Join Dorothy Roberts, Harsha Walia, Kim Wilson, and Maya Schenwar for a virtual book launch and conversation on caregiving, abolition, and hope amid chaos!

As we await a second Trump presidency, it's easy to feel frozen -- as if any action we take can't possibly be enough, and may be futile. Now is a moment to bring in the stories of folks who are taking action to build a liberatory world every day, sometimes in ways that go completely unrecognized: caregivers. In this heavy time, it's important to recognize the centrality of care to movement work. In their new anthology, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson have drawn together the insights of a wide range of authors and organizers, including Dorothy Roberts, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Beth Richie, Harsha Walia, Dylan Rodriguez, Victoria Law, adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown, and many more. Together, these essays illuminate the ways in which caregiving and struggles for liberation intertwine, offering both transformative ideas and practical tools for building new worlds even in the direst of circumstances.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on November 20, 2024.***

Speakers:

Maya Schenwar is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism and board president at Truthout. She is the coauthor (with Victoria Law) of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms and the author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better. Maya is also the coeditor (with Joe Macaré and Alana YuLan Price) of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States, and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and numerous other publications. Maya is a cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund and organizes with the Love & Protect collective. She lives in Chicago with her partner, child, and abolitionist cat.

Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the cofounder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.

Harsha Walia is the award-winning author Border and Rule and Undoing Border Imperialism. Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One Is Illegal and Women’s Memorial March Committee.

Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School where she holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander chair. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies. Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and biopolitics. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.

Join longtime organizers and authors Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam in conversation with Harsha Walia on ways to deepen solidarity with migrant sex workers.

In Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy.

An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on November 26, 2024.***

Speakers:

Chanelle Gallant is an author, activist, and movement strategist who has worked in the areas of sexuality and criminalization for over two decades. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, most recently the New York Times best-seller Pleasure Activism, Beyond Survival, and Defund, Disarm, Dismantle, and her work has been discussed in the Washington Post, the Advocate, Esquire, Vice, and every national media outlet in Canada. Chanelle is on the national board for Showing Up For Racial Justice and has helped to found or support numerous sex worker organizations. She has an MA in sociology and was a Lambda Literary Fellow.

Elene Lam is an activist, artist, community organizer, educator, and human rights defender. She has fought for sex worker, migrant, gender, labor, and racial justice for over twenty years. She is the founder of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) and the co-founder of Migrant Sex Workers Project. She has used diverse and innovative approaches to advocate social justice for migrant sex workers, such as leadership building and community mobilization. She holds a master’s of law and master’s of social work. She is a PhD candidate at McMaster University (School of Social Work) and is studying the harm of the anti-trafficking movement. She was awarded the Constance E. Hamilton Award for Women’s Equality by the City of Toronto.

Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Border and Rule and Undoing Border Imperialism. Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One Is Illegal and Women's Memorial March Committee.

Join Rebecca Carroll in conversation with Donika Kelly and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein as they discuss and celebrate the newly imagined edition of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like.

The first edition of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, published in 1994, remains an essential text for readers of Black feminist literature in all genres. Featuring interviews with and excerpts by writers like Rita Dove, Pearl Cleage, Barbara Neely, June Jordan, and others, this indispensable work speaks to the intersections of politics and art-making along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Now, writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll presents the original conversations alongside personalized introductions by some of the brightest voices in today’s literary world. The new contributors carry the torch of the original interviewees’ lives and words with heart, rigor, gratitude, and radical imagination, illuminating how these conversations are about more than just writing—they are about life, relationships, joy, gratitude, wellness, and self-preservation.

I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like is a book unbound by time, lifting up a chorus of past and present voices. Paying homage to a historic lineage of Black feminist writers and their impact on our current literary landscape, it is a book by and for the storytellers, the poets, the playwrights, the dreamers, and all readers interested in what it means to make art within and from marginalized spaces.

"Thirty years ago, Rebecca Carroll curated an astonishing collection of voices, and it is a gift to now be immersed in a lively dialogue between those remarkable trailblazers and a new generation of Black women who have been shaped by their words, wisdom and radical vision."

—Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on January 16, 2025.***

Speakers:

Rebecca Carroll is a writer, cultural critic, and host of the podcasts Come Through with Rebecca Carroll: 15 conversations about race in a pivotal year for America and the award-winning Billie Was a Black Woman. Rebecca’s writing has been published widely, and her critically acclaimed memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, has been optioned by Killer Films with Rebecca attached to write and develop for episodic TV. She is the creator, curator, and executive producer of In Love and Struggle, a live and audio event series that centers the lived experiences of Black women and nonbinary people through monologues, music, and humor. The series is a co-production with The Meteor media collective, where Rebecca serves as Editor-at-Large.

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations and Bes- tiary. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. She cur- rently lives in Iowa City, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate pro- fessor of physics and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of The Disor- dered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred. Her next books, The Edge of Space-Time and The Cosmos Is a Black Aesthetic, are forthcoming from Pantheon Books and Duke University Press, respectively.

A combustible combination of capitalist development, climate change, and neoliberal policies transformed normal patterns of wind and fire into an inferno that has laid waste to whole sections of LA. This human made disaster has had devastating impacts particularly on the city’s multiracial working class. Join this Spectre Live event to discuss the roots of the killer fires, collective solidarity amidst it, and what must be done to prevent future climate catastrophes.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on January 28, 2025.***

Speakers:

Dan Boscov-Ellen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute and associate web editor for Spectre. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Critical Climate Ethics: Capitalism, Colonialism, and the Climate Crisis.

Maga Miranda is a community-engaged researcher, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Pomona College, and a member of the Spectre Editorial Board. She is working on a book entitled Domestic Codes: Latina Workers and the Data-Driven Politics of Care.

Promise Li is a socialist from Hong Kong and Los Angeles. He is a member of Tempest Collective and Solidarity and has been active in higher-education rank-and-file union work, international solidarity and anti-war campaigns, and Chinatown tenant organizing.

Abby Cunniff is a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz and is working on a dissertation, entitled, Prison Labor in the Wild: the Invisible Infantry of California Nature, which examines how incarcerated people are exploited to fight fires, construct roads, restore habitats, and build park infrastructure.

Joshua Frank is the managing editor at CounterPunch. He is a Southern California-based investigative journalist and author of the recent award-winning book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Spectre Journal.

International journalist and author Rula Jebreal is currently facing criminal prosecution in Italy for her tweets re PM Meloni’s weaponization of language from the Nazi’s great replacement conspiracy theory, as well as her tweet about Fabio Rampelli’s involvement in a fascist rally (Rampelli is vice president of Italy’s parliament, and a mentor of prime minister Giorgia Meloni).

As The Coalition For Women In Journalism notes, “Jebreal has been a vocal critic of the neo-fascist Fratelli d'Italia party and Israel’s apartheid, military occupation and has faced years of threats, intimidation, surveillance, and smear campaigns.”

Press freedom organizations have documented increasing risks to journalists, especially those working in Palestine, exposing war crimes and Palestinian journalists who challenge ethnonationalism and fascism globally.

Join journalists Rula Jebreal, Naomi Klein, and Nermeen Shaikh for a timely discussion of these critical challenges, and how we can build solidarity with journalists—and others—working on the front lines.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on January 29, 2025.***

Speakers:

Rula Jebreal is an award-winning international journalist. Jebreal serves on the G7 gender-based violence advisory council and currently is a visiting professor at The University of Miami, where she teaches Communications (course title “Propaganda and Genocides”).

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and columnist with The Guardian and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her newest book is the New York Times-bestseller Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, now out in paperback.

Nermeen Shaikh is a co-host and senior producer at the independent television news hour Democracy Now! based in New York City. She is the author of The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power and serves on the Board of Directors of the Nobel Women's Initiative

We often talk about the various ways in which the state, nonprofits, and service providers coopt abolitionist demands for "care" to justify their own repressive and reformist agendas. But even within leftist spaces, we think about care work in terms of survival, not in terms of ensuring that marginalized communities can actually thrive. So there is a need for greater clarity and specificity even in our own organizing communities around care work: what kind of care are we talking about and to what ends?

Imprisoned abolitionist, Stevie Wilson and Dr. Joy James discuss what care is, how we avoid performing a version of care that is based on exploitation or infantilization, and how we can ensure care work is instead rooted in a revolutionary praxis of solidarity.

Support 9971's Work Behind the Walls: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-99...

9971 engages imprisoned people through study and discussion. We provide mutual aid that creates and sustains community behind the walls.

For more info check out In the Belly: https://abolitioniststudy.com/

Speakers:

Stevie Wilson (he/him) is a currently imprisoned Black queer abolitionist organizer and facilitator from Philadelphia. Wilson is the founder of the inside abolitionist study collective 9971 and is the founder of the abolitionist journal In the Belly. He is a columnist for the Abolitionist, a newspaper published by Critical Resistance, and a recipient of the Writing Freedom Fellowship from Haymarket Books.

Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College, is a political philosopher who works with organizers. She is editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader; Imprisoned Intellectuals; The New Abolitionistsand co-editor of The Black Feminist Reader. James's recent books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love; New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner; and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon. Her 2024 edited books with Pluto include: Beyond Cop Cities and ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, Afro-Indigenous Futures.