Join the Haymarket Book Club to take 50% off Everything!

Podcast

Criminalization: the Core of Authoritarianism, Fascism, and Resistance

Criminalization is not only a primary tool to suppress dissent, silence opposition, and enforce policies that consolidate and enforce power - it is at the core of how Right wing, authoritarian and fascist agendas, movements, and regimes are enacted, legitimized, and entrenched.

Interrupting criminalization - a political process that extends beyond criminal laws, policing, and punishment to a collective construction of categories of "others" framed as existential threats to an imagined and actual social order to be contained, expelled, and, ultimately eradicated - must therefore be at the core of our resistance.

Join panelists Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Herzing, and Scot Nakagawa in exploring the central role of criminalization in shaping the current and evolving political terrain, and the essential role of challenging criminalization and confronting carceral logics and systems in strategies for resistance and solidarity across movements to fight fascism and authoritarianism worldwide.

Speakers:

Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ organizing, and in movements against state violence and for racial, gender, reproductive, economic, environmental and migrant justice in the U.S., Canada, and internationally since the 1980s. Andrea is the co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color and Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies, and co-author of No More Police. A Case forAbolition and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.

Scot Nakagawa is a political strategist and organizer with over four decades of experience exploring questions of structural racism, white supremacy, and social justice. He is the co-founder and director of the 22nd Century Initiative, a national strategy and action hub building power at the intersection of opposition to authoritarianism and expanding democratic governance in the U.S.

Rachel Herzing is an organizer, activist, and educator fighting the violence of surveillance, policing and imprisonment. Herzing is co-author, with Justin Piché, of How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment (2024). Herzing is director of the Yarrow Institute for Organizing and Analysis, was executive director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left and progressive social movements; co-director of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex; and director of research and training at Creative Interventions, a community resource that developed interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services.

Ejeris Dixon is an organizer, writer, and strategist with 25 years of experience leading organizations within racial justice, LGBTQ, anti-violence, transformative justice and economic justice movements. They are the Founding Director of Ejerie Labs where they focus on building movement strategy towards creating transformative futures and curtailing rising fascism. Ejeris serves as the host of the Fascism Barometer, a podcast and learning hub that discusses fascism’s rise in the United States, and how to organize against it. For ten years Ejeris served as the Founding Executive Director of Vision Change Win Consulting, where they partnered with organizations throughout the United States and internationally to build their organizing and community safety infrastructure and capacity. Ejeris is also the co-editor of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha. Over the past twenty-five years Ejeris has directly worked on thousands of incidents of violence and directly organized around more than a hundred murders of Queer and Trans People of Color.

Woods Ervin is an organizer that has been working for over a decade in movements both for trans self-determination as well as for prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition. She has worked at both TGI Justice Project and Interrupting Criminalization. She is currently a co-director at Critical Resistance, an organization that launches campaigns and projects for PIC abolition, at which she’s been volunteering since 2010.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Interrupting Criminalization.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzuy7U1mdh4

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

More Episodes

Mar 17, 2022

From Data Criminalization to Prison Abolition

Join abolitionist organizers connecting the dots between surveillance capitalism, border imperialism, and neoliberal prison reforms. A dominant mode of our time, data analysis and prediction are part of a longstanding historical process of racial and national profiling, management and control in the US. In a new report, From Data Criminalization to Prison Abolition, Community Justice Exchange examines the interlocked machineries of migrant surveillance and describes processes of “data criminalization:” the creation, archiving, theft, resale and analysis of datasets that mark some of us as threats and risks, based on data culled about us from state and commercial sources. How might we fight data criminalization on our terms? Rather than being drawn into arguments about privacy, accuracy, or the theatrics of consumer consent and regulatory oversight, we assert that these datasets are inherently illegitimate, and creation and use of them should be abolished. What if we organized our resistance based on that premise? Speakers: J. Khadijah Abdurahman is an abolitionist whose research focus is predictive analytics in the US child welfare system and the Horn of Africa. They are the founder of We Be Imagining, a public interest technology project at Columbia University’s INCITE Center and The American Assembly’s Democracy and Trust Program. WBI draws on the Black radical tradition to develop public technology through infusing academic discourse with the performance arts in partnership with community based organizations. Jacinta González is a senior campaign organizer with Mijente and leads their #NoTechforICE campaign. Previously, she worked at PODER in México, organizing the Río Sonora River Basin committees against water contamination by the mining industry. Jacinta was the lead organizer for the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice Congress of Day Laborers (2007-2014). In Louisiana Gonzalez helped establish a base of day laborers and undocumented families dedicated to building worker power, advancing racial justice, and organizing against deportations in post-Katrina New Orleans. Sarah T. Hamid (she/her/no preference) is an abolitionist and organizer working in the Pacific Northwest. She leads the policing technology campaign at the Carceral Tech Resistance Network: an archiving and knowledge sharing network for organizers building community defense against the design, roll-out, and experimentation of carceral technologies. Sarah co-founded the inside/outside research collaboration, the Prison Tech Research Group, and helped create the #8toAbolition campaign—a police and prison abolition resource built during last summer’s uprisings against state violence. Puck Lo (she/they) is the Research Director of Community Justice Exchange, an abolitionist organization that supports organizers to fight all forms of incarceration and social control. They spent the last year examining Department of Homeland Security's data regimes and other expanding systems of corporeal theft and predictive criminalization. Harsha Walia (moderator) is the author of Border and Rule and Undoing Border Imperialism and an organizer rooted in migrant justice, abolitionist, antiracist, feminist, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist movements for over two decades. This event is sponsored by Community Justice Exchange and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/FTg20fo3nyk Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now
Mar 18, 2022

Class Struggle Unionism with Joe Burns

Join veteran labor organizers Joe Burns and Barbara Madeloni for a discussion about how to rebuild a fighting labor movement. Celebrate the launch of Joe Burns' new book, Class Struggle Unionism, with a conversation between Burns and Barbara Madeloni about how we can create a more militant, democratic and fighting labor movement. How should workers relate to the union establishment which often does not want to fight? How much should the labor movement prioritize broader class demands versus shop floor struggle? How can we revive militancy and union power in the face of corporate power and a legal system set up against us? Class struggle unionism is the belief that our union struggle exists within a larger struggle between an exploiting billionaire class and the working class which actually produces the goods and services in society. Order a copy of Class Struggle Unionism for 30% off HERE: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1767-class-struggle-unionism "There is nothing more essential for the resurgence of the labor movement than cutting through the racial, social, gender and political divisions driven by the corporate class to deny working class power and keep workers in competition with each other. Class Struggle Unionism not only defines the urgency of our common struggle, it's a textbook on how to organize around our common demands right where we work in order to build a movement strong enough to realize an inclusive economy and thriving democracy." —Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO --------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Joe Burns is a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer with over 25 years experience negotiating labor agreements. He is currently the Director of Collective Bargaining for the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA. He graduated from the New York University School of Law. Prior to law school he worked in a public sector hospital and was president of his AFSCME Local. He is the author of Class Struggle Unionism, Strike Back: Rediscovering Militant Tactics to Fight the Attacks on Public Employee Unions and Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America. Barbara Madeloni is a staff organizer and writer at Labor Notes. Prior to coming to Labor Notes she was the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, where she was elected out of a left caucus, Educators for a Democratic Union. She remains active in the caucus and in the United Caucus f Rank and File Educators. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/T8uMeHEx7zw Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now
Mar 29, 2022

The Billboard: A Play About Abortion. Launch event w/ Natalie Y. Moore

Join playwright Natalie Y. Moore and director TaRon Patton for a performance and discussion from The Billboard: A Play About Abortion. The Billboard is about a fictional Black women’s clinic in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood on the South Side and its fight with a local gadfly running for City Council who puts up a provocative billboard: “Abortion is genocide. The most dangerous place for a Black child is his mother’s womb,” spurring on the clinic to fight back with their own provocative sign: “Black women take care of their families by taking care of themselves. Abortion is self-care. #Trust Black Women.” As a play and book, The Billboard is a cultural force that treats abortion as more than pro-life or pro-choice. Join us for the live stream of our limited-capacity in-person book launch event featuring a performance from The Billboard and a conversation with playwright Natalie Y. Moore and director TaRon Patton. Order your copy of The Billboard for 30% off here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1788-the-billboard --------------------------------------------------------------------- Presenters: Natalie Y. Moore is an award winning Chicago-based author and journalist and author of The Billboard: A Play About Abortion. Her last book, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, won the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction. She is a 2021 USA Fellow and the Pulitzer Center named her a 2020 Richard C. Longworth Media Fellow for international reporting. TaRon Patton has been a Congo Square Theater ensemble member for 20 years. She is currently the CEO of GLP PRODUCTIONS, INC and just recently returned to the stage: Her Honor Mayor Byrne (Lookingglass Theater) after serving 4 years as Executive Director for Congo Square. She is also the Co-Founding Executive Director of the African American Museum of the Performing Arts. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/CfTw8QIEpaI Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now
Mar 30, 2022

Salvage Live: Beyond the Red Wall: Nation, Race, & Class Post-Brexit

Join Salvage and Haymarket Books for a discussion of British Politics post-Brexit, and post-Corbyn. When reviewing the unexpected results of the Brexit referendum, and again when discussing the Corbyn led Labour Party’s collapse in its old strongholds, commentators have been quick to reach for neat and convenient explanations over careful analysis. Sound bite friendly descriptors—the ‘white working-class’ or the ‘metropolitan elite,’ for starters—continue to stand in for deeper appraisals, and thus offer little in the way of lessons. In his recent Salvage essay, "Brexit From Below: Nation, Race and Class," Jonas Marvin attempts to rise above the fray by offering a perspective that Brexit and its fall out is best understood as a moment in the long term process of class decomposition in Britain. For this Salvage Live event, Jonas Marvin, Annie Olaloku-Teriba, and Barnaby Raine will use this framework as a starting point to survey the prospects of the British Left post-Brexit and post-Corbyn. Read Jonas Marvin's article here: https://salvage.zone/articles/brexit-from-below-nation-race-and-class/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Jonas Marvin is an independent researcher and activist based in Leeds. Annie Olaloku-Teriba is a writer and podcaster whose research focuses on how neoliberalism has transformed the theory and practice of ‘race.’ Barnaby Raine is writing his PhD at Columbia University on visions of ending capitalism. He teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/fQ95ZeAo2Fw Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now
Apr 12, 2022

Haymarket Spring Poetry Showcase

Join us for the Haymarket Poetry Spring Showcase, where we'll celebrate new books by Noor Hindi, Maya Marshall, and Hope Wabuke. Pre-order Hope Wabuke’s The Body Family, publishing in April: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781642596977 Pre-order Noor Hindi’s DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW., publishing in May: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781642596960 Pre-order Maya Marshall’s All the Blood Involved in Love, publishing in June: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781642596953 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Noor Hindi (she/her/hers) is a Palestinian-American poet and reporter. She is a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW. is her debut collection of poems. She lives in Dearborn. Follow her on Twitter @MyNrhindi. Maya Marshall is the author of chapbook Secondhand and cofounder of underbelly, a journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. She has earned fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, Watering Hole, Community of Writers and Cave Canem. Marshall previously served as artist-in-residence at Northwestern University and as faculty for Loyola University. She is the 2021-2023 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University. Hope Wabuke is a Ugandan American poet, essayist, and writer. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir Please Don’t Kill My Black Son Please. Hope has published in The Guardian, The Root, Los Angeles Review of Books, and NPR among others. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a founding board member and former Media & Communications Director for the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction. José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. Suzi F. Garcia is a Peruvian-American poet and editor raised in the South. She is the author of the poetry chapbook A Homegrown Fairytale (Bone Bouquet, 2020), focusing on queering the reader relationship with Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. She is an upcoming editor for POETRY and executive editor of Noemi Press, where she has edited several award-winning books of poetry, craft, and more. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/2e3DzF-pIBU Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now
Apr 13, 2022

Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis & Cultural Strategy w/ Ben Davis

Join art critic Ben Davis and artists Julieta Aranda and Naeem Mohaiemen for a conversation about the role of art in a world on fire. It is a scary and disorienting time for art, as it is a scary and disorienting time in general. Aesthetic experience is both overshadowed by the spectacle of current events and pressed into new connection with them. The self-image of art as a social good is collapsing under the weight of capitalism’s dysfunction. In his new book Art in the After-Culture, critic Ben Davis makes sense of our extreme present as an emerging "after-culture"—a culture whose forms and functions are being radically reshaped by cataclysmic events. In the face of catastrophe, he holds out hope that reckoning with the new realities of art, technology, activism, and the media, can help us weather the super-storms of the future. ”Here's to art criticism with an axe to grind.”—Boots Riley “This kaleidoscopic collection will help you see and comprehend the world anew—which is, in my book, what good art should do.”—Astra Taylor “Following in the footsteps of theorists like John Berger, Stuart Hall, and Lucy Lippard, Ben Davis is an essential guide to the politics of culture in the 21st Century.”—Trevor Paglen --------------------------------------------------------------------- Ben Davis is the author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, which ARTnews named one of the best art books of the decade in 2019. He has been Artnet News's National Art Critic since 2016. His writings have also been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Baffler, Jacobin, Slate, Salvage, e-Flux Journal, Frieze, and many other venues. In 2019, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab reported that he was one of the five most influential art critics in the United States. He lives in Brooklyn. Naeem Mohaiemen is Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Concentration Head of Photography at Columbia University, New York. His work combines photography, films, and essays to parse the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings) in the postcolonial Muslim world(s). He is co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of the forthcoming Solidarity Must be Defended (Tranzit: Hungary, 2022). Julieta Aranda is an artist born in Mexico City, who currently lives and works between Berlin and New York. Central to Aranda’s multidimensional practice are her involvement with circulation mechanisms; her interest in science-fiction, space travel, zones of friction; and her interest in the possibilities for the production of political subjectivities by way of all of the above. As a co-director of e-flux together with Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda has developed the projects Time/Bank, Pawnshop, and e-flux video rental, all of which started in the e-flux storefront in New York, and have traveled to many venues worldwide. Since 2008, Julieta Aranda has been the editor of e-flux journal, together with Anton Vidokle and Brian Kwan Wood. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/SbwtXqwhfBc Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Listen now