In this inaugural event in the Haymarket Presents speakers series, best-selling author Malcolm Harris will be joined by activist-historian Gabriel Winant for a conversation on Harris’s new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis. Co-sponsored by Pilsen Community Books.

Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying “blah blah blah.” Something has to change—but what, and how?

In What's Left, Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies—progressive, socialist, and revolutionary—that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What's Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns.

Harris and Winant will examine where we stand, explore how we got here, and try to chart a way toward a brighter future.

Get the book: https://pilsencommunitybooks.com/item/2-gUryvjjJ_i3fKieCwDVw

Speakers:

Malcolm Harris is the author of the national bestseller Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials; and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History.

Gabriel Winant is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, a member of the executive council of AAUP/AFT Local 6741, a member of the Dissent editorial board, and author of The Next Shift.

This event is co-sponsored by Pilsen Community Books and Haymarket Books, and is part of the Haymarket Presents speakers series.

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

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Leanne Betasamosake Simpson for a conversation with Sarah Haley to celebrate the release of her new book Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead.

In her powerful new book, Theory of Water, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience—and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.

Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet—one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.

Theory of Water is a genre-bending exploration of that most elemental force–water–through Indigenous storytelling, personal memory, and the work of influential artists and writers.

Speakers:

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician and member of Alderville First Nation. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is the author of seven previous books, including Rehearsals for Living with Robyn Maynard, and the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies. Her newest book is Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead.

Sarah Haley’s work focuses on questions of carceral gendering and the long history of Black women’s ensnarement in U.S. prison regimes as well as their historical and ongoing opposition to carceral power. Her research interests include gender and carceral history, Black feminist history and theory, queer studies, prison abolition, and feminist archival methods. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, published in 2016. Her essays and articles have appeared in edited volumes as well as in journals including Signs, The Journal of African American History, GLQ, Souls, and Women & Performance. She is working on a book titled The Carceral Interior: A Black Feminist Study of American Punishment, 1966-2016. She is associate professor of gender studies and history at Columbia University and has been active in abolitionist and labor movements and currently organizes with Scholars for Social Justice.

Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2533-theory-of-water

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4_5HpR9GOY

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

We are currently witnessing the dismantling of environmental policies and a reversal of climate commitments on a large scale. But what kind of environmentalism do we really want, and for whom? Environmentalism is not about switching out plastic for paper straws, electric vehicles, carbon-neutral yachts, or eco-friendly waterfront real-estate.

It’s not about meeting the desires of a smoothie-slurping “green” class whose lives depend on increasingly precarious working class livelihoods. Environmentalism is about building class power to resist the decimation of life on our planet by a privileged minority.

Join Ashley Dawson, Emma River-Roberts, Aaron Vansintjan, and Vijay Kolinjivadi for a discussion on how to reject the “sustainability class” and instead build a working class environmentalism.

Order The Sustainability Class here: http://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781620977439

Speakers:

Emma River-Roberts is the Founder and Co-Director of the international non-profit the Working Class Climate Alliance, as well as a PhD Researcher at Goldsmiths University, specialising in working class environmentalism. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He has published numerous books on aspects of the fight for climate and environmental justice, including, most recently, Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket, 2024) and Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2024). Dawson is the Climate Justice Fellow for 2024-25 at the arts organization Culture Push, and is also a faculty fellow at Social Practice CUNY. He is currently creating a series of short documentary films about the toxic impact of energy infrastructure in NYC.

Aaron Vansintjan was born in Ghent, Belgium and lives in Montreal, Canada. After studying philosophy and natural resource sciences, he became involved in Montreal’s artist and activist community, running an underground venue and organizing around food and housing justice. Eventually, a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London took him to Barcelona and Hanoi, leading him to write essays on how people build and transform their world, through food, social movements, and political imagination. He has since co-authored two books: The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism (Verso) and, with Vijay Kolinjivadi, The Sustainability Class: How to take back our future from lifestyle environmentalists (The New Press). His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Time, Newsweek, Al Jazeera, and The Conversation.

Vijay Kolinjivadi is originally from Cincinnati, Ohio and born from two immigrant parents from Tamil Nadu, India. For over a decade, Vijay has worked as a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, covering UN multilateral environmental processes around the world. He now teaches community economic development and ecological economics at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. His research explores the social impacts of putting a monetary price on the conservation of nature. He has published on environmental politics for Aljazeera, The New Internationalist, Green European Journal, Newsweek, and Science for the People, among others. He is the co-author of The Sustainability Class: How to take back our future from lifestyle environmentalists, for The New Press.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuCa9KwQbBg

Buy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org

Join Dean Spade and Eman Abdelhadi in conversation about Spade's new book Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together.

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

More about the book:

Lifelong activist and educator Dean Spade dares us to decide that our interpersonal actions are not separate from our politics of liberation and resistance. Many activist projects and resistance groups fall apart because people treat each other poorly, trying desperately to live out the cultural myths about dating and relationships that we are fed from an early age.

How do we divest from the idea that one romantic partner will be the solution to all our problems? How do we bring our best thinking about freedom and justice into step with our desires for healing and connection?

Love in a F*cked-Up World is a resounding call to action and a practical manifesto for how to combat cultural scripts and take our relationships into our own hands, preparing us for the work of changing the world.

Order a copy of Love in a F*cked Up World: https://www.pilsencommunitybooks.com/item/G_f3vj27PIekwP3GLS_dlQ

Speakers:

Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He is a professor at the Seattle University School of Law. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. In 2015, Dean released a one-hour video documentary, Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!, which can be watched free online with English captions or subtitles in several languages. Dean’s book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next) was published by Verso Press in October 2020. It is also out in Spanish, Czech, German, Catalan, Italian, Thai, Korean, and Portuguese.

Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhYW-DTw9C0

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join editors and contributors to the new Palestinian poetry anthology Heaven Looks Like Us for a virtual reading in commemoration of Nakba Day.

A love letter to Palestinian ancestors, their descendants, and their land, to all anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, to a history that will never be forgotten, and to a future in which there thrives a free, free Palestine.

Poetry has always served as a mode of resistance in Palestinian culture. In defiance of dispossession and decades of military siege, of a nakba that never ended, of historical and cultural obfuscation, of unrelenting violence and thousands of martyred people, the “power to narrate,” as Edward Said wrote, remains a necessary tool for self-determination. The poems collected here reclaim that power, bridging borders, languages, and generations to forge new conversations around resistance and liberation.

Heaven Looks Like Us is a battle-cry against the annihilation of a people. As Palestinian history remains haunted by exile, violence, and grief, so, too, are the poems in this anthology. And yet, editors George Abraham and Noor Hindi present these realities alongside other themes that are also true: queer and feminist perspectives, eco-poetry, meditations on love and time, and lineages of protest. This anthology dares to imagine a future beyond a nation-state for Palestinian people everywhere.

Order Heaven Looks Like Us: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2527-heaven-looks-like-us

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHwVoB52yQw

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join us for an event in the Haymarket Presents speakers series, as Silky Shah is joined by historian Charlotte E. Rosen for a conversation on Shah’s book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition.

Co-sponsored by Organized Communities Against Deportations, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago and Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama’s record-level deportations, Trump’s immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition.

Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah’s personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement’s strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings.

Shah and Rosen will explore how to bridge the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.

Silky Shah has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2009, she joined the staff of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigrant detention in the United States, and now serves as its executive director. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Truthout, Teen Vogue, Inquest, and The Forge and in the edited volumes, The Jail is Everywhere (Verso, 2024), Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, 2024), and Transformative Planning (Black Rose Books, 2020). She has also appeared in numerous national and local media outlets including The Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC.

Charlotte E. Rosen is a historian and writer based in Chicago. She is also the Programming and Events Coordinator at Haymarket Books.

Order Unbuild Walls: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2213-unbuild-walls

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

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org