News

Women’s Resistance in South Africa. Author Koni Benson and illustrator André Trantraal discuss their new collaboration, Crossroads: I Live Where I Like: A Graphic History on Thursday, July 29th, 2:00pm – 3:30pm ET hosted by Firestorm Books. Register here.

Crossroads: I Live Where I Like: A Graphic History is a graphic nonfiction history of women-led movements at the forefront of the struggle for land, housing, water, education, and safety in Cape Town over half a century

Koni Benson is a historian, organizer, and educator. She is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, where she is committed to creative approaches to history that link art, activism, and African history in her work with various student, activist, and cultural collectives in southern Africa.

André Trantraal is a writer, illustrator, and translator from Bishop Lavis, Cape Town. He is the writer of the comic books Coloureds and Stormkaap. His work has been exhibited in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Cape Town and his political cartoons have appeared in a range of South African newspapers.

Join Siobhán McGuirk and Adrienne Pine, coeditors of Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry, along with Mark Akkerman and Yasser Louati for an online forum on “Migration and Asylum in Europe: The Industry of (and Profit in) Human Mobility” on Thursday, July 29 at 6pm UK, 7pm Central Europe, 10am PT, 1pm ET. Sponsored by Argos International Migration and Human Rights Observatory. Watch the event on Argos Facebook page here or PM’s YouTube page here.

The Argos International Migration and Human Rights Observatory is pleased to announce a conversation examining migration, with a particular focus on Europe, as a lucrative industry fueled by global inequities and geopolitical interference—as outlined in the recently-published PM Press volume Asylum For Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry. Panelists’ diverse perspectives and experiences will provide a broad overview of the ways in which this industry generates winners and losers in European countries as well as in the nations of origin and transit for non-European migrants. They will also explore the crucial role of governments and private corporations in the asylum and migration industry.

Panelists:
1. Mark Akkerman (Netherlands) | Researcher with Stop Wapenhandel, The Transnational Institute, and the Abolish Frontex campaign
2. Yasser Louati (France) | Community organizer, political analyst, and founder of the transnational human rights and civil liberties organisation CJL (Comité Justice Libertés Pour Tous)
3. Siobhán McGuirk (UK) | Researcher at London-Goldsmiths and coeditor of Asylum for Sale

Moderator:
Adrienne Pine (USA) | Medical anthropologist, co-editor of Asylum for Sale, senior researcher with Argos International Migration and Human Rights Observatory

Join Akilah S. Richards, author of Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work, as a live and virtual Keynote at the HOMESCHOOL ASSOCIATION OF CALIFORNIA Conference on Friday, July 30th from 10:30am to 12noon PT on, “Trust is practice, not a destination: Questioning our understandings of trust as part of raising free people.” Learn more and register here.

About Raising Free People:

No one is immune to the byproducts of compulsory schooling and standardized testing. And while reform may be a worthy cause for some, it is not enough for countless others still trying to navigate the tyranny of what schooling has always been. Raising Free People argues that we need to build and work within systems truly designed for any human to learn, grow, socialize, and thrive, regardless of age, ability, background, or access to money.

Families and conscious organizations across the world are healing generations of school wounds by pivoting into self-directed, intentional community-building, and Raising Free People shows you exactly how unschooling can help facilitate this process.

Individual experiences influence our approach to parenting and education, so we need more than the rules, tools, and “bad adult” guilt trips found in so many parenting and education books. We need to reach behind our behaviors to seek and find our triggers; to examine and interrupt the ways that social issues such as colonization still wreak havoc on our ability to trust ourselves, let alone children. Raising Free People explores examples of the transition from school or homeschooling to unschooling, how single parents and people facing financial challenges unschool successfully, and the ways unschooling allows us to address generational trauma and unlearn the habits we mindlessly pass on to children.

In these detailed and unabashed stories and insights, Richards examines the ways that her relationships to blackness, decolonization, and healing work all combine to form relationships and enable community-healing strategies rooted in an unschooling practice. This is how millions of families center human connection, practice clear and honest communication, and raise children who do not grow up to feel that they narrowly survived their childhoods.

Akilah S. Richards is a public speaker and the founder of Raising Free People Network, a social enterprise focused on resolving the ways that unexamined experiences with bias and oppression disrupt families’ and organizations’ capacity to sustain cultures of belonging.

Join Marcus Colasurdo and musician friends for an in-person reading and performance of his new work Simultaneous Revolutions: (Poems), coauthored with G.H. Mosson, on Saturday, July 31st at 7pm, hosted by Hazelton Art League in Hazelton, PA. Learn more below and at the website here and check out their previous work, Heart X-rays: A Modern Epic Poem.

Simultaneous Revolutions offers a meeting place for individual expression in this plague year where, forced to look within and stay afar, people can do both with these companion poems. With poems about Bob Dylan, contemporary singer Grimes, the Clash, Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries, Allen Ginsberg, and also featuring voices from warehouse rave to the ignored alley, from the blurry highway to a couple’s river-walk to a calm man’s tilling, these poems offer a provocative panorama of our both ancient and neon times.

Headed down the wounded highway
like a nurse on the same road,
don’t know what the banners say today,
but sense the ill from the good.
—from “Soulphone Ringing”

Who hasn’t traveled the revolutions of living? What would that map look like, as varied people chart their own ways to harbor? Find out by checking out Simultaneous Revolutions. From the Lower East Side to the Lehigh River Gorge, from Standing Rock to Chesapeake Bay, from St. Louis to Vermont to San Francisco, Simultaneous Revolutions stands exactly at the broad confluence of a hundred nourishing, wild, wounded rivers—coming together—flowing to a gathering of power, becoming one.

G.H. Mosson is a poet, lawyer, activist, and author of three prior books of poetry. His poetry has appeared in The Hollins Critic, the Tampa Review, the Cincinnati Review, Measure, and also won fellowships from the Puffin Foundation and Johns Hopkins University. From 2003 to 2010, he edited Poems against War: A Journal of Poetry and Action (Wasteland Press).

Marcus Colasurdo is an underground “classic beat” poet who has published several books and given inspiring readings across venues of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Virginia, and California. He often combines art, music, and audience at performances to raise money for worthy causes.