Join feminists from Ukraine and around the world for a critical discussion on building solidarity against the war and global capitalism.
Since Russia’s full-scale imperialist invasion of Ukraine was launched by Vladimir Putin on February 24, Putin’s speeches, Russian state propaganda and the actual massacres and rapes committed by the Russian army have revealed the genocidal and misogynist character of this invasion. At the same time, the resistance of the Ukrainian people has been heroic. There have been many other expressions of opposition to this war as well, ranging from global protests to humanitarian aid convoys and initiatives by individuals and groups to help the resistance in Ukraine.
Ukrainian feminists have been an active part of the resistance both in actual combat and in various other invaluable capacities such as health care, child care, food production, communications and strategizing through social media as writers, leaders and spokeswomen. Among the more than five million Ukrainian refugees in Europe who are mostly women and children, many women are promoting valuable communication with the world.
The Russian Feminist Anti-War Resistance, though much smaller in comparison, has brought together forty different feminist groups inside Russia to oppose the invasion. They have also attempted to fight state disinformation by publicizing facts about the war through a Telegram channel. However, many of their members along with other opponents of the war within Russia have been arrested and silenced by the Russian police state and its campaign of disinformation.
Desperately needed is a coordinated global feminist solidarity effort to support the Ukrainian popular resistance and their struggle to maintain their country’s independence and democratic rights. This panel will argue that solidarity with Ukraine is critical for the present and future of women’s rights, anti-racism, labor rights, environmentalism, LGBTQ+ rights, and the right to truth and social justice seeking.
Speakers:
Yuliya Yurchenko is the author of Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketization to Armed Conflict (Pluto Press, 2018). She is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability Institute at the University of Greenwich, UK. She is also vice-chair of the Critical Political Economy Research Network.
Oksana Dutchak is a Ukrainian sociologist and co-editor of Commons: Journal of Social Criticism, a journal of the Ukrainian left. She is the deputy director of the Center for Social and Labor Research in Kyiv, where she has studied work and working conditions as well as gender inequalities. She is now a refugee.
Wonda Powell is Professor Emerita of History at Los Angeles Southwest College. She continues her work in Ethnic Studies.
Sasha Talaver is a Ph.D. candidate (Gender Studies, CEU, Vienna) and currently, she is a fellow at ZZF (Leibniz Center for contemporary History Potsdam). Sasha explores the role of the state-supported women’s organization in the Soviet Union, the Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee, in Soviet policy-making. Her previous research project was on the underground women's movement in Soviet Leningrad, Sasha has co-edited the book Feminist Samizdat: 40 Years After (Moscow: commonplace, 2020).
Frieda Afary is an Iranian American librarian and translator in Los Angeles and author of the forthcoming book Socialist Feminism: A New Approach (Pluto Press).
This event is sponsored by Commons: Journal of Social Criticism (Ukraine), New Politics Magazine, Internationalism From Below, and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/dXMnZ0uKzIA
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
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More Episodes
May 17, 2022
Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and M4BL w/ Donna Murch & Barbara Ransby
Join Donna Murch and Barbara Ransby for a conversation about state violence, racial capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives.
This is a book launch event for Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives by Donna Murch, available at Haymarketbooks.org.
Drawing its title from one of America's foremost revolutionaries, this collection of thought-provoking essays by award-winning Panther scholar Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration.
“Donna Murch is one of the sharpest, most incisive, and elegant writers on racism, radicalism, and struggle today. In this collection of essays assessing the current contours of the contemporary movement against racism in the United States, Murch combines a historian’s rigor with a cultural critic’s insights and the passionate expression of someone deeply engaged with the politics, debates, and key questions confronting activists and organizers today. This is a smart and sophisticated book that should be read and studied by everyone in search of answers to the profound crises that continue to confront this country.”—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
Get Assata Taught Me at Haymarket Books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1650-assata-taught-me
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Speakers:
Donna Murch is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and is the president of the New Brunswick chapter of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT. She is the author of Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives, and Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.
Barbara Ransby is a widely acclaimed historian of the Black Freedom Movement, award-winning author, and longtime activist. She is the John D. MacArthur Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Black Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She also directs the Social Justice Initiative, which promotes connections between academics and community organizers working on social justice. A founding member of Scholars for Social Justice, she works closely with activists in the Movement for Black Lives and The Rising Majority. She is an elected fellow in the Society of American Historians, as well as a recipient of the Angela Y. Davis Prize for public scholarship from the American Studies Association. Ransby is the author of multiple books, including the award-winning Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/iInE0_B3Rqk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 21, 2022
Intimate Partner Violence and Abolitionist Safety Planning
Join us for a lively exploration of the concept of "abolitionist safety planning" and supporting survivors from feminists and abolitionists.
In situations of domestic violence, survival can become criminalized in unexpected and chilling ways. However, because isolation is a central strategy of abuse, many survivors lack the community and resources needed to find support for both the violence as well as the risks of criminalization. What can concrete support for intimate partner violence survivors look like from a prison abolitionist perspective? What can it look like in practice to support survivors while being acutely aware of both the dangers of abuse and the overwhelming violence of the criminal legal system? Join us for a lively exploration of the concept of "abolitionist safety planning" from feminists and abolitionists, who will share their experiences, challenges, and lessons learned from supporting survivors in situations of active and ongoing violence.
Speakers:
Mariame Kaba (moderator) is an organizer, educator, curator, and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. Kaba is the author of We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, Missing Daddy, See You Soon and Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators with Shira Hassan.
Aracelia Aguilar (she/her) is one of the Empowerment Directors at DeafHope, providing direct services to Deaf DV/SV survivors. DeafHope recognizes the system barriers and institutional oppressions Deaf survivors navigate through to get to safety, and Aracelia's advocacy strongly focuses on putting the survivor at the center of the work. Aracelia has also received training under Sujatha Baliga and Mimi Kim to incorporate Restorative and Transformative Justice into the work of DeafHope. Aracelia provides Teen Dating Violence, Consent & Boundaries, and Sexual Violence presentations for Deaf teens at High Schools all over the Bay Area.
Rachel Caidor (she/her) has spent over 25 years providing direct service and organizational support to rape crisis and domestic violence survior support agencies in Chicago. She is a member of Love and Protect and supports the work of the Chicago Community Bond Fund.
Shira Hassan (she/her) is the founder, co-creator and principal consultant for Just Practice, a capacity building project for organizations and community members, activists and leaders working at the intersection of transformative justice, harm reduction and collective liberation. She is the former executive director of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, an organizing and grassroots movement building project led by and for young people of color that have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies.
Hyejin Shim (she/her) is a Building Community Power Fellow at Community Justice Exchange. She has over a decade's experience in supporting survivors of domestic and sexual violence, particularly immigrant, refugee, and criminalized survivors of abuse. Hyejin is a co-founder of Survived and Punished, a national organization dedicated to supporting criminalized and incarcerated survivors of gender-based violence.
This event is sponsored by Community Justice Exchange, Survived and Punished, Interrupting Criminalization, and Haymarket Books.
https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org
https://survivedandpunished.org
https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/QEVuJuBrj5A
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 23, 2022
Marx in Paris, 1871: Book Launch w/ Michael Löwy & more
Join Haymarket for a discussion celebrating the release of Olivier Besancenot and Michael Löwy’s Marx in Paris, 1871.
This deeply informed, eminently enjoyable work of historical fiction places Karl Marx in the thick of the unprecedented events of the Paris Commune. In disguise, employing imperfect but serviceable French, Karl and his eldest daughter, Jenny, encounter and debate many important figures of the movement, including Léo Frankel, Eugène Varlin, Charles Longuet, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, and Louise Michel, eventually returning to England with a profoundly changed sense of political possibility.
“This book adds to the tradition evolving since Marx and Lenin. Remarkably accessible, it refreshes, provokes, and thereby develops that movement still further.” — Richard Wolff
“This fictional account is a remarkable piece of historical criticism and revolutionary imagination.” —Enzo Traverso
Get Marx in Paris, 1871: Jenny’s “Blue Notebook” from Haymarket here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1770-marx-in-paris-1871
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Speakers:
Michael Löwy is emeritus research director at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). His books, including On Changing the World and the Politics of Combined and Uneven Development, have been translated into thirty languages.
Natalia Tylim is active in the NYC-DSA labor branch. She’s a restaurant worker, a founding member of DSA’s Restaurant Organizing Project, and a member of the Tempest Collective.
Valerio Arcary is a professor at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology in Brazil.
Todd Chretien (moderator) is an organizer, author, translator, and high school Spanish teacher. He has contributed to several books, including Socialist Strategy and Electoral Politics, and is editor of Eyewitnesses to the Russian Revolution.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/HdPcBkE7OlM
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 24, 2022
Social Work and Family Policing w/ Dorothy Roberts & Joyce McMillan
Join Dorothy E. Roberts, J.D. and Joyce McMillan for a conversation highlighting the harms within the so-called child welfare system.
Join Dorothy E. Roberts, J.D. and Joyce McMillan for a conversation highlighting the harms, and in particular the damage social workers have caused and continue to perpetuate, within the so-called child welfare system. "Social work and Family Policing" will draw on Professor Roberts' decades of research, culminating in her recent book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World and Joyce McMillan's years of abolitionist organizing against family policing. This conversation will explore the systemic oppression of the family policing system, especially against poor Black, Indigenous, and Latinae families. We will explore concrete ideas for how social workers and others working with families can adopt an abolitionist approach.
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Speakers:
Dorothy E. Roberts, J.D. is a Professor of Africana Studies, Law, and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law whose latest book is Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.
Joyce McMillan is a thought leader, advocate, activist, community organizer, and educator. Joyce is the founder and executive director of JMacForFamilies a nonprofit whose mission is to abolish the family policing system while creating concrete community resources in communities of color who are disproportionately affected by systems of harm.
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This event is sponsored by the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Q7xo9PsA7ic
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 27, 2022
You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Book Launch w/ Naomi Klein, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, & more
Join Seven Stories Press and Haymarket Books for a launch of Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s important new book, "You Have Not Yet Been Defeated".
“The text you are holding is living history.” — Naomi Klein, from the foreword to You Have Not Yet Been Defeated
Alaa Abd el-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade.
To celebrate the launch of the first English language collection of his essays, social media posts, and interviews, Alaa’s sister Sanaa Seif—herself an activist, filmmaker, and former political prisoner of the Sisi regime in Egypt—will be joined by Naomi Klein, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous for a conversation on the wide range of subjects covered in this important new book.
To order a copy of You Have Not Yet Been Defeated visit: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781644212455
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Speakers:
Sanaa Seif is an Egyptian filmmaker, producer and political activist. Imprisoned three times under the Sisi regime, she is currently touring the US promoting her imprisoned brother, Alaa Abd el Fattah's, newly published book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.
Sharif Abdel Kouddous is an independent journalist based in Cairo. He has reported from across the Arab world for a number of print and broadcast outlets including Democracy Now, and is currently an editor and reporter at Mada Masr, Egypt's leading independent media outlet.
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and international bestselling author of eight books including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough and On Fire, which have been translated into over 35 languages. She is Senior Correspondent for The Intercept and an inaugural Marielle Franco fellow of the Social Justice Initiative Portal Project at the University of Chicago. In 2018, she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies 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 and is the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice.
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, as well as the forthcoming Change Everything, and Abolition Geography. Her recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice; the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award; The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award; and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Seven Stories Press.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/QdUpDKJ7tKg
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 30, 2022
Feminists vs. the War Machine w/ Lux Magazine
Join Lux and Haymarket for a discussion about feminist internationalism in the face of war.
How do we practice feminist internationalism? The question has never been more urgent than today, as war rages in Ukraine.
This is a problem feminists have faced many times before. Remember when Laura Bush tried to sell the war in Afghanistan as women’s liberation? At the time, the left was hampered by thin relationships with our feminist counterparts in these countries, leaving the anti-war movement vulnerable to claims that women there really did want the help of the US military. Today, we’re committed to strengthening those relationships through conversations like this one.
The spring 2022 issue of Lux features several explorations of US empire from a feminist perspective. We talk with the women of the Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association about the US withdrawal, profile National Book Award-finalist poet Solmaz Sharif whose work confronts the War on Terror and her own exile from Iran, report on Okinawa’s multigenerational anti-US-base movement, and pay tribute to Puerto Rican radical Luisa Capetillo.
This event will take on the special role that feminism continues to play in anti-imperalist struggles, from the Middle East to East Asia to Latin America, connecting these struggles, and activists, across borders.
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Speakers:
Rozina Ali is a contributing writer at New York Times Magazine and a fellow at Type Media Center. Her writing covers the War on Terror, Islamophobia, and the Middle East and South Asia. She was previously on the staff of The New Yorker and The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. She is currently working on a book about the history of Islamophobia in the United States.
Margo Okazawa-Rey is a professor emerita at San Francisco State University and a transnational feminist activist. She works on militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women in the US and around the world. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, and was a founding member of the Combahee River Collective. Her recent publications include “‘Nation-izing’ Coalition and Solidarity Politics for US Anti-militarist Feminists,” and Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives (Oxford, 2020).
Sophie Pinkham is the author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine. She has written about Russian and Ukrainian culture and politics for The New York Review of Books, The New Left Review, The New Republic, The Nation, and many other publications. She produced the short documentary Balka, on women, drugs, and HIV in Ukraine.
Sarah Leonard (moderator) is editor-in-chief of Lux magazine. She is contributing editor to Dissent and The Nation. (@sarahrlnrd)
This event is sponsored by Lux magazine and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/vRuCwaSiHyg
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks