn Nakagawa is a fourth-generation Anglo-Japanese Canadian poet and playwright who makes her home in the territory colonized as Vancouver, British Columbia. Her paternal grandparents were forcibly uprooted from Steveston and lived in Magna Bay and Westbank before returning to Vancouver in 1950. She is currently seeking a publisher for her full-length poetry manuscript.

Michael Prior is a poet and teacher. His grandparents and their families were incarcerated in Tashme, a camp located on the unceded land of the Coast Salish peoples. Prior’s most recent book of poems, Burning Province, won the 2021 BC & Yukon Book Prize for poetry and the 2020 Canada-Japan Literary Award.

Brynn Saito’s third collection of poetry, Under a Future Sky (Red Hen Press, 2023), was inspired by her visit with her father to Gila River, the place where her aunt, grandparents, and other family members were incarcerated. Brynn teaches at California State University, Fresno.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including The Grave on the Wall and The Afterlife Is Letting Go, both from City Lights. He had family in Heart Mountain, Poston, and Fort Missoula, where his grandfather was incarcerated under suspicion of being a spy for Japan.

Anne Yukie Watanabe (she/her) is a queer femme yonsei and shin-nisei nurse, organizer, peer counselor and writer living in Chicago. Her grandparents were incarcerated in Tashme and Lillooet in Canada. She is a founding member of Nikkei Uprising, a Nikkei group that organizes for collective liberation with an abolitionist and anti-imperialist lens.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Tsuru for Solidarity, and The Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation.


Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRd1HvGzSPk

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Apr 22, 2025

Trump's Hammer, Our Hope: An Emergency Town Hall

Join Naomi Klein, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Astra Taylor, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for an emergency town hall on the continuing attacks on both marginalized communities and on free speech at the hands of the current administration.

As events have continued to unfold at a blistering pace under the current Trump administration, it has remained crucial for our side to strategize about how we can respond to these conditions while defending those baring the brunt of this full out assault.

Speakers:

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author. She is a columnist with The Guardian. In 2018 she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University and is now Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. In September 2021 she joined the University of British Columbia as UBC Professor of Climate Justice (tenured) and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice. Her newest book is the New York Times-bestseller Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, just published in paperback.

Astra Taylor is a writer, filmmaker and political organizer. Her books include the American Book Award–winner The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, and, with Leah Hunt-Hendrix, Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea. She is a co-founder of The Debt Collective.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free. Her book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership was a semi-finalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. She co-edited, with Robin D. G. Kelley and Colin Kaepernick, Our History Has Always Been Contraband. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and is Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Chenjerai Kumanyika teaches nonfiction audio journalism and podcasting at New York University. He is the co-creator, co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, a podcast on the Civil War and is the creator and host of the new podcast, Empire City, an eight-part narrative series investigating the complicated and largely invisible history of the New York Police Department.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vP5p_oTmZU

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org


Apr 28, 2025

Criminalization: the Core of Authoritarianism, Fascism, and Resistance

Criminalization is not only a primary tool to suppress dissent, silence opposition, and enforce policies that consolidate and enforce power - it is at the core of how Right wing, authoritarian and fascist agendas, movements, and regimes are enacted, legitimized, and entrenched.

Interrupting criminalization - a political process that extends beyond criminal laws, policing, and punishment to a collective construction of categories of "others" framed as existential threats to an imagined and actual social order to be contained, expelled, and, ultimately eradicated - must therefore be at the core of our resistance.

Join panelists Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Herzing, and Scot Nakagawa in exploring the central role of criminalization in shaping the current and evolving political terrain, and the essential role of challenging criminalization and confronting carceral logics and systems in strategies for resistance and solidarity across movements to fight fascism and authoritarianism worldwide.

Speakers:

Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ organizing, and in movements against state violence and for racial, gender, reproductive, economic, environmental and migrant justice in the U.S., Canada, and internationally since the 1980s. Andrea is the co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color and Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies, and co-author of No More Police. A Case forAbolition and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.

Scot Nakagawa is a political strategist and organizer with over four decades of experience exploring questions of structural racism, white supremacy, and social justice. He is the co-founder and director of the 22nd Century Initiative, a national strategy and action hub building power at the intersection of opposition to authoritarianism and expanding democratic governance in the U.S.

Rachel Herzing is an organizer, activist, and educator fighting the violence of surveillance, policing and imprisonment. Herzing is co-author, with Justin Piché, of How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment (2024). Herzing is director of the Yarrow Institute for Organizing and Analysis, was executive director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left and progressive social movements; co-director of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex; and director of research and training at Creative Interventions, a community resource that developed interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services.

Ejeris Dixon is an organizer, writer, and strategist with 25 years of experience leading organizations within racial justice, LGBTQ, anti-violence, transformative justice and economic justice movements. They are the Founding Director of Ejerie Labs where they focus on building movement strategy towards creating transformative futures and curtailing rising fascism. Ejeris serves as the host of the Fascism Barometer, a podcast and learning hub that discusses fascism’s rise in the United States, and how to organize against it. For ten years Ejeris served as the Founding Executive Director of Vision Change Win Consulting, where they partnered with organizations throughout the United States and internationally to build their organizing and community safety infrastructure and capacity. Ejeris is also the co-editor of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha. Over the past twenty-five years Ejeris has directly worked on thousands of incidents of violence and directly organized around more than a hundred murders of Queer and Trans People of Color.

Woods Ervin is an organizer that has been working for over a decade in movements both for trans self-determination as well as for prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition. She has worked at both TGI Justice Project and Interrupting Criminalization. She is currently a co-director at Critical Resistance, an organization that launches campaigns and projects for PIC abolition, at which she’s been volunteering since 2010.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Interrupting Criminalization.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzuy7U1mdh4

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Apr 29, 2025

How MAGA is Winning Hearts & Minds Among the Progressive Base

Join us for a conversation with Dr. Daniel HoSang and Micah English with a response from longtime organizer and strategist Gihan Perara, moderated and introduced by Dr. Carmen Rojas.

How are conservative groups like Turning Point USA building new onramps to the right for young people, people of color, and other parts of the progressive base? How do their events, rallies, workshops, and social media spaces make direct appeals to identity, culture, and organizing issues that have long been the domain of the left? And what implications do these appeals and tactics have for left wing political strategy and practice?

A team of scholar activists attending right wing events for the last two years reports back on the surprising ways that the MAGA movement has built new inroads for people of color and other parts of the progressive base. How are they doing it and what challenges does it pose to progressive approaches to organizing and movement building?

Speakers:

Micah English is a PhD candidate at Yale University studying American politics, and an organizer with Unite Here Local 33. Micah researches Black politics, social movement engagement and mobilization, and their intersections with sexuality and gender.

Daniel Martinez HoSang is a professor of American Studies at Yale and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, The Politics of the Multiracial Right. He is the author or co-editor of six other books an social movements and racial justice and a current Race and Democracy Fellow with the Roosevelt Institute.

Gihan Perera is a Senior Fellow at the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity (PRE) and an experienced movement strategist with over 25 years of experience working at the intersection of racial justice, community organizing, and transformative philanthropy. As a thought leader and practitioner, he bridges the gap between grassroots movements and institutional philanthropy, offering critical analysis on power-building strategies in an increasingly complex political landscape.

Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Under her leadership, the foundation launched the prestigious Freedom Scholar award, committed to ensuring that a majority of MCF’s endowment is overseen by diverse managers, and since starting in 2020 granted more than $160M in funding to dozens of organizations doing the hard work of shifting power to those people who have long been excluded from having it.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfk8crNutnE

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Apr 30, 2025

Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass

Join Sarah Jones and Sarah Lazare in conversation around Jones' new book Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass. This event will take place at Haymarket House, and will also be live-streamed on our YouTube channel.

In a compelling blend of personal narrative and in-depth reporting, New York magazine senior writer Sarah Jones exposes the harsh reality of America’s racial and income inequality and the devastating impact of the pandemic on our nation’s most vulnerable people.

Sarah Jones delves into the lives of the essential workers, seniors, and people with disabilities who were disproportionately affected by COVID-19—not due to their age or profession, but because of the systemic inequality and poverty that left them exposed. She argues that America has abandoned a sacrificial underclass of millions, but insists that another future is possible. By addressing the pervasive issues of racial justice and public policy, Jones calls for a future where no one is seen as disposable again.

“Disposable is a massive work of journalism—and a masterful act of love. Both a scathing rebuke of corporate health care and a clear-eyed call to action, this book reminds us that we should not and cannot put the pandemic behind us.”

—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick.

Order a copy of Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass: https://bookshop.org/p/books/disposable-america-s-contempt-for-the-underclass-sarah-jones/21581827?ean=9781982197421&next=t&affiliate=1039

Speakers:

Sarah Jones is a senior writer for New York magazine, where she covers politics and religion. She was previously a staff writer for The New Republic and her work has been published by The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Dissent magazine. Jones won the 2019 Mirror Award for commentary and has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is active on social media @OneSarahJones. Originally from rural Washington County, Virginia, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Sarah Lazare is a reporter based in Chicago. She comes from a background in independent journalism for publications including The Intercept and Jacobin. A former editor for In These Times, staff writer for AlterNet and Common Dreams, Sarah co-edited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War.

This event is cosponsored by Haymarket Books, In These Times, and Pilsen Community Books.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loSbXlI9NDk

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

May 1, 2025

Who's Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler in Conversation with Lisa Wedeen

Join Judith Butler and Lisa Wedeen for a bold and essential conversation of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.

Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti–gender ideology movements” that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization—and even “man” himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence.

The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and trans-exclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.

An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless—a book whose verve and rigor only they could deliver.

“A profoundly urgent intervention.” —Naomi Klein

“A timely must-read for anyone actively invested in reimagining collective futurity.” —Claudia Rankine

Speakers:

Judith Butler is the author of several books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”; The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection; and The Force of Nonviolence. In addition to their numerous academic honors and publications, Butler has published editorials and reviews in a wide range of journals and newspapers, including The New York Times, Time, and the London Review of Books, and has been featured on radio programs and podcasts throughout the world. They live in Berkeley, California.

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College, Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and Associate Faculty in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). For this newest book, she received the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award (2020); the APSA’s inaugural Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s best book award (2020); the IPSA award for Concept Analysis in Political Science (2021); and the Gordon J. Laing Award for the book that brings the most distinction to the University of Chicago Press (2022). Wedeen’s co-edited volume with Joseph Masco, entitled Conspiracy/Theory was published in January 2024. Her edited volume with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth on reimagining cosmopolitanism will be published in 2025. She is now beginning work on a book on revolutionary disappointment and recalibration and another on interpretive methods in political theory.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Women & Children First.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y93iGH7Nurw

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org