Haymarket Books Live

The second in a series of Critical Conversations organized by Study and Struggle discussing prison abolition and immigrant justice. ———————————————— The Study and Struggle program is the first phase of an ongoing project to organize against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi through four months of political education and community building. Our Critical Conversations webinar series, hosted by Haymarket Books, will cover the themes for the upcoming month. Haymarket Books is an independent, radical, non-profit publisher. The second webinar theme is Abolition, Intersectionality, and Care and will be a conversation about what it means for abolition to be intersectional and how abolition demands a reimagination of what it means to be in community and to care for one another. ———————————————— Speakers: Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!,” and the creator of the mutual aid toolkit at BigDoorBrigade.com. His latest book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), forthcoming from Verso Press this summer. Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant police misconduct attorney and organizer whose writing, litigation, and advocacy has focused on policing and criminalization of women and LGBT people of color for the past two decades. She is currently Researcher in Residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality and Criminalization at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, where she recently launched the Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action initiative. She is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, Say Her Name: What it Means to Center Black Women’s Experiences of Police Violence in Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States, Surviving the Streets of New York: Experiences of LGBT Youth, YMSM and YWSW Engaged in Survival Sex, and Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color, in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology and has published numerous articles, policy reports and research studies. Victoria Law is a freelance writer and editor. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, and co-author of the new book Prison By Any Other Name. She frequently writes about the intersections between mass incarceration, gender and resistance. Pauline Rogers, is formerly incarcerated, and, Co-founder of the Reaching & Educating for Community Hope (RECH) Foundation in Jackson, Mississippi. Jarvis Benson (moderator) is originally from Grenada, Mississippi and graduated from the University of Mississippi in 2019. He currently lives in Washington DC and works on youth leadership development, voting accessibility, and social justice initiatives on campuses across the country. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/T5xefwldPLk Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Astra Taylor, Hannah Appel and Chenjerai Kumanyika discuss the urgent new book: Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition by the Debt Collective. The book is a powerful guide to action for people in debt. ---------------------------------------------------- Debtors have been mocked, scolded and lied to for decades. We have been told that it is perfectly normal to go into debt to get medical care, to go to school, or even to pay for our own incarceration. We’ve been told there is no way to change an economy that pushes the majority of people into debt while a small minority hoard wealth and power. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that mass indebtedness and extreme inequality are a political choice. In the early days of the crisis, elected officials drew up plans to spend trillions of dollars. The only question was: where would the money go and who would benefit from the bailout? The truth is that there has never been a lack of money for things like housing, education and health care. Millions of people never needed to be forced into debt for those things in the first place. Armed with this knowledge, a militant debtors movement has the potential to rewrite the contract and assure that no one has to mortgage their future to survive. Debtors of the World Must Unite. As isolated individuals, debtors have little influence. But as a bloc, we can leverage our debts and devise new tactics to challenge the corporate creditor class and help win reparative, universal public goods. Individually, our debts overwhelm us. But together, our debts can make us powerful. ------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the director, most recently, of "What Is Democracy?" and the author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone and the American Book Award winning The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. She is co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union for debtors, and contributed the foreword to the group’s new book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition. Hannah Appel is a Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at UCLA and a political organizer. She is the author, most recently, of The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea, and serves as the Associate Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, where she leads the Future of Finance research stream. She is co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union for debtors, and a writers bloc member for Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition. Chenjerai Kumanyika is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Media at Rutgers University who also commits acts of podcasting and organizing. His research and teaching focus on power, race , and promotional culture in the cultural and creative industries. In addition to being a proud Moth storyteller, Chenjerai Co-created and Co-hosted Gimlet Media’s Peabody award-winning Uncivil podcast and co-hosts on Scene on Radio’s widely influential seasons on “Seeing White,” and the history of American democracy. His writing appears in a variety of scholarly and journalistic outlets. Chenjerai organizes with 215 People's Alliance, the Media, Inequality, & Change Center, Philadelphia Debt Collective and continues to serve on Street Poets' board. ---------------------------------------------------- Order a copy of Can't Pay Won't Pay: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1520-can-t-pay-won-t-pay Learn more about the Debt Collective: https://debtcollective.org Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/V88AJhbHof0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A discussion in commemoration of Attica Day about its continued significance and the movement demanding prisoner labor rights. —————————————————————————— The forced labor of incarcerated people is a vestige of slavery still protected by the 13th Amendment today. On September 9th, 1971, nearly 1,300 men incarcerated at the Attica Correctional Facility led an insurrection against the prison — an institution undergirded by systemic oppression, racism, and violence. The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto rooted the uprising in collective principled struggle: “In our peaceful efforts to assemble in dissent...we are in turn murdered, brutalized, and framed...because we seek the rights and privileges of all American People.” The State used brutal and deadly force to silence the rebellion. And yet, the vision for collective liberation forged during the Attica Uprising continues to shape demands of incarcerated people throughout the world. Join us on September 13th to commemorate Attica Day and discuss its continued significance, unfulfilled demands, and the movement to bring those demands to bear. Speakers: Orisanmi Burton is an Assistant Professor of anthropology at American University and a 2020 – 2021 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Burton’s research, which focuses on Black radical politics and state repression in the US, has been published in North American Dialogue, The Black Scholar, and Cultural Anthropology. He is an active member of the Critical Prison Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association and the Abolition Collective and is completing a book manuscript titled The Tip of the Spear: Black Revolutionary Organizing and Prison Pacification in the Empire State that analyzes the prison as a domain of domestic warfare. Darren Mack is an activist, advocate, and organizer based in New York. Darren served 20 years in New York State's prison system where he was politicized. Upon his release he became a member of the Education From the Inside Out coalition working to remove statutory and practical educational barriers for individuals impacted by the punishment system. In 2016, he became one of the outspoken advocates for the #CLOSErikers campaign. Robin McGinty is a PhD candidate (ABD) at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Doctoral Program in Geography. Robin McGinty’s research study “A Labor of Livingness: Oral Histories of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women” considers a re-imagination of the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated Black women and the production of an explicit political subjectivity that attends to the ways of knowing and living the world. Foregrounding the oral histories of formerly incarcerated Black women, the term ‘a labor of livingness’ is articulated as an expression of resistance to the prison as a site of living death, and its structural afterlives. Emani Davis is the CREATE(HER) of The Omowale Project, established to respond to the syndemic epidemics of COVID-19 and the racial violence targeting Black men and women. The project is designed to provide direct support to BIPOC-led organizations and the battle-scarred and emerging leaders who are at the helm of the national movement for racial justice. While reducing trauma and building resilience, The Project operates at the intersection of brain science, Ancestral wisdom and the healing arts. —————————————————————————— This event is cosponsored by Haymarket Books and 13th Forward. 13th Forward is a campaign led by a coalition of workers’ rights advocates, criminal justice activists, grassroots organizers, and directly impacted individuals to end the forced labor and wage theft of incarcerated workers in New York. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/7ePHL7_Gpho Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A discussion on why winning a Green New Deal requires confronting both inequality and the right-wing's strategic racism. ---------------------------------------------------- How can we win the Green New Deal and rapidly transform our economy to avert climate catastrophe while securing economic and racial justice for all? Co-editors of the new book, WINNING THE GREEN NEW DEAL, Varshini Prakash and Guido Girgenti are joined by Green New Deal policy expert Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Data for Progress' Julian Noisecat, Dog Whistle Politics author and professor Ian Haney-Lopez, and Justice Democrats' Executive Director Alexandra Rojas for a discussion on why the climate crisis cannot be solved unless we also confront inequality and racism. Order a copy of Winning the Green New Deal here: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781982142438 ------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Ian Haney López is the originator of the race-class approach to beating dog whistle politics. A law professor at UC Berkeley who specializes in Critical Race Theory, his focus for the last decade has been on the use of racism as a class weapon in electoral politics, and how to respond. In Dog Whistle Politics (2014), he detailed the fifty-year history of coded racism in American politics. Rhiana Gunn-Wright serves as director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute. Before joining Roosevelt, Gunn-Wright was the policy director for New Consensus, where she was charged with developing and promoting the Green New Deal, among other projects. Gunn-Wright was previously the policy director for Abdul El-Sayed’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign. A 2013 Rhodes Scholar, she has also worked as the policy analyst for the Detroit Health Department, the Mariam K. Chamberlain Fellow of Women and Public Policy at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), and on the policy team for former First Lady Michelle Obama. Julian Brave NoiseCat (@jnoisecat) is Vice President of Policy & Strategy for Data for Progress and Narrative Change Director for the Natural History Museum. A Fellow of the Type Media Center and NDN Collective, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and other publications. Julian grew up in Oakland, California and is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen and descendant of the Lil'Wat Nation of Mount Currie. Alexandra Rojas is the Executive Director of Justice Democrats, the progressive political organization most well-known for recruiting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress, launching the Green New Deal sit-in at Nancy Pelosi's office alongside Sunrise Movement, and for electing a new generation of Green Deal champions in Congress like Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Marie Newman, and so many more. Rojas got her start in politics working on the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. Varshini Prakash is the executive director and cofounder of the Sunrise Movement and a leading voice for young Americans in the fight to stop climate change. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, on the BBC, and more. Varshini was one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People and Forbes’s 30 Under 30 in 2019. She currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Guido Girgenti is the Media Director for Justice Democrats and a founding Board Member of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led movement to stop climate change and win a Green New Deal. He is a lifelong organizer for racial, economic, and climate justice, and lives in his hometown of Brooklyn, NY. ---------------------------------------------------- This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org and Sunrise Movement: https://www.sunrisemovement.org Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/FFjk7m6SQEA Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join authors Roberto Lovato and Mike Davis for a lively conversation on violence, migration, and the possibility of revolution, in celebration of the release of Lovato’s gripping new memoir Unforgetting. An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time—and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten. In Unforgetting, Roberto interweaves his father’s complicated history and his own with first-hand reportage on gang life, state violence, and the heart of the immigration crisis in both El Salvador and the United States. In doing so he makes the political personal, revealing the cyclical ways violence operates in our homes and our societies, as well as the ways hope and tenderness can rise up out of the darkness if we are courageous enough to unforget. Roberto Lovato is a journalist and a member of The Writers Grotto. He is one of the country’s leading writers and thinkers on Central American gangs, refugees, violence and other issues. Lovato is also a co-founder of #DignidadLiteraria, the national movement formed to combat the invisibility and silencing of Latinx stories and books in the U.S. publishing industry. He is also recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center and a former fellow at U.C. Berkeley’s Latinx Research Center. His essays and reporting have appeared in numerous publications including Guernica, Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Der Spiegel, La Opinion, and other national and international publications. He lives in San Francisco. Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Late Victorian Holocausts, Buda’s Wagon, and Planet of Slums. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Diego. Our official bookstore partner for this event is Unabridged Bookstore. To purchase Unforgetting by Roberto Lovato from Unabridged Bookstore, call 773.883.9119. Or click here: https://www.unabridgedbookstore.com/event/virtual-event-unforgetting-roberto-lovato-and-mike-davis-haymarket-books Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/CIwOCd8HUyE Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Arundhati Roy and Nick Estes for an urgent and timely conversation on the present crisis, resistance, and the meaning of freedom. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The chant of "Azadi!"—Urdu for "Freedom!"—is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it also became the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism. Even as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for Freedom—a chasm or a bridge?—the streets fell silent. Not only in India, but all over the world. The coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of Azadi, making a nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could. In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world. Arundhati Roy studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. A collection of her essays from the past twenty years, My Seditious Heart, was recently published by Haymarket Books. Her latest book is Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico. In 2014, he co-founded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization. For 2017-2018, Estes was the American Democracy Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. Estes is the author of the book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance and he co-edited Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, which draws together more than thirty contributors, including leaders, scholars, and activists of the Standing Rock movement. Co-presented by Haymarket Books and Elliott Bay Book Company, with the support of Tasveer, this event is to celebrate the release of Arundhati Roy’s new book of essays, Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. Order your copy of Azadi from Elliott Bay: https://www.elliottbaybook.com/book/9781642592603 Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/iEr4wCWJ9GM Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

The first in a series of Critical Conversations organized by Study and Struggle discussing prison abolition and immigrant justice. The Study and Struggle program is the first phase of an ongoing project to organize against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi through four months of political education and community building. Our Critical Conversations webinar series, hosted by Haymarket Books, will cover the themes for the upcoming month. ———————————————— The first webinar theme is Abolition as Study and Deconstructing Racial Capitalism and will be a conversation exploring the longstanding relationship between political study and the practice of abolition. Speakers will also discuss racial capitalism and its connection to the Prison Industrial Complex both historically and in current organizing contexts. Speakers: Rachel Herzing is the executive director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left, progressive social movements, the working class and people of color. Rachel has played roles as an organizer, activist, and advocate fighting the violence of policing and imprisonment. Rukia Lumumba is the Executive Director of the People’s Advocacy Institute, co-lead of the Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives, and a steering committee member and co-chair of legal committee of the Mississippi Prison Reform Coalition. Derecka Purnell is a human rights lawyer, writer, and organizer. Since graduating from Harvard Law School, she has worked to end police and prison violence nationwide by providing legal assistance, research, and trainings to community based organizations through an abolitionist framework. Derecka is currently a columnist at The Guardian and Deputy Director of Spirit of Justice Center. Stephen Wilson is a currently incarcerated, Black, queer writer, activist and student. For over two decades, he was active in the ballroom community and worked as an HIV-prevention specialist and community organizer. His work and practice inherit teachings from prison abolition, transformative, and racial justice, Black feminist theory, and gender and queer liberation. Specifically, he works to end cycles of poverty and incarceration that have plagued his community. He works to expose and dismantle the prison industrial complex and to build a world in which we deal with harm without caging or exiling other people. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/PWUJKPX8md0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A conversation on the intersecting crises that have plagued Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria and the communities organizing to rebuild. ---------------------------------------------------- Join Marisol LeBrón, Yarimar Bonilla, and Molly Crabapple for a conversation on the intersecting crises that have plagued Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria in 2017, and the communities organizing to resist and rebuild. This event will include the premier of the new short film: "Aftershocks of Disaster," directed by Juan C. Dávila, and produced by Yarimar Bonilla. “Broad in scope, passionate, and urgent, Aftershocks is a necessary anthology of Puerto Ricans telling the story not just of Maria but of resistance to colonialism, austerity and disaster capitalism.” —Molly Crabapple Three years after Hurricane Maria hit, Puerto Ricans are still reeling from its effects and aftereffects. Aftershocks collects poems, essays and photos from survivors of Hurricane Maria detailing their determination to persevere. The concept of "aftershocks" is used in the context of earthquakes to describe the jolts felt after the initial quake, but no disaster is a singular event. Aftershocks of Disaster examines the lasting effects of hurricane Maria, not just the effects of the wind or the rain, but delving into what followed: state failure, social abandonment, capitalization on human misery, and the collective trauma produced by the botched response. Speakers: Yarimar Bonilla is the co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm. She is a political anthropologist specializing in questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and race across the Americas. She has tracked these issues across a broad range of sites and practices including: postcolonial politics in the French Caribbean, the role of digital protest in the Black Lives Matter movement, the politics of the Trump presidency, the Puerto Rican statehood movement, and her current research, for which she was named a 2018 Carnegie Fellow, on the political, economic, and social aftermath of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Marisol LeBrón is is the co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching focus on social inequality, policing, violence, and protest. She is the author of Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico, which examines the growth of punitive governance in contemporary Puerto Rico. Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer whose inspirations include Diego Rivera and Goya’s The Disasters of War. She is the author of Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham, which was a NY Times Notable Book and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award. Her memoir, Drawing Blood, received global praise and attention. Her animated short film “A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” has been nominated for an Emmy award in the category of Outstanding News Analysis: Editorial and Opinion.Follow us to help support our work! ---------------------------------------------------- Order a copy of Aftershocks of Disasters, edited by Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1333-aftershocks-of-disaster Order Molly Crabapple's book, Brother of the Gun: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9780399590627 Order Molly Crabapple's illustrated memoir, Drawing Blood: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9780062797223 Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/W1PU46ihFR0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A conversation about why capitalism has failed and how we can fight for an economy, and society, that works for the 99%. ---------------------------------------------------- Join writers and socialists Hadas Thier and Meagan Day for a conversation about the unfolding global economic and health crises and the importance of arming a new generation of activists and organizers with the tools of Marxist economics. The Covid-19 pandemic and attendant economic meltdown expose capitalism’s failures more clearly than ever, and make evident the pressing need for an alternative way of understanding, and organizing, society. Thier and Day will discuss how profound inequality has determined the impacts of the health crisis, the inadequacy of free market solutions to the problems we face, the Marxist theory of economic crisis, and more. This event is a book launch for Hadas Thier’s A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics, a lively, accessible, and timely guide to Capitalism for those who want to understand and dismantle the world of the 1%. Order it here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1481-a-people-s-guide-to-capitalism ---------------------------------------------------- Hadas Thier is an activist, writer, and socialist, and in her spare time, an amateur paleontologist (aka mom to a toddler). She is the author of A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics. Meagan Day is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She is the co-author of Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go From the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/PEObOvuwI0g Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A discussion examining the roots of the explosion and mass protests currently unfolding in Lebanon with speakers on the ground in Beirut. ----- Please join the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) International Committee and Haymarket Books for this forum examining the momentous events currently unfolding in Lebanon, featuring three speakers on the ground in Beirut. The massive explosion that rocked Beirut on August 4 revealed the depths of the Lebanese ruling elite’s criminal mismanagement. The explosion and mass protests that followed come on the heels of a year-long economic crisis and popular revolt. Since October 17, 2019 the people of Lebanon have been in the streets again and again struggling to transform the country’s sectarian-oligarchic political and economic system. Now in the wake of the COVID crisis, economic collapse, and devastation caused by elite incompetence which has driven 300,000 people from their homes, the people of Lebanon are rising up again. What can we learn from Lebanon’s long uprising and how can we show solidarity? Speakers: Rima Majed is a writer, activist, and Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her research focuses on social movements, sectarianism, conflict and violence in the Middle East. She has written extensively on the political economy of sectarianism, protests and uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq, structural transformations and unemployment in postwar Lebanon, and the importance of labor organization. Her work has appeared in a range of academic journals and media outlets, including Social Forces, Mobilization, Global Dialogue, Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology, Al Jumhuriya, CNN, Middle East Eye, openDemocracy, and Al Jazeera English. She is currently working on a book that looks at sectarian capitalism and the shift in sectarian boundaries in Lebanon. Lara Bitar is a journalist in Beirut and the founding editor of The Public Source, a Beirut-based independent media organization that covers socioeconomic and environmental crises afflicting Lebanon since the onset of neoliberal governance in the 1990s and provides political commentary on events unfolding since October 17, 2019. Bassel Salloukh is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut. He is co-author of The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (2015) and Beyond the Arab Spring: Authoritarianism and Democratization in the Arab World (2012) and co-editor of Persistent Permeability? Regionalism, Localism, and Globalization in the Middle East (2004). Moderator: Shireen Akram-Boshar is a socialist activist and alum of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). She has organized around the question of the Syrian uprising and the relationship between Syrian and Palestinian struggles for liberation, as well as on anti-imperialism and solidarity with the revolts of the Middle East/North Africa region. Her writing has covered the repression of Palestine solidarity activists in the US, revolution and counterrevolution in the Middle East, Trump’s war on immigrants, and the fight against the far right. Shireen is part of the Middle East and Africa working group of DSA's International Committee. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Z2otEIX9Eu8 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks