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Study and Struggle Critical Conversation #2: Abolition Must Be Green

A conversation about centering climate justice, land, food sovereignty, and fighting environmental racism in the struggle for abolition. 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. 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/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our second webinar theme is "Green" and will be a conversation about what it means for abolition to be life-sustaining, and how abolition demands we center questions of climate justice, land, food sovereignty, and environmental racism. 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. Speakers: J.T. Roane is assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He currently serves as the lead of the Black Ecologies Initiative at ASU's Institute for Humanities Research. He is the former co-senior editor of Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). Roane's scholarly essays have appeared in Souls Journal, The Review of Black Political Economy, Current Research in Digital History and Signs. His work has also appeared in venues such as Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, Pacific Standard, and The Immanent Frame, Roane was 2020-2021 National Endowment for the Humanities/Mellon Foundation Research Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Bigg Villainus is an artist, musician, founder of Overthrow Media and a radical revolutionary who has been dedicated to radical struggle and revolutionary growth for over a decade. Currently an organizer with Fight Toxic Prisons they bring a lot of abolitionist and direct action history and experience to the table. As well as a lumpen proletariat perspective and Analysis. They are firm advocates of bottom-up organizing. As well as having a firm decolonial Praxis. They have a long history of organizing with groups such as black Frontline movement, outside agitators, black lives matter, occupied, and many more. They are currently on a national tour, networking, spreading abolition and music. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/PH6CWhLKODY Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

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Feb 25, 2021

Capitalism Is The Disease Mike Davis on the Coronavirus Crisis (3-31-20)

An online teach-in with renowned activist-scholar Mike Davis, author of numerous books, including The Monster at Our Door, In Praise of Barbarians, and the forthcoming Set the Night on Fire. Fifteen years ago, in his prescient book, The Monster At Our Door, Mike Davis warned that a viral catastrophe was being cooked up in the toxic vat built by the combined dangers of global capitalist production, ecological devastation, and the intentional, politically motivated neglect of public services the world over. As coronavirus continues to spread, largely unabated, we are witnessing both profound acts of solidarity among working people, and the grotesque depths to which the ruling class is willing to sink for the sake of maintaining their profits. And these are only the early days of what will likely become a medical Katrina. The pandemic has shown that capitalist globalization is biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public health infrastructure, and we can say for sure that such an infrastructure will never exist until peoples’ movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit health care. Doing so will demand an independent socialist design for human survival well beyond even a Second New Deal. In this virtual teach-in, Mike Davis will offer his appraisal of the crisis so far, discuss the urgent need for international solidarity to end this (and future) pandemics, and take questions from our digital audience. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/xOp9G5hoQnM
Mar 1, 2021

After Bernie—Amidst Pandemic with Naomi Klein and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor(4-9-20)

Join Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Astra Taylor, and Hari Kondabolu for a discussion of what comes next after Bernie. The current crisis is laying bare the extreme injustices and inequalities of our economic and social system. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/6Gi5qGHRJ9c Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks We are in a battle of visions for how we’re going to respond to this crisis. We will either be catapulted backward to an even more brutal winner-takes-all system — or this will be a wake-up call. Ideas that were dismissed as too radical just a week ago are starting to seem like the only reasonable path to get out of this crisis and prevent future ones. We need to use every tool that we have that allows us to hear each other’s voices, to read each other’s words, to see each other’s faces, even if it’s just on screens, to stay organized and stay connected. We have to create spaces where we’re able to deliberate and strategize about what it means to protect our neighbors, our rights, and our planet. We have to have the confidence to say this is the moment when we change everything. Sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Leap, Debt Collective, and Democratic Socialists of America Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/6Gi5qGHRJ9c Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 1, 2021

Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (4-14-20)

Join us for the launch of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, a landmark literary collection of essays, poems, and prose that are a testament to the profound political power of defying shame. Haymarket Books convenes a panel of contributors from this powerful volume for a conversation on the personal-political fight for abortion rights. With reading and discussions by: Annie Finch, poet and editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion Soniah Kamal, author of Unmarriageable Desiree Cooper, writer and producer of the short film "The Choice" Alexis Quinlan, poet and educator Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/V-tfKGuxbj0 Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 1, 2021

Covid-19, Decarceration, and Abolition with Ruth Wilson Gilmore & Naomi Murakawa (4-16-20)

How should abolitionists respond to the coronavirus pandemic? Join Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Naomi Murakawa for an urgent discussion of abolition and the pandemic. How can we achieve urgently needed decarceration for the millions of people caged in jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers? Abolitionism doesn’t just say no to police, prisons, border control, and the current punishment system. It requires persistent organizing for what we need, organizing that’s already present in the efforts people cobble together to achieve access to schools, health care and housing, art and meaningful work, and freedom from violence and want. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Her forthcoming Haymarket Books title, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, is the inaugural book in the new Abolitionist Papers book series, edited by Naomi Murakawa. Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/hf3f5i9vJNM Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 1, 2021

Too Much Midnight with Krista Franklin, Mahogany L. Browne & more (4-19-20)

Haymarket Books, Bowery Poetry, and The BreakBeat Poets present: Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight Krista Franklin will be joined by special guests Aricka Foreman, and avery r. young, for an event to launch her new book Too Much Midnight hosted by Mahogany L. Browne While this event is free for all to attend, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to support the work of these artists. All donations received will be shared between the performers. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1460-too-much-midnight ____________ Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight draws on Pan African histories, Black Surrealism, Afrofuturism, pop culture, art history, and the historical and present-day micro-to-macro violence inflicted upon Black people and other people of color, working to forge imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions of liberation. Featuring 30 poems, 30 artworks, an author statement and an interview, Too Much Midnight chronicles the intersections between art and life, art and writing, the historical and the speculative, cultural and personal identity, the magical and the mundane. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/t2KanIZv0O0 Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 1, 2021

Remaking Schools in the Time of Coronavirus (4-22-20)

Three leading voices in the struggle for education justice (Jesse Hagopian, Wayne Au, and Noliwe Rooks) discuss the remaking of public schools in the time of crisis. What has this crisis taught us about the role of public schools in society? What have we learned about what really matters in education during this time? When we re-open schools, what kind of education will we have, will we demand? The Covid-19 crisis has upended public education around the country. Join three radical education activists in conversation about what this crisis means for public education now and how moving forward we can continue to fight for the schools our students deserve. Jesse Hagopian is an award-winning educator and a leading voice on issues of educational equity and social justice unionism. He is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine and is the co-editor of Teaching for Black Lives, and editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing. Noliwe Rooks is the W.E.B Du Bois Professor of Literature at Cornell University and the author of Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education which won an award for non-fiction from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Wayne Au is a Professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He is a long-time Rethinking Schools editor, co-editor of Teaching for Black Lives and author of A Marxist Education: Learning to Change the World. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/rDnP663yEbM Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks