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Podcast

Crisis and Uprising in Lebanon (8-21-20)

A discussion examining the roots of the explosion and mass protests currently unfolding in Lebanon with speakers on the ground in Beirut. ----- Please join the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) International Committee and Haymarket Books for this forum examining the momentous events currently unfolding in Lebanon, featuring three speakers on the ground in Beirut. The massive explosion that rocked Beirut on August 4 revealed the depths of the Lebanese ruling elite’s criminal mismanagement. The explosion and mass protests that followed come on the heels of a year-long economic crisis and popular revolt. Since October 17, 2019 the people of Lebanon have been in the streets again and again struggling to transform the country’s sectarian-oligarchic political and economic system. Now in the wake of the COVID crisis, economic collapse, and devastation caused by elite incompetence which has driven 300,000 people from their homes, the people of Lebanon are rising up again. What can we learn from Lebanon’s long uprising and how can we show solidarity? Speakers: Rima Majed is a writer, activist, and Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her research focuses on social movements, sectarianism, conflict and violence in the Middle East. She has written extensively on the political economy of sectarianism, protests and uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq, structural transformations and unemployment in postwar Lebanon, and the importance of labor organization. Her work has appeared in a range of academic journals and media outlets, including Social Forces, Mobilization, Global Dialogue, Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology, Al Jumhuriya, CNN, Middle East Eye, openDemocracy, and Al Jazeera English. She is currently working on a book that looks at sectarian capitalism and the shift in sectarian boundaries in Lebanon. Lara Bitar is a journalist in Beirut and the founding editor of The Public Source, a Beirut-based independent media organization that covers socioeconomic and environmental crises afflicting Lebanon since the onset of neoliberal governance in the 1990s and provides political commentary on events unfolding since October 17, 2019. Bassel Salloukh is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut. He is co-author of The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (2015) and Beyond the Arab Spring: Authoritarianism and Democratization in the Arab World (2012) and co-editor of Persistent Permeability? Regionalism, Localism, and Globalization in the Middle East (2004). Moderator: Shireen Akram-Boshar is a socialist activist and alum of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). She has organized around the question of the Syrian uprising and the relationship between Syrian and Palestinian struggles for liberation, as well as on anti-imperialism and solidarity with the revolts of the Middle East/North Africa region. Her writing has covered the repression of Palestine solidarity activists in the US, revolution and counterrevolution in the Middle East, Trump’s war on immigrants, and the fight against the far right. Shireen is part of the Middle East and Africa working group of DSA's International Committee. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Z2otEIX9Eu8 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

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May 18, 2026

Ukraine’s Anti-Imperialist Struggle

February 24th marked the fourth anniversary of Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Right now, it is bombing the country’s energy system, cutting off heat and electricity for millions in the depths of a bitterly cold winter. At the same time, the Trump administration is trying to bully Ukraine into a land for peace settlement that rewards Putin’s aggression and, with the willing collaboration of Ukraine’s oligarchs, puts the country up for sale to Western multinationals. Join this webinar to hear about Ukraine’s struggle.

Speakers:

Artem Chapeye is the author of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Guns (Washington Post 2025 best non-fiction) and The Ukraine. He is a writer, translator, activist, and, after the 2022 invasion, an enlisted member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine .

Tanya Vyhovsky is a Ukrainian American, Vermont State Senator, member of Vermont’s Progressive Party, and also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Denys Bondar is a native of Ukraine and an associate professor of physics at Tulane University as well as a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction.

May 18, 2026

We Are Each Other's Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities

Join editors and contributors of We Are Each Other's Liberation, a major anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarities between Black and Asian feminists.

A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, We Are Each Other's Liberation envisions a cross-racial and internationalist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Bringing together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, this collection introduces readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism.

Drawing out lessons from the revolutionary work of movement forebearers—including the Combahee River Collective, Claudia Jones, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Third World Women’s Alliance as well as struggles today—We Are Each Other’s Liberation offers an urgent call for the just future we might build together.

Get a copy of We Are Each Other's Liberation from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2519-we-are-each-other-s-liberation

Speakers:

Rachel Kuo is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, which engages intersectional feminist politics grounded within Asian diasporic communities.

Jaimee A. Swift is the creator and executive director of Black Women Radicals, dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender-expansive people’s radical activism in Africa and in the African diaspora.

TD Tso is a feminist writer, editor, cultural organizer, and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective.

Pratibha Parmar’s films have shaped the politics of feminist, queer, and diasporic visual cultures for over four decades. From experimental shorts to activist documentaries and feature-length works, Parmar’s cinematic language operates as an act of visual justice. Her practice engages the image as a site of struggle—challenging the power relations that determine who is seen, how they are represented, and what forms of visual expression are made possible. Her films are a site of narrative transformation, where memory, activism, and artistic expression converge to resist erasure and imagine new futures. Pratibha is a published author and editor of of several anthologies. The Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) and Sming Sming Books published, Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar in 2025.

Margo Okazawa-Rey is an activist-educator working on issues of militarism for over 30 years. She has long-standing activist commitments in South Korea and Palestine, with Du Re Bang and Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, respectively. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, its US group. She also hosts feminist radio program Women’s Magazine, broadcast on KPFA Berkeley California station of the Pacifica Radio network, and is known as DJ MOR Love and Joy, transnational feminist virtual dance party DJ.

Dr. Beverley Bryan is a lifelong educator and political activist, who is co-author of the classic book Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985) which detailed the experiences of Black women and their fight for equality from post-war up to 1980s Britain. Dr. Bryan was a founding member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD); a Saturday school organiser, a mainstream primary school teacher who pioneered Black history teaching in her classroom in the 1970s and a member of the British Black Panther Movement. A lifelong educator, Dr. Bryan is a retired Professor of Language Education from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.

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