Haymarket Books Live

Join us for an event in the Haymarket Presents speakers series, as Silky Shah is joined by historian Charlotte E. Rosen for a conversation on Shah’s book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Co-sponsored by Organized Communities Against Deportations, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago and Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama’s record-level deportations, Trump’s immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition.Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah’s personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement’s strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings.Shah and Rosen will explore how to bridge the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.Silky Shah has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2009, she joined the staff of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigrant detention in the United States, and now serves as its executive director. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Truthout, Teen Vogue, Inquest, and The Forge and in the edited volumes, The Jail is Everywhere (Verso, 2024), Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, 2024), and Transformative Planning (Black Rose Books, 2020). She has also appeared in numerous national and local media outlets including The Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC.Charlotte E. Rosen is a historian and writer based in Chicago. She is also the Programming and Events Coordinator at Haymarket Books.Order Unbuild Walls: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2213-unbuild-wallsWatch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvhsiCtpReEBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join editors and contributors to the new Palestinian poetry anthology Heaven Looks Like Us for a virtual reading in commemoration of Nakba Day.A love letter to Palestinian ancestors, their descendants, and their land, to all anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, to a history that will never be forgotten, and to a future in which there thrives a free, free Palestine.Poetry has always served as a mode of resistance in Palestinian culture. In defiance of dispossession and decades of military siege, of a nakba that never ended, of historical and cultural obfuscation, of unrelenting violence and thousands of martyred people, the “power to narrate,” as Edward Said wrote, remains a necessary tool for self-determination. The poems collected here reclaim that power, bridging borders, languages, and generations to forge new conversations around resistance and liberation.Heaven Looks Like Us is a battle-cry against the annihilation of a people. As Palestinian history remains haunted by exile, violence, and grief, so, too, are the poems in this anthology. And yet, editors George Abraham and Noor Hindi present these realities alongside other themes that are also true: queer and feminist perspectives, eco-poetry, meditations on love and time, and lineages of protest. This anthology dares to imagine a future beyond a nation-state for Palestinian people everywhere.Order Heaven Looks Like Us: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2527-heaven-looks-like-usWatch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHwVoB52yQwBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Dean Spade and Eman Abdelhadi in conversation about Spade's new book Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together. This event is cosponsored by Haymarket Books, Pilsen Community Books, and In These Times. More about the book:Lifelong activist and educator Dean Spade dares us to decide that our interpersonal actions are not separate from our politics of liberation and resistance. Many activist projects and resistance groups fall apart because people treat each other poorly, trying desperately to live out the cultural myths about dating and relationships that we are fed from an early age.How do we divest from the idea that one romantic partner will be the solution to all our problems? How do we bring our best thinking about freedom and justice into step with our desires for healing and connection?Love in a F*cked-Up World is a resounding call to action and a practical manifesto for how to combat cultural scripts and take our relationships into our own hands, preparing us for the work of changing the world.Order a copy of Love in a F*cked Up World: https://www.pilsencommunitybooks.com/item/G_f3vj27PIekwP3GLS_dlQSpeakers: Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He is a professor at the Seattle University School of Law. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. In 2015, Dean released a one-hour video documentary, Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!, which can be watched free online with English captions or subtitles in several languages. Dean’s book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next) was published by Verso Press in October 2020. It is also out in Spanish, Czech, German, Catalan, Italian, Thai, Korean, and Portuguese.Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhYW-DTw9C0Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

We are currently witnessing the dismantling of environmental policies and a reversal of climate commitments on a large scale. But what kind of environmentalism do we really want, and for whom? Environmentalism is not about switching out plastic for paper straws, electric vehicles, carbon-neutral yachts, or eco-friendly waterfront real-estate.It’s not about meeting the desires of a smoothie-slurping “green” class whose lives depend on increasingly precarious working class livelihoods. Environmentalism is about building class power to resist the decimation of life on our planet by a privileged minority.Join Ashley Dawson, Emma River-Roberts, Aaron Vansintjan, and Vijay Kolinjivadi for a discussion on how to reject the “sustainability class” and instead build a working class environmentalism.Order The Sustainability Class here: http://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781620977439Speakers:Emma River-Roberts is the Founder and Co-Director of the international non-profit the Working Class Climate Alliance, as well as a PhD Researcher at Goldsmiths University, specialising in working class environmentalism. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He has published numerous books on aspects of the fight for climate and environmental justice, including, most recently, Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket, 2024) and Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2024). Dawson is the Climate Justice Fellow for 2024-25 at the arts organization Culture Push, and is also a faculty fellow at Social Practice CUNY. He is currently creating a series of short documentary films about the toxic impact of energy infrastructure in NYC.Aaron Vansintjan was born in Ghent, Belgium and lives in Montreal, Canada. After studying philosophy and natural resource sciences, he became involved in Montreal’s artist and activist community, running an underground venue and organizing around food and housing justice. Eventually, a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London took him to Barcelona and Hanoi, leading him to write essays on how people build and transform their world, through food, social movements, and political imagination. He has since co-authored two books: The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism (Verso) and, with Vijay Kolinjivadi, The Sustainability Class: How to take back our future from lifestyle environmentalists (The New Press). His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Time, Newsweek, Al Jazeera, and The Conversation.Vijay Kolinjivadi is originally from Cincinnati, Ohio and born from two immigrant parents from Tamil Nadu, India. For over a decade, Vijay has worked as a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, covering UN multilateral environmental processes around the world. He now teaches community economic development and ecological economics at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. His research explores the social impacts of putting a monetary price on the conservation of nature. He has published on environmental politics for Aljazeera, The New Internationalist, Green European Journal, Newsweek, and Science for the People, among others. He is the co-author of The Sustainability Class: How to take back our future from lifestyle environmentalists, for The New Press.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuCa9KwQbBgBuy books from Haymarket: haymarketbooks.org

Join Leanne Betasamosake Simpson for a conversation with Sarah Haley to celebrate the release of her new book Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead.In her powerful new book, Theory of Water, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience—and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet—one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.Theory of Water is a genre-bending exploration of that most elemental force–water–through Indigenous storytelling, personal memory, and the work of influential artists and writers.Speakers:Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician and member of Alderville First Nation. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is the author of seven previous books, including Rehearsals for Living with Robyn Maynard, and the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies. Her newest book is Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead.Sarah Haley’s work focuses on questions of carceral gendering and the long history of Black women’s ensnarement in U.S. prison regimes as well as their historical and ongoing opposition to carceral power. Her research interests include gender and carceral history, Black feminist history and theory, queer studies, prison abolition, and feminist archival methods. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, published in 2016. Her essays and articles have appeared in edited volumes as well as in journals including Signs, The Journal of African American History, GLQ, Souls, and Women & Performance. She is working on a book titled The Carceral Interior: A Black Feminist Study of American Punishment, 1966-2016. She is associate professor of gender studies and history at Columbia University and has been active in abolitionist and labor movements and currently organizes with Scholars for Social Justice.Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2533-theory-of-waterWatch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4_5HpR9GOYBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

In this inaugural event in the Haymarket Presents speakers series, best-selling author Malcolm Harris will be joined by activist-historian Gabriel Winant for a conversation on Harris’s new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis. Co-sponsored by Pilsen Community Books.Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying “blah blah blah.” Something has to change—but what, and how?In What's Left, Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies—progressive, socialist, and revolutionary—that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What's Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns.Harris and Winant will examine where we stand, explore how we got here, and try to chart a way toward a brighter future.Get the book: https://pilsencommunitybooks.com/item/2-gUryvjjJ_i3fKieCwDVwSpeakers:Malcolm Harris is the author of the national bestseller Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials; and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History.Gabriel Winant is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, a member of the executive council of AAUP/AFT Local 6741, a member of the Dissent editorial board, and author of The Next Shift.This event is co-sponsored by Pilsen Community Books and Haymarket Books, and is part of the Haymarket Presents speakers series.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbvUKAJRMCEBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Judith Butler and Lisa Wedeen for a bold and essential conversation of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti–gender ideology movements” that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization—and even “man” himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence.The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and trans-exclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless—a book whose verve and rigor only they could deliver.“A profoundly urgent intervention.” —Naomi Klein“A timely must-read for anyone actively invested in reimagining collective futurity.” —Claudia RankineSpeakers:Judith Butler is the author of several books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”; The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection; and The Force of Nonviolence. In addition to their numerous academic honors and publications, Butler has published editorials and reviews in a wide range of journals and newspapers, including The New York Times, Time, and the London Review of Books, and has been featured on radio programs and podcasts throughout the world. They live in Berkeley, California.Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College, Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and Associate Faculty in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). For this newest book, she received the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award (2020); the APSA’s inaugural Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s best book award (2020); the IPSA award for Concept Analysis in Political Science (2021); and the Gordon J. Laing Award for the book that brings the most distinction to the University of Chicago Press (2022). Wedeen’s co-edited volume with Joseph Masco, entitled Conspiracy/Theory was published in January 2024. Her edited volume with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth on reimagining cosmopolitanism will be published in 2025. She is now beginning work on a book on revolutionary disappointment and recalibration and another on interpretive methods in political theory.This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Women & Children First. Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y93iGH7NurwBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Sarah Jones and Sarah Lazare in conversation around Jones' new book Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass. This event will take place at Haymarket House, and will also be live-streamed on our YouTube channel.In a compelling blend of personal narrative and in-depth reporting, New York magazine senior writer Sarah Jones exposes the harsh reality of America’s racial and income inequality and the devastating impact of the pandemic on our nation’s most vulnerable people.Sarah Jones delves into the lives of the essential workers, seniors, and people with disabilities who were disproportionately affected by COVID-19—not due to their age or profession, but because of the systemic inequality and poverty that left them exposed. She argues that America has abandoned a sacrificial underclass of millions, but insists that another future is possible. By addressing the pervasive issues of racial justice and public policy, Jones calls for a future where no one is seen as disposable again.“Disposable is a massive work of journalism—and a masterful act of love. Both a scathing rebuke of corporate health care and a clear-eyed call to action, this book reminds us that we should not and cannot put the pandemic behind us.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick.Order a copy of Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass: https://bookshop.org/p/books/disposable-america-s-contempt-for-the-underclass-sarah-jones/21581827?ean=9781982197421&next=t&affiliate=1039 Speakers: Sarah Jones is a senior writer for New York magazine, where she covers politics and religion. She was previously a staff writer for The New Republic and her work has been published by The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Dissent magazine. Jones won the 2019 Mirror Award for commentary and has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is active on social media @OneSarahJones. Originally from rural Washington County, Virginia, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband.Sarah Lazare is a reporter based in Chicago. She comes from a background in independent journalism for publications including The Intercept and Jacobin. A former editor for In These Times, staff writer for AlterNet and Common Dreams, Sarah co-edited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War.This event is cosponsored by Haymarket Books, In These Times, and Pilsen Community Books.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loSbXlI9NDkBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join us for a conversation with Dr. Daniel HoSang and Micah English with a response from longtime organizer and strategist Gihan Perara, moderated and introduced by Dr. Carmen Rojas.How are conservative groups like Turning Point USA building new onramps to the right for young people, people of color, and other parts of the progressive base? How do their events, rallies, workshops, and social media spaces make direct appeals to identity, culture, and organizing issues that have long been the domain of the left? And what implications do these appeals and tactics have for left wing political strategy and practice?A team of scholar activists attending right wing events for the last two years reports back on the surprising ways that the MAGA movement has built new inroads for people of color and other parts of the progressive base. How are they doing it and what challenges does it pose to progressive approaches to organizing and movement building?Speakers:Micah English is a PhD candidate at Yale University studying American politics, and an organizer with Unite Here Local 33. Micah researches Black politics, social movement engagement and mobilization, and their intersections with sexuality and gender.Daniel Martinez HoSang is a professor of American Studies at Yale and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, The Politics of the Multiracial Right. He is the author or co-editor of six other books an social movements and racial justice and a current Race and Democracy Fellow with the Roosevelt Institute.Gihan Perera is a Senior Fellow at the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity (PRE) and an experienced movement strategist with over 25 years of experience working at the intersection of racial justice, community organizing, and transformative philanthropy. As a thought leader and practitioner, he bridges the gap between grassroots movements and institutional philanthropy, offering critical analysis on power-building strategies in an increasingly complex political landscape.Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Under her leadership, the foundation launched the prestigious Freedom Scholar award, committed to ensuring that a majority of MCF’s endowment is overseen by diverse managers, and since starting in 2020 granted more than $160M in funding to dozens of organizations doing the hard work of shifting power to those people who have long been excluded from having it.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfk8crNutnEBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Criminalization is not only a primary tool to suppress dissent, silence opposition, and enforce policies that consolidate and enforce power - it is at the core of how Right wing, authoritarian and fascist agendas, movements, and regimes are enacted, legitimized, and entrenched.Interrupting criminalization - a political process that extends beyond criminal laws, policing, and punishment to a collective construction of categories of "others" framed as existential threats to an imagined and actual social order to be contained, expelled, and, ultimately eradicated - must therefore be at the core of our resistance.Join panelists Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Herzing, and Scot Nakagawa in exploring the central role of criminalization in shaping the current and evolving political terrain, and the essential role of challenging criminalization and confronting carceral logics and systems in strategies for resistance and solidarity across movements to fight fascism and authoritarianism worldwide.Speakers:Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ organizing, and in movements against state violence and for racial, gender, reproductive, economic, environmental and migrant justice in the U.S., Canada, and internationally since the 1980s. Andrea is the co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color and Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies, and co-author of No More Police. A Case forAbolition and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.Scot Nakagawa is a political strategist and organizer with over four decades of experience exploring questions of structural racism, white supremacy, and social justice. He is the co-founder and director of the 22nd Century Initiative, a national strategy and action hub building power at the intersection of opposition to authoritarianism and expanding democratic governance in the U.S.Rachel Herzing is an organizer, activist, and educator fighting the violence of surveillance, policing and imprisonment. Herzing is co-author, with Justin Piché, of How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment (2024). Herzing is director of the Yarrow Institute for Organizing and Analysis, was executive director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left and progressive social movements; co-director of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex; and director of research and training at Creative Interventions, a community resource that developed interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services.Ejeris Dixon is an organizer, writer, and strategist with 25 years of experience leading organizations within racial justice, LGBTQ, anti-violence, transformative justice and economic justice movements. They are the Founding Director of Ejerie Labs where they focus on building movement strategy towards creating transformative futures and curtailing rising fascism. Ejeris serves as the host of the Fascism Barometer, a podcast and learning hub that discusses fascism’s rise in the United States, and how to organize against it. For ten years Ejeris served as the Founding Executive Director of Vision Change Win Consulting, where they partnered with organizations throughout the United States and internationally to build their organizing and community safety infrastructure and capacity. Ejeris is also the co-editor of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha. Over the past twenty-five years Ejeris has directly worked on thousands of incidents of violence and directly organized around more than a hundred murders of Queer and Trans People of Color.Woods Ervin is an organizer that has been working for over a decade in movements both for trans self-determination as well as for prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition. She has worked at both TGI Justice Project and Interrupting Criminalization. She is currently a co-director at Critical Resistance, an organization that launches campaigns and projects for PIC abolition, at which she’s been volunteering since 2010.This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Interrupting Criminalization.Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzuy7U1mdh4Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org