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 Harsha Walia, Silky Shah, and Beatrice Adler-Bolton of Death Panel for an urgent discussion on the brutal enforcement of immigration policing in Minneapolis and beyond, and why resistance calls for the abolition of much more than ICE.
With at least 6 people dying in immigration detention in January 2026 alone, and following the executions of Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, and Keith Porter Jr. at the hands of ICE agents, the call to abolish ICE can be heard across the US. In this conversation, co-hosted by Haymarket Books and Death Panel, thinkers and organisers Walia, Shah, and Adler-Bolton will discuss the realities of immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation; the history of ICE and the US border regime; and the many ways people can - and do - resist.
Remember that you can download three crucial e-books on migrant justice for free from Haymarket here, including Shah’s Unbuild Walls and Walia’s Border & Rule: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/525-free-ebooks-abolish-ice-abolish-the-border
Speakers:
Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the U.S. She is also the author of the recently published book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024). She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison-industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for over 20 years.
Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Border and Rule (Haymarket Books, 2021) and Undoing Border Imperialism (AK, 2013). 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.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton is an author, disability and mad justice agitator, and theorist of debility, care, class struggle, and the state. She is the cohost of the Death Panel Podcast about the political economy of health, and the coauthor of the books Health Communism (Verso 2022) and All Care for All People (forthcoming from Haymarket). She is based in South Minneapolis and has struggled and organized against occupation by ICE and CBP with comrades and neighbors since "Operation Metro Surge" descended on the Twin Cities in early December 2025.
This event is organized by Haymarket Books and Death Panel.
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/d9YJqx1zY2c
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Join four left Venezuelan voices for an urgent discussion of the neocolonial US intervention and kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro on January 3 and its aftermath. The event will examine the evolution of the Bolivarian process and its neoliberal turn under Maduro, along with the weakening of the social forces within Venezuela capable of resisting imperialist invasion. As the situation changes rapidly, speakers will also assess the post-invasion configuration under Delcy Rodríguez, the collaboration with U.S. imperial power, oil concessions, and the consolidation of a “Madurismo without Maduro.”
The discussion will challenge both pro-invasion narratives and apologetics for the Venezuelan state, advancing a left, anti-imperialist critique rooted in sovereignty, democracy, and working-class self-determination.
Speakers:
Simón Rodríguez is a Venezuelan socialist writer and journalist. He was a student organizer and later became professor at the Universidad de los Andes. When he was a member of the national leadership of the Socialism and Freedom Party, he ran as a candidate for the National Assembly in 2015. He is a founding member of Laclase.info and Venezuelanvoices.org and has published articles in Humania del Sur, NACLA Report on the Americas, The New Arab, and Rebelión and on dozens of electronic outlets, and his articles have been translated into six languages. He has given talks and lectures in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. He is coauthor with Miguel Sorans of the book Why Did Chavismo Fail? A Left-Opposition Balance Sheet (CeHUS, 2018).
Emiliano Terán is a sociologist from the Central University of Venezuela and has a master’s degree in ecological economics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is a PhD candidate in environmental science and technology at the same institution. He is also an associate researcher at the Center for Development Studies in Venezuela and a member of the Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela
Gonzalo Gómez was a leader of the Socialist Workers Party from the 1970s to the 1990s. He was a key figure in the regroupment of Trotskyism in Venezuela and was a critical supporter of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. He participated in the Popular Revolutionary Assembly against the 2002 coup. Gómez also was a cofounder of the alternative media site Aporrea. He was one of the founders of Marea Socialista, a current that joined the PSUV, of which he was a founding delegate and part of the regional leadership in Caracas. In 2014, Marea was excluded from the PSUV and then broke with the Maduro government. Gómez participated for several years with the Citizen’s Platform for the Defense of the Constitution with several former Chávez ministers. Gómez has continued to organize with Marea Socialista as an independent organization and section of the International Socialist League.
Yoletty Bracho is a Venezuelan political science researcher currently teaching at the University of Avignon in south of France who studies authoritarian governance and popular mobilization in Venezuela.
Moderator:
Anderson Bean is a sociology professor at North Carolina A&T State University, as well as a North Carolina–based activist and editor. He is a contributor and editor of the book Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives, out this month from Haymarket Books, and the author of Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis (Lexington Books)
Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/cOe2ZWX7f8M
Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2604-venezuela-in-crisis
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
“When a seed is ready to sprout, and when the conditions are right, nothing can stop it.” –Ricardo Levins Morales
In the last few months, Minnesota has not only made headlines, but history. The resistance to ICE atrocities has been fueled by working class collective action and care. There is much to learn about how the crisis is evolving, from January 23rd’s historic work stoppage to the continued daily, on-the-ground mutual aid and rapid response networks keeping people fed, housed, and safe from authoritarian aggressors. Hear from union leaders and rank-and-filers who have been active on the frontlines and behind the scenes about what we are capable of when we come together, and what must be done to keep growing worker power.
Speakers:
Paul Kirk-Davidoff - Twin Cities Labor Report
Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou - Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation
Feben Ghilagaber - UNITE-HERE 17
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Workday Magazine.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/riV6B7D4diA
Check out WorkDay Magazine: https://workdaymagazine.org
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
The devastating US-Israeli war on Iran and Israel's war on Lebanon show no signs of ending soon. What is behind the attacks and how can we organize to oppose them without supporting the Iranian theocracy? Join Tempest Magazine and Haymarket Books for this important discussion.
Speakers:
Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022), tells the story of Iranian students who organized against US support for the Shah of Iran in the 60s and 70s. She has been an anti-war activist for many years, serving on the United for Peace and Justice organizing committee for the February 15, 2003 global protest against the US invasion of Iraq. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of Feminists for Jina, a global network which formed in fall 2022 to support the women, life, freedom uprising in Iran.
Ida Nikou is a sociologist working on international political economy, labor regimes, and financialization, with a focus on Iran and the Middle East. She received her PhD at SUNY Stony Brook and is currently based in Germany. Her research examines how sanctions, neoliberal restructuring, and financialization transform class relations, labor precarity, and patterns of worker resistance in Iran. She has written on sanctions and labor struggles in Iran for venues including MERIP, Jadaliyya, and the Global Labour Journal, and is currently developing new work on sanctions, accumulation, and state restructuring in Iran.
Rima Majed is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies Department at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She is the co-editor of The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution. Her work has appeared in several journals, books and media platforms including American Political Science Review, Social Forces, British Journal of Sociology, Global Dialogue, OpenDemocracy, CNN, and Al Jazeera English.
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Tempest.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/l58tVX8d7tI
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org