More Episodes
Apr 14, 2022
Is Social Work Obsolete?
Join Kassandra Frederique and Michelle Grier for a conversation centering an abolitionist approach to social work.
Taking inspiration from Angela Davis' "Are Prisons Obsolete?", Is Social Work Obsolete? will explore the historical and contemporary harms of the social work profession and ask whether it is capable of transformation, or if it is irreparable and in fact obsolete. This conversation will also explore the need to build systems of care rooted self-determination, liberation and collective wellbeing.
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Speakers:
Kassandra Frederique is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a national nonprofit that works to end the war on drugs—which has disproportionately harmed Black, Latinx, Indigenous, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities—and build alternatives grounded in science, compassion, health, and human rights. During her time at DPA, Frederique has built and led innovative campaigns around policing, the overdose crisis, and marijuana legalization—each with a consistent racial justice focus. Her advocacy, and all of the Drug Policy Alliance’s work, lies at the intersection of health, equity, autonomy, and justice.
Michelle Grier (she/her) is a Black feminist committed to intergenerational advocacy and liberatory healing practices. Grier has over 10 years of experience leading mental health programs and youth-centered programs in schools and nonprofits. She is a member of the NAASW and grateful for the space to foster conversations about abolition and social work.
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This event is sponsored by the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Y1WvSupCSDI
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Apr 28, 2022
Transformative Justice and Knowledge Production in Tech
Join contributors to the special edition of Logic Magazine, Beacons, for a discussion on Transformative Justice and Knowledge Production in Tech
Techno-capitalism is re-negotiating the social contract but knowledge about technologies is too often sequestered behind the lock doors of industry. Black women researchers like Dr. Timnit Gebru who raised alarm about the racial and ecological implications of emergent technologies are systematically silenced and forced out. Additionally, corporate capture of academic departments has even further limited the space to do critical research.
Given these obstacles, how can researchers both inside and outside of tech companies do the difficult work of research, critique, and resistance? When individualist opportunism is the guiding norm of knowledge production, how do we cultivate a practice of transformative justice in the context of tech research? What are the set of tools and collective histories Black people in the Americas and the Black global diaspora can draw on in order to care for each other in the process of producing research about tech?
Get the new issue of Logic Magazine, Beacons, here: https://logicmag.io
Speakers:
Dr. Safiya U. Noble is an internet studies scholar and Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she serves as the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (also known as the “Genius Award”) for her ground-breaking work on algorithmic discrimination, which prompted her founding of a non-profit, Equity Engine, to accelerate investment in companies, education, and networks driven by women of color. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications.
Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team. She received her PhD from Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying projects aiming to gain insights from data. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian highschool students, free of charge.
Moderator:
J Khadijah Abdurahman is an abolitionist whose research focus is predictive analytics in the child welfare system. 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. They are a Tech Impact Fellow at UCLA C2I2, co-founder of The Otherwise School: Tools and Techniques of Counter-Fascism alongside Sucheta Ghoshal’s Inquilab at the University of Washington, HCDE. Recent edited publications include Logic Magazine: Beacons and ACM Interactions: Unmaking Democracy.
This event is sponsored by Logic Magazine and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/WqAMkmX9AuE
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Apr 29, 2022
Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson w/ Barbara Ransby
Join Dr. Barbara Ransby and Dr. Lynette Jackson for a conversation celebrating the release of Ransby's new memoir, Eslanda.
Eslanda "Essie" Cardozo Goode Robeson lived a colorful and amazing life. Her career and commitments took her many places: colonial Africa in 1936, the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, the founding meeting of the United Nations, Nazi-occupied Berlin, Stalin's Russia, and China two months after Mao's revolution. She was a woman of unusual accomplishment—an anthropologist, a prolific journalist, a tireless advocate of women's rights, an outspoken anti-colonial and antiracist activist, and an internationally sought-after speaker. Yet historians for the most part have confined Essie to the role of Mrs. Paul Robeson, a wife hidden in the large shadow cast by her famous husband.
In this masterful book, biographer Dr. Barbara Ransby refocuses attention on Essie, one of the most important and fascinating Black women of the twentieth century.
Join us for a limited-capacity in-person book launch event and discussion with Dr. Barbara Ransby and Dr. Lynette Jackson on the extraordinary life of Eslanda Robeson and the implications of her work on freedom struggles today.
Masks and proof of vaccination are required for those attending in person. For those attending in-person doors will open at 6 PM.
The event will also be livestreamed for those unable to attend in-person. Closed captioning will be available for the livestream.
Order your copy of Eslanda here.
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Speakers:
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. A founding member of Scholars for Social Justice, she works closely with activists in the Movement for Black Lives and The Rising Majority. She is an elected fellow in the Society of American Historians, as well as a recipient of the Angela Y. Davis Prize for public scholarship from the American Studies Association. Ransby is the author of multiple books, including the award-winning Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson.
Dr. Lynette Jackson is an associate professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Black Studies at UIC. She received her PhD in African History from Columbia University in 1997. Dr. Jackson is the author of Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe and numerous other articles and book chapters on topics relating to women, the state and medical and public health discourses in colonial and postcolonial Africa, particularly having to do with the regulation of African women's sexuality. Dr. Jackson's current research explores the history of child refugee diasporas from Southern Sudan, particularly focusing on two streams of unaccompanied children: The Lost Boys and Girls and the Cuban 600.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/s4xq5KpOZZI
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 3, 2022
Haymarket Poetry: The Body Family with Hope Wabuke and more
Join Hope Wabuke and special guests Safia Elhillo and Ladan Osman for a celebration of Wabuke's new book The Body Family.
The Body Family is a song of memory and revelation; it is the sublime unearthing of what has been hidden by silence and erasure. This lyrical and imagistic poetry collection tells the story of a family’s journey to flee the murderous reign of Uganda’s Idi Amin only to land in a racist American landscape. Wabuke excavates personal and ancestral history to bring these poems to wrenching life, articulating what it means to be a Black girl becoming a Black woman while navigating a diaspora haunted by British colonization and American enslavement.
Get The Body Family from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1872-the-body-family
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Speakers:
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.
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2021), and a forthcoming novel in verse (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021). Co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), she is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University.
Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden (2019), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of the Sillerman Prize. A 2021 Whiting Award winner, she has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, the Michener Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/XACbmEh1F8k
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 5, 2022
Capitalism & the Apocalypse: Salvage Live w/ Mike Davis
Join Salvage and Haymarket Books for a discussion of Capitalism & the Apocalypse with writer and activist Mike Davis.
Ice shelves larger than the largest U.S. states collapse, and barely make headlines. Imperial powers return to brinksmanship and open conflict, and our politicians assure us they are ready and willing to build more charnel houses. Plague floats like a film over our collective future, and we’re asked to face it with a stiff upper lip for the sake of the Economy. And these are just the most recent of the festering horrors to grow from capitalism and threaten the very existence of humanity.As the profit system has spawned disaster after disaster, few analysts, pundits, or commentators can claim to have addressed the mounting number of catastrophes with as much insight or clarity as Mike Davis. And none have combined his unflinching honesty with an unwavering commitment to the necessity of a revolutionary break from our entire social system.From his magisterial City of Quartz, to the more recent The Monster Enters, Davis has been cataloging and raging against capitalism’s slow burning (though rapidly accelerating) apocalypse(s) in his invaluable books for decades. He will join our Salvage Live hosts, Annie Olaloku-Teriba and Richard Seymour, for an urgent discussion of the crises we face, and what it means to confront them with eyes open and desolation in our hearts.
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Speakers:
Mike Davis is professor emeritus of creative writing at UC Riverside. He joined the San Diego chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1962 at age 16 and the struggle for racial and social equality has remained the lodestar of his life. His City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles challenged reigning celebrations of the city from the perspectives of its lost radical past and insurrectionary future. His wide-ranging work has married science, archival research, personal experience, and creative writing with razor-sharp critiques of empires and ruling classes.
Annie Olaloku-Teriba is a writer and podcaster whose research focuses on how neoliberalism has transformed the theory and practice of ‘race.’
Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster from Northern Ireland and the author of numerous books about politics including Against Austerity and Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics. His writing appears in The New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Prospect, Jacobin, and innumerable other places including his own Patreon. He is an editor at Salvage magazine.
This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Salvage.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/KSQ3UYl29D0
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 17, 2022
Deborah Eisenberg in conversation with David L. Ulin
Join Deborah Eisenberg and David L. Ulin for a conversation on Eisenberg's work and the craft of writing.
A short story writer who crafts distinctive portraits of contemporary American life with precision and moral depth, Deborah Eisenberg is the author of Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All around Atlantis, Twilight of the Superheroes, and Your Duck Is My Duck. Writer and editor David L. Ulin is Professor of the Practice of English at the University of Southern California and a former book critic for the Los Angeles Times.
Speakers:
Deborah Eisenberg is the author of five collections of short stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All around Atlantis, Twilight of the Superheroes, and Your Duck Is My Duck. She is a MacArthur Fellow and the recipient of numerous honors, including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She is a professor emerita in the writing program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
David L. Ulin is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was short-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, and Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. A former book editor and book critic for the Los Angeles Times, he has written for Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His essay “Bed” appeared in The Best American Essays 2020. He is a Professor of the Practice of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the literary journal Air/Light. Most recently, he edited Joan Didion: The 1960s and 70s and Joan Didion: The 1980s and 90s for Library of America.
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This event is a partnership between Lannan Foundation and Haymarket Books.
Lannan Foundation's Readings & Conversations series features inspired writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as cultural freedom advocates with a social, political, and environmental justice focus. We are excited to offer these programs online to a global audience. Video and audio recordings of all events are available at lannan.org.
Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago. Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left.
Lannan Foundation is a family foundation dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity, and creativity through projects that support exceptional contemporary artists and writers, inspired Native activists in rural communities, and social justice advocates.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/OVPRslmLgLk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
