Join the Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work in collaboration with Haymarket Books for a conversation about the intersections and entanglements of social work and racial capitalism, and how they can shape struggles for abolition. This will be the first in a two part series geared towards the social work community deepening our understanding and praxis in struggling against racial capitalism and for care, interdepence, and collective safety and wellbeing. This first event will explore racial capitalism and its hold on social work and other caring professions, and how this analysis can shape our struggles and movements.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on February 5, 2025.***

Speakers:

Mimi Abramovitz, Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor of Social Policy, Emerita, Silberman School of Social Work, Hunter College, and The Graduate Center, City University of New York received her MSW in Community Organizing and her DSW in Social Policy, both from Columbia University School of Social Work. Her research interests include the US welfare state, poverty, inequality, activism, Neoliberalism, and Managerialism--all viewed through the lens of race, class, gender, and history. Widely published in social work and often interviewed by the print and broadcast media, she is the author of 90 plus articles and four books, including Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. She is currently writing Gendered Obligations: The History of Activism Among Black and White Working-Class Women Since 1900. She has received more than 19 awards, most recently an Honorary Doctorate from Lund University, Sweden, 2023; The Lifetime Award for Excellence (Hunter College, 2022)/ and the Significant Lifetime Achievement Award ( CSWE 2018 ).

Dr. Kirk “Jae” James is an immigrant, formerly incarcerated black man committed to creating a world in which everyone can self-actualize. Jae is currently a Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the DSW program at NYU Silver School of Social Work. He also sits on the editorial board of the journal Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work. Jae has authored numerous academic articles and book chapters; and speaks internationally on mass incarceration, anti-oppression, human rights, trauma, abolition praxis, and liberatory pedagogy. He has written and shared his lived experience and research with HuffPost, the Jamaican Gleaner, Truth Out, Forbes Magazine, and Bloomberg news. Jae also leads NYU Silver's Evolving Justice — an educational initiative to build community, co-create brave spaces, and facilitate various dialogue(s) toward the emancipatory exploration of justice in theory and action. Jae was inducted into the inaugural Alumni Hall of Fame at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice in 2018. In addition, he is a recipient of the 2020 New York University Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Faculty Award. Jae is completing his first book, titled 94A6325: Coming of Age In The Era of Mass Incarceration, which is a reflection and amalgamation of his lived experience and research within carceral systems.

Born in South Africa and raised in the United States, Premilla Nadasen is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College and Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She is most interested in the activism and visions of liberation of poor and working-class women of color. She is past president of the National Women’s Studies Association, the inaugural recipient of the Ann Snitow Prize, a former Fulbright Fellow, a member of the Society of American Historians, and a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar. Nadasen has been involved in grassroots social justice organizing for many decades and has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing. She is the author of two award-winning books Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. Most recently she published Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. She is currently writing a biography of South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba.

Cameron W. Rasmussen is an educator, researcher, social worker, and facilitator. Cameron is an Assistant Professor in the Thompson School of Social Work & Public Health at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. His research is focused on issues of accountability, restorative and transformative justice, and the intersections of social work and abolition. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social Intervention Group at Columbia School of Social Work and was an Associate Director at the Center for Justice at Columbia University. 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 Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW).

Join economist Rob Larson, and Real News Network editor-in-chief Max Alvarez for a dissection of the lifestyle, moral bankruptcy, and stupidly large sums of money hoarded by the billionaire class.

The fact that we live in one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world was already common knowledge before the richest man in the world and his teenage lackeys started raiding federal offices this week.

Lists of “richest people in x country” may be easy to come by, but how much do we really know about the disgustingly wealthy who sit atop our global economic system? Who are they, really? How did they accumulate their ill-gotten gains? And what kind of depravities do they use to maintain their positions?

In this discussion with Real News Network editor Max Alvarez, economist Rob Larson will turn the weapons of class-war wielded by the elite against them—crunching the numbers on their balance sheets and combing through their fawning profiles in the Wall Street Journal so that you don’t have to. Larson will build on his book, Mastering the Universe to argue that ending corporate dominance of our society starts with stoking the fires of righteous anger by appreciating all of the sordid ways the ruling class make us miserable, break our society to pieces, and destroy the planet in their pursuit of ever-increasing power and profit.

As we behold whole continents on fire, pandemics thrashing public health system to smithereens, and declining lifespans for the vast majority, Larson and Alvarez will make the case that the only way forward is to yank on the emergency break and give capitalism the boot.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on February 12, 2025.***

Speakers:

Rob Larson is a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College and author of Mastering the Univers, Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley and Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom. He writes for Jacobin and Dollars & Sense, and is the House Economist for Current Affairs. He lives in Tacoma, Washington.

Maximillian Alvarez is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of The Real News Network (TRNN) in Baltimore. He is the founder and co-host of Working People, "a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today," and the author of The Work of Living, a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of COVID-19. Prior to joining TRNN, he was an Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review. He is a columnist for In These Times, and his writing has been featured in outlets like The Nation, Poynter, Boston Review, The Baffler, Current Affairs, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and as an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, The New Republic, NPR’s 1A, The Hill’s Rising, and more.

February 24th marks the third anniversary of Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Ever since, the Ukrainian state and its working people have resisted and fought for their self-determination. While they received support from the US and Europe, it came with a price tag of debt and neoliberal restructuring, and now the new Trump administration has suspended aid and aims to strike a peace deal with Russia behind Ukraine’s back. Join us for this panel on war, resistance, and the future of Ukraine.

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on February 24, 2025.***

Speakers:

Denys Pilash is a political scientist, an activist with the Ukrainian democratic socialist organization Social Movement (Sotsialnyi Rukh) and is on the editorial board of Commons: Journal of Social Criticism.

Grusha Gulaeva is the managing editor of Russian socialist and anti-war website, Posle Media.

Howie Hawkins is a retired Teamster in Syracuse, New York. A member of the Green Party, Solidarity, and the Ukraine Solidarity Network, he was the Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2020. He visited Georgia and Ukraine in October and November 2024.

Suzi Weissman, Professor Emeritus of Russian Politics, Saint Mary's College of CA, sits on the Editorial Boards of Critique and Against the Current, author of Victor Serge, A Political Biography, broadcasts Beneath the Surface on KPFK and podcasts Jacobin Radio.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Ukraine Solidarity Network.

Join us Robin D.G. Kelley, Barbara Ransby, Davarian Baldwin, Robyn Spencer-Antoine, Johanna Fernández, and Sarah Haley for a discussion on the fight to defend Black studies in the face of ongoing fascist attacks against education.

Speakers:

Davarian Baldwin is a leading urbanist, historian, and cultural critic. Baldwin is the author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021), Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (UNC, 2007) and co-editor, with Minkah Makalani, of the essay collection Escape From New York! The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (Minnesota, 2013). He is currently finishing Land of Darkness: Chicago and the Making of Race in Modern America (Oxford University Press). Baldwin is also developing a digital, video-based, Black Intellectual Oral History (BIOH) project for both archival documentation of important stories and virtual mentorship to younger scholars.

Johanna Fernández is Associate Professor of 20th Century US History and Social Movements at The Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is the author of the acclaimed The Young Lords: A Radical History, which among others received the 2021 American Book Award and the three highest honors of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Research for the book led Fernández to file a 2014 Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) lawsuit against the NYPD, which led to the recovery of the "lost" Handschu files—the nation’s largest repository of police surveillance records—over one million files compiled by the NYPD between 1954 and1972, during the height of the Cold War, including surveillance documents on Malcolm X. Fernández’s new book project is on the historical roots of US Fascism; her article by that title can be found online. Among others, her awards include the Fulbright Scholars grant to the Middle East and North Africa, which took her to Jordan during the Arab Spring. Professor Fernández has curated a number of exhibitions, including ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, an exhibition in three NYC museums, cited by the New York Times as one of 2015’s Top 10, Best In Art. Most recently, Brown University acquired through Johanna Fernández the papers of wrongfully imprisoned radio journalist and veteran Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. She's the writer, executive producer, and co-director of the film, Justice on Trial: the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (BigNoise Films, 2010).

Sarah Haley is an associate professor of history and gender studies at Columbia University. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity.

Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.

Dr. Barbara Ransby is a widely acclaimed historian of the Black Freedom Movement, award-winning author, and longtime activist. She is the John D. MacArthur Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Black Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She also directs the Social Justice Initiative, which promotes connections between academics and community organizers working on social justice. She is the author of multiple books, including the award-winning Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson and Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century.

Robyn Spencer-Antoine is an associate professor of history and African American studies at Wayne State University. She is the author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoDJA1DHD3c

Join PARCEO and Haymarket Books for a discussion with organizers, educators, & social justice lawyers addressing the moment we are in

Speakers:

Moderator: Nyle Fort, a minister, organizer, and scholar, is currently an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.

Lara Kiswani is the Executive Director of Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC).

Darakshan Raja is the founding director of Muslims for Just Futures (MJF).

Diala Shamas is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

Bina Ahmad (she/her) is a social justice attorney working in criminal defense, civil rights, international human rights, and animal rights.

Beth Miller is the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action.

Join Ilan Pappé, Katherine Natanel, and Laleh Khalili as they connect the struggle for Palestinian liberation to various liberatory movements around the world.

As more and more people align themselves with the Palestinian people, Palestine in a World on Fire provides the global perspective and analysis needed to inform how we forge ahead on this path of newfound solidarity. Editors Ilan Pappé and Katherine Natanel have gathered a collection of interviews that are intimate, challenging, and rigorous—many of them conducted before October 7th but still startlingly prescient.

Palestine in a World on Fire highlights the centrality of Palestine in struggles shared across the world: capitalism, imperialism, misogyny, neo-colonialism, racism, and more. Each conversation tackles urgent events and unfolding dynamics, and the scholar-activists interviewed here provide invaluable perspectives and insights, illuminating the richness and relevance of recent scholarship on Palestine.

Speakers:

Ilan Pappé is a Professor of History and the Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies (ECPS) at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. He has written 22 books to date, including Our Vision for Liberation (with Ramzy Baroud), On Palestine and Gaza in Crisis (with Noam Chomsky), and the best-seller The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Katherine Natanel is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. She is the author of Sustaining Conflict: Apathy and Domination in Israel-Palestine and serves as the Executive Editor for Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP).

Laleh Khalili teaches at the University of Exeter. Her books include Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration and The Corporeal Life of Seafaring.