Join Zhandarka Kurti, Jarrod Shanahan, and Dylan Rodríguez for a damning account of mass incarceration that reveals how powerful nonprofits and "progressives" used the language of social movements to build new jails.

In Skyscraper Jails, scholars and organizers Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti detail how progressive forces in New York City appropriated the rhetoric of social movements and social justice to promise “downsized” and “humane" jails. The principal advocates of these new jails were not right-wing politicians, but prominent city activists and progressive non-profit organizations.

As the political coalition that campaigned for the new jails fans out across the United States, the story at the heart of Skyscraper Jails is at once a case study and a cautionary tale for what will be coming to cities and towns across the United States and beyond.

Speakers:

Zhandarka Kurti is an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Loyola University Chicago. Her work examines race, class, criminalization and punishment through a historical and contemporary perspective. She is the co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform and the Future of America’s Punishment System and editor of Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.

Jarrod Shanahan is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage, co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and America's Punishment System, and City Time: On Being Sentence to Rikers Island and editor of Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity. He lives in Chicago and works as an assistant professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University in University Park, IL.

Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. He is a faculty member in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. He is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Join Nafis Hasan and Tayyaba Jiwani in conversation on the rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and how to center our efforts to combat cancer on the basis of care. Organized by Common Notions, Jamhoor, Science for the People, and Haymarket Books.

More than fifty years after the declaration of the War on Cancer, we are nowhere closer to victory. The problem lies in the way cancer is understood and the “cancer-industrial complex” that has been established to address it.

Metastasis brings the cancer-industrial complex to the fore of our understanding of what cancer is, the chronic nature of the disease, its unmistakable parallels to capitalism, its inextricable link to the neoliberal model of economic development, and its disproportionate burden on nonwhite and poor populations—and what it will really take to rid ourselves of the gravest dangers to our individual and collective well-being.

Nafis Hasan received his PhD in Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology from Tufts University in 2019. He is currently an Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a labor organizer based in Philadelphia. His writings have appeared in Jacobin, Science for the People, The Trouble, and more. He serves as an editor for the radical science magazine Science for the People and South Asian left media platform Jamhoor, and is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Read more at nafishasan.com.

Tayyaba Jiwani completed her PhD in molecular biology from the University of Toronto and currently researches the political dimensions of genomics as a fellow at the University of Exeter. She is also an editor at Jamhoor, a South Asia-focused left media platform.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Common Notions, Jamhoor, and Science for the People.

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani-Muslim woman who is currently serving an unjust 86-year sentence at the only federal medical prison in the United States, FMC Carswell, notoriously known as the “Hospital of Horrors.” For Aafia and countless others at the Hospital of Horrors, their punishment goes beyond captivity, and mirrors a pattern of abuse and neglect that is pervasive in women’s prisons across the U.S.

Join us in learning about Dr. Siddiqui’s case, the function of abuse at FMC Carswell and other women’s prisons, and ongoing efforts to demand justice for state violence survivors.

To learn more about Dr. Siddiqui’s case follow: @aafiamovementofficial on Instagram

Learn more about the Texas People’s Tribunal: https://texaspeoplestribunal.com/

More information on Missouri Justice Coalition: https://mojustice.org/

Join the Dublin Prison Solidarity Coalition mailing list: https://dublinprisonsolidarity.org/

Speakers:

Diana Block is a long time feminist, abolitionist, social justice activist. She is a founding and active member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and the Dublin Prison Solidarity Coalition. Diana is also an author and writes for online journals. You can learn more about her work at dianablock.com.

Kendra Drysdale is a motivational speaker, and an advocate for transformative justice, trauma healing, and rehabilitation. She was a part of the class action lawsuit against FCI Dublin, and is a survivor advocate with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and Dublin Prison Solidarity Committee.

Kaley Johnson is a Texas-based freelance journalist. Her work includes investigations into FMC Carswell federal prison, uncovering systemic issues in the Texas criminal justice system, following social justice movements in North Texas, and stories centering on vulnerable populations.

Tania Siddiqi is an attorney and the Founder and Executive Director of the Texas People’s Tribunal. Her work focuses on creating and implementing effective strategies against state violence. She has led both regional and international movement-centered initiatives. Tania is the Editor of #WithoutJustCause: The Case of U.S.-Held Political Prisoner Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.

ML Smith is the Founder of Missouri Justice Coalition. She is a criminal punishment system-impacted advocate, abolitionist and activist who experienced incarceration during the COVID-19 pandemic, which made her intimately aware of the dire reality faced by our imprisoned populations, as well as the egregious actions and apathy of institution staff and administrators.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Texas People’s Tribunal and Missouri Justice Coalition.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOGW633rRh0

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join editors and contributors of Abolish Social Work (As We Know It) and Abolition and Social Work for a discussion about the intersections of abolitionist politics and principles and social work.

Pick up a copy of Abolish Social Work (As We Know it) here: https://btlbooks.com/book/abolish-social-work

Pick up a copy of Abolition and Social Work here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2226-abolition-and-social-work

Pick up a copy of Not Your Rescue Project here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2258-not-your-rescue-project

Pick up the Creative Interventions Toolkit: https://www.akpress.org/creative-interventions-toolkit.html

Moment of Truth Statement of Commitment to Black Lives: https://wscadv.org/news/moment-of-truth-statement-of-commitment-to-black-lives

Speakers:

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. 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). He completed his PhD in the Social Welfare program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Craig Fortier - (they/them) is an Associate Professor in Social Development Studies at Renison University College (University of Waterloo). They have been involved in community based organizing with migrant justice, queer/trans* liberation, anti-capitalist, Indigenous solidarity, and abolitionist movements. Craig is the author of Unsettling the Commons: Social Movements Within, Against, and Beyond Settler Colonialism and co-editor of Abolish Social Work (As We Know It). Their research is interdisciplinary, experiential, and rooted in day-to-day organizing work - including studies on colonialist memorialization projects, queer and trans* community sports, social work history, social movement organizing, and political theory. They currently reside in Tkaronto/Toronto (Michi Saagiig Nishaabeg, Wendat, and Haudenosaunee territories) and acts as a co-commissioner in the Field of Dreamers Cooperative Softball association, playing shortstop for the Don River Curse Breakers.

Durrell Malik Washington Sr. is an Abolitionist, a Social Worker, Educator and PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. His research interest lies at the intersections between P.I.C. Abolition, Juvenile legal law, policy and other youth serving systems, Black families, and Health. Durrell is a Beyond Prisons Fellow at UChicago and a collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work.

Mimi Kim is a longtime community accountability/transformative justice practitioner. As a co-founder of Incite! and founder of Creative Interventions, Mimi has challenged interpersonal and state violence through the building of community-based liberatory practice. She is currently re-launching the StoryTelling & Organizing Project through a Stories for Power collaboration between Creative Interventions and Just Practice. Mimi is also an Associate Professor of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach.

Chanelle Gallant - (she/her) is a movement writer, organizer, strategist and consultant and co-author of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice (Haymarket Books, 2024). She co-founded the Migrant Sex Workers Project, SURJ-Toronto and has provided training and advocacy on sex work and racial justice, from city hall to the United Nations. Chanelle sits on the national board for Showing Up for Racial Justice and Catalyst Project and has helped to move millions into organizing through donor advising and grassroots fundraising. She holds an MA in Sociology and was a Lambda Literary Fellow. Find her at chanellegallant.com

Sena Hussain (she/her) is a social worker, editor, and prison abolitionist based in Toronto. She has spent over a decade supporting criminalized and marginalized people through harm reduction, advocacy, and direct support. Sena is the editor of Cell Count, a publication amplifying the voices of prisoners and has co-facilitated workshops in federal prisons on health and harm reduction. Her work is rooted in anti-oppressive practice, abolitionist organizing, and a commitment to systemic change.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo7juGv5H2o

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Rick Perlstein, Jean Casella, and David Neiwert as they discuss the updated edition of Blood in the Face by James Ridgeway.

In 1990, Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture was the first book to uncover the contours, beliefs, leaders, and wider influence of the American racist far-right movement. It told their story from the inside out, complete with interviews, recruiting pamphlets, cartoons, rants, sermons, threats, police reports, and more. The accompanying analysis by veteran investigative reporter James Ridgeway detailed the movement 's volatile history and its expansion beginning in the 1980s, insisting that the groups making up this "fringe" culture were too powerful--and too much a part of American culture--to be ignored or dismissed.

When the book's prescience about the dangers of the racist far-right became manifest in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, a second edition of Blood in the Face was released with a new introduction charting the rise of the Militia Movement to which Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators were connected. Since then, both the book and the documentary film that accompanied its release (also titled Blood in the Face), have earned cult followings.

In the past 25 years, Ridgeway's final warning–that the "fringe was becoming part of the fabric" of American politics and culture, have come to chilling fruition in the rise of the Tea Party, the racist backlash against the presidency of Barack Obama, the resurgence of anti-immigrant Nativism, the growth of racist far-right media, and the election of Donald Trump with the thunderous support of white nationalists.

Join Rick Perlstein, Jean Casella, and David Neiwert as they discuss Blood in the Face: White Nationalism from the Birth of a Nation to the Age of Trump and its continued relevance.

Speakers:

Chicagoan Rick Perlstein is the author of a four-book series on the rise of conservatism in America. The first, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 2001. The second, third, and fourth made the New York Times bestseller list, with the second, Nixonland, appearing on the “best of” lists of over a dozen publications in 2008. A contributor to publications including the Nation, Washington Post, New Yorker, New Republic, he is the former president of the board of InThese Times magazine and a frequent talking head on cable news and history documentaries.

Jean Casella collaborated with James Ridgeway for more than 30 years, editing both the original 1991 edition and the revised 2025 edition of Blood in the Face. In 2009, she and Ridgeway co-founded Solitary Watch, a watchdog project that exposes solitary confinement and other abusive conditions in U.S. prisons and jails. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, and Mother Jones, among others. For her work on prisons, she received a Soros Justice Media Fellowship and an Alicia Patterson Fellowship.

David Neiwert is an investigative journalist and author based in the Pacific Northwest. Though now retired from daily newsroom operations, he worked as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers in Idaho, Montana, and Washington from the 1970s to the 1990s, when he made the leap to digital journalism in the early iterations of MSNBC's Redmond newsroom, where he won a National Press Club award for distinguished online journalism.

Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1651-blood-in-the-face

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_PjcK3j8sI

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò for a conversation with Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson to celebrate the release of the new paperback edition of Reconsidering Reparations.

A clear, new case for reparations as a “constructive,” future-oriented project that responds to the weight of history’s injustices with the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens. Centuries ago, Táíwò explains, European powers engineered the systems through which advantages and disadvantages still flow. Colonialism and transatlantic slavery forged schemes of injustice on an unprecedented scale, a world order he calls “global racial empire.” The project of justice must meet the same scope.

Táíwò’s analysis not only discourages despair, it demands global resistance. Reconsidering Reparations suggests policies, goals, and organizing strategies. And it leaves readers with clear and powerful advice: act like an ancestor. Do what we can to shape the world we want our moral descendants to inherit, and have faith that they will continue the long struggle for justice. This understanding, Táíwò shows, has deep roots in the thought of Black political thinkers such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cedric Robinson, and Nkechi Taifa.

Reconsidering Reparations is a book with profound implications for our views of justice, racism, the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and climate change policy.

Speakers:

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Elite Capture, a contributor to Greta Thunberg’s The Climate Book, and a past recipient of a Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar fellowship. Táíwò’s public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism, has been featured in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, Hammer & Hope (where he is a member of the Editorial Team). His writings have been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and Korean, among other languages.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is an Affrilachian (Black Appalachian) woman from the working class, born and raised in Southeast Tennessee. She is the first Black woman to serve as Co-Executive Director of Highlander Research & Education Center. As a member of leadership teams in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), Ash-Lee has contributed to the Vision for Black Lives and BREATHE Act. She has served on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly, the advisory committee of National Bailout Collective. She is a long-time activist who has worked in movements fighting for workers, for reproductive justice, LGBTQUIA+, environmental justice etc.

Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2538-reconsidering-reparations

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

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org