For more than two decades, the movement to end mass incarceration has sought to challenge policing, criminalization and incarceration as harmful institutions. Amongst the harms perpetrated by these carceral systems is the punishment paradigm, a term that signifies the hegemonic power of punishment as it now exists in the U.S., embedded in culture, media, law, and policy. Despite a heightened consciousness around the negative impacts of punitive systems following the uprisings of 2020, the institutions of punishment have remained largely intact.
The Trump administration has significantly escalated the use of punishing institutions, like policing, detention, incarceration and deportation, to target migrants, dissidents, and all people at the margins. The federal government has also increased its use of punishment practices, like the threats to punish institutions for not complying with government demands, the outsourcing of punishment to everyday people, and the impunity offered for otherwise punishable offenses to those who side with the administration. This escalation has demonstrated the centrality of punishment to authoritarian regimes, and laid bare the devastating consequences for our communities.
Speakers:
Laura Whitehorn served 14+ years in federal prison for the “Resistance Conspiracy” case.” Released in 1999, she works in the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign (RAPPCampaign.com), and for the release of political prisoners. She edited the "The War Before" by late Black Panther political prisoner and organizer, Safiya Bukari (feministpress.org) and helped organized the 2014 Interference Archive exhibition "Self Determination Inside/Out" which showed how the struggles of incarcerated people affected and shaped social movements on the outside. With her partner, the writer Susie Day, she was part of the prison, labor, and academic delegation to Palestine in 2016.
Nadia Ben-Youssef (she/her) is the granddaughter of artists, refugees, and revolutionaries. A human rights lawyer by training, Nadia currently serves as the Advocacy Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal and advocacy organization working with social movements and communities under threat to dismantle racism, cisheteropatriarchy, economic oppression and abusive state practices. She has expertise in international human rights fora and mechanisms, and extensive experience developing advocacy strategies to influence U.S. decision-makers. Her work often centers at the intersection of art and advocacy, and she curates exhibits and artistic programming that document key human rights concerns, celebrate social movements, and allow creatives the space to chart the future. Central to Nadia's lifework is a commitment to the liberation of Palestine, and she is a proud co-founder of the Adalah Justice Project. Nadia is a member of the NY State bar, and serves on the Boards of Adalah Justice Project, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and Multitude Films.
Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She is also the author of the recently published book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket, 2024). Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11 and has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Teen Vogue, The Nation, Truthout, Inquest, and The Forge.
Charlene Allen is a writer and activist who works with community organizations to heal trauma and foster justice. She has been a restorative and healing justice practitioner for over a decade and advocates for policy changes to expand the use of community-based restorative practices. As a writer, Charlene’s debut novel, Play the Game, (HarperCollins, 2023), explores and advances restorative and healing justice practices in real life situations
Cameron W. Rasmussen is a social worker, researcher, educator, and facilitator. He is an assistant professor at the Thompson School of Social Work & Public Health at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa where he researches issues of accountability, violence, and justice, and the intersections of abolition and social work. Cameron is a Co-Editor of Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes and the Practice of Community Care and is a Collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work (NAASW).
Co-Sponsors: Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative, Center for Justice at Columbia University, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/CAyIxFkh7U4
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
As the new year begins, the student movement for Palestine is facing its first felony trial for a 2024 demonstration at Stanford University. If convicted of the felonies brought against them, the Stanford 11 face the possibility of over three years in prison and over $300,000 in restitution to Stanford University. On January 9, 2026, opening arguments commenced, marking the beginning of a lengthy trial anticipated to last between two to six weeks.
In recent years we have witnessed the criminalization of dissent ramp up nationwide, threatening both students and everyday people with detention, deportation, and political prosecutions. The chilling effect on our movements has been palpable, raising questions about what it means to act and sacrifice for our principles today. Amidst heightened repression, the US government's increasing impunity at home and abroad, and the genocide in Gaza still unabated by a 'ceasefire'—how can we continue to act in solidarity and defend our movement?
Speakers:
Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian student organizer and Columbia graduate student who was abducted from his home and from his then 8-month pregnant wife by ICE agents in March 2025. He spent three months in immigration detention, continuing to speak out from behind bars for Palestine as well as others held alongside him in ICE custody. A judge ordered his release in June 2025. However, Mahmoud's case remains pending: the federal government immediately appealed the decision, and is still fighting to deport him. Since his release, Mahmoud has filed a lawsuit demanding the Trump administration release its communications with the Zionist groups that contributed to his arrest, detention, and attempted deportation.
Germán González is an organizer with Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a fourth year student at Stanford University, and a defendant with the Stanford 11. They are completing a degree in Urban Studies, with hopes of working in local government and continuing his revolutionary organizing.
Hatem Bazian is a longtime Palestinian community activist and academic. He is the co-founder and Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College, the first accredited Muslim Liberal Arts College in the United States. Professor Bazian is a lecturer in the Departments of Near Eastern and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. For decades, his leadership and community work have helped nurture and build up the national solidarity movement for Palestine: Professor Bazian was also a founding member of the first Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at UC Berkeley, and he continues to lend his support and guidance as the movement grows.
Loubna Qutami is a Palestinian community organizer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA. She is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective.
Tori Porell is a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal. She provides legal advice and advocacy support to activists in the movement for Palestinian liberation on issues ranging from free speech violations, discrimination and disciplinary charges to doxxing, threats, and academic freedom.
This event is organized by Haymarket Books, Stanford 11 Defense Committee, Palestine Legal, Palestinian Youth Movement, Palestinian Feminist Collective, and Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine.
The US military build up in the Caribbean and its aggression towards Venezuela are part of the Trump regime’s strategy of renewed American dominance and interventionism in the Western Hemisphere. Join Center for Political Education, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, and Haymarket Books for an important conversation on the new “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine and how US imperialism threatens to bring war and economic instability across the region.
Speakers:
Marisol LeBrón is an Associate Professor in Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching focus on social inequality, policing, violence, and protest. She is the author of Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019) and Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021).
Jorge E. Cuéllar is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on the histories, politics, and daily life of modern Central America. At present, he is finishing his first book titled, Everyday Life and Everyday Death in El Salvador (Duke UP), a grounded study of the Central American nation's postwar to "post-postwar" transition. Cuéllar is appointed Assistant Professor of Central American Studies in the Department of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College and is a member of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) Editorial Committee.
Alex Aviña is Associate Professor of History in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University (ASU). His research focuses on twentieth-century Mexico, with an emphasis on revolutionary movements, the Mexican Left, state violence and terrorism, immigration, and the history of narcotics production and trafficking.
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School, and Center for Political Education.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/GehPn9o3_cQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join us for a conversation with local organizers about how our community pushed back against attacks on our neighbors from federal border patrol agents last fall.
Over the course of several months, more than 250 Border Patrol agents were flown into Illinois to assist ICE in carrying out warrantless arrests and racially targeted sweeps. Community organizations documented at least 615 people who were unlawfully detained — a number expected to grow as additional cases are reviewed.
Although this particular surge force has since left Illinois, federal officials have made it clear that similar operations are likely to return. That makes it essential to take stock of what happened here, how our communities responded in real time, and what it means for the months ahead.
Speakers include Rey Wences from Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Antonio Gutierrez from Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) and Illinois State Senator Celina Villanueva, with a special poetry reading from Juliet DeJesus Alejandre.
This event is cosponsored by ICIRR, OCAD and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/OJ4Kk4yARb4
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join David Omotoso Stovall and Tara Betts as they discuss Stovall's latest book Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago. Marginalized communities often become understandably preoccupied with a city’s structured attempt to deem them disposable, making it difficult to see people experiencing the same suffering as potential comrades in struggle. Enemies are manufactured as the result of continued displacement, hyper-segregation, and dispossession. Under these impossible circumstances people are often quicker to punch each other before they identify the enemy as white supremacy and capitalism, creating a society where conflict is engineered.
Examining the long fight of Black people in Chicago to claim their humanity and thrive in a city while facing school closings, the destruction of public housing and oppressive law enforcement, Stovall argues that marginalized communities face unique structural challenges while being blamed for interpersonal conflict and labeled “violent” and deemed disposable. With a novel approach to the question of how state-sanctioned violence and abandonment impacts low-income communities, Engineered Conflict uses examples from Chicago’s recent history to shed light on the politics of disposability through housing instability, criminalization, and school closures. Looking at all three phenomena together allows readers to see how state policies designate some neighborhoods as unviable, where disinvestment furthers a rationale to contain members of these communities.
Looking at the many ways Black communities have resisted state violence and the work of local organizations to address marginalization, Engineered Conflict calls for a powerful movement against the displacement, disinvestment, and disposability of Chicago’s Black population. --------------------------------------------------------------
Speakers:
David Omotoso Stovall is a professor in the Department of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation and the Politics of Interruption.
Tara Betts is the author of Refuse to Disappear, Break the Habit, and Arc & Hue. She is a professor in the Peace, Conflict Studies, and Social Justice program at DePaul University and part of the faculty at the Solstice MFA program at Lasell University. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including This is the Honey, Choice Words, and The Overturning. Her short stories and essays have also appeared in numerous publications, including Octavia's Brood, Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, and The Breakbeat Poets.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/ZttfgSzf46I
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
It's clear, at this late hour of the climate crisis, that nothing short of revolution in some form can salvage the possibility of global justice. It's equally clear that a mere climate or climate-justice movement can't do this alone. What's required is not simply a more powerful "climate left" but a far more powerful left--a resurgent, revolutionary left--for which the total defeat of fascism and of fossil capital are understood as inseparable. Everything the left has fought for is now at stake.
Join Haymarket Books and Verso Books for an urgent conversation about climate catastrophe and the left, featuring:
Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, co-authors of The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It's Too Late
Thea Riofrancos, author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism
Host: Wen Stephenson, climate-justice correspondent for The Nation and author of Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe
Speakers:
Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change and Antipode. His latest book, with Andreas Malm, is The Long Heat.
Andreas Malm is Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of several acclaimed books, such as, with the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. His book How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an international bestseller and has been turned into a feature film. His latest book, with Wim Carton, is The Long Heat.
Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, the global lithium sector, green technologies, social movements, and the Latin American left. She is the author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025) and Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), and the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). Her publications have appeared in scholarly journals such as Global Environmental Politics, World Politics, and Perspectives on Politics, as well as in media outlets including The New York Times, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, n+1, Dissent, and more.
Wen Stephenson is the climate-justice correspondent for The Nation and a frequent contributor to The Baffler.. An independent journalist, essayist, and activist, he is the author of, most recently, Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe (Haymarket, 2025). His previous book, What We're Fighting for Now Is Each Other (Beacon, 2015), is a personal account of the pivotal early years of the US climate-justice movement. He has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. In 2010, he left his career in mainstream media and has since covered, engaged in, and helped organize nonviolent resistance to fossil capital.
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Verso Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/ppW3UEaFGA0
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join Dr. Rebecca Hall and Kyle T. Mays as they discuss and celebrate the new edition of Negro Liberation, a major work in the Black Communist tradition by worker-intellectual Harry Haywood.
In 1948, Harry Haywood, a leading member of the Communist Party USA, published Negro Liberation, a pathbreaking book that lays out his argument that the Black Belt South constitutes a distinct nation and an internal colony of U.S. imperialism. Applying a Marxist-Leninist lens to questions of nationalism, colonialism, and land distribution, Haywood lays out the dire stakes of Jim Crow violence and oppression and critiques the emptiness and insufficiency of liberal solutions. Along the way, he makes a powerful case for Black self-determination.
Framed by Rebecca Hall’s moving meditation on her father’s legacy and Charisse Burden-Stelly’s clear-eyed case for how Haywood reveals the contradiction between ruling-class politics and Black liberation today, this new edition of Negro Liberation is a must-read for anyone fighting against oppression.
Order the book here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2616-negro-liberation
More on Wake Productions: https://www.rebhallphd.org/
Speakers:
Rebecca Hall, JD PhD is an independent scholar, activist, and educator. Her paternal grandparents were born enslaved and she is the daughter of Harry Haywood. Dr. Hall writes and publishes on the history of race, gender, law, and resistance as well as articles on climate justice and intersectional feminist theory. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College, Berkeley Law, and University of Santa Cruz. Her most recent book, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (Simon & Schuster, 2021) has won multiple awards, and was a finalist for the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards and the Pen America Open Book Award. Wake has been listed as a Best Book of 2021 by NPR and The Washington Post, Forbes, Ms. Magazine, and has been released in eight languages. She has been a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute (2022-23) The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Stanford Humanities Center 2023-24). Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships.
Kyle T. Mays (he/him) is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) writer and scholar. He is a Professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History and the Associate Vice Provost of Inclusive Excellence at UCLA. In 2024 he was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of five books, including When We Are Kin: The History and Future of Afro-Indigenous Solidarity (Haymarket, 2026), Rethinking the Red Power Movement with Sam Hitchmough (Routledge, 2024), City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2021), and Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (SUNY Press, 2018).
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/pNL0AZDbuBE
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org