Events

Join Adrian Shanker who will be doing a virtual reading from his book Bodies and Barriers: Queer Activists on Health, along with others, at the 2021 “Goldie Finalists” reading on Saturday, May 8th at 11am ET / 9am PT, hosted by the Golden Crown Literary Society. Learn more and register here.

About the book:

LGBT people pervasively experience health disparities, affecting every part of their bodies and lives. Yet many are still grappling to understand the mutually reinforcing health care challenges that lead to worsened health outcomes. Bodies and Barriers informs health care professionals, students in health professions, policymakers, and fellow activists about these challenges, providing insights and a road map for action that could improve queer health.

Through artfully articulated, data-informed essays by twenty-six well-known and emerging queer activists—including Alisa Bowman, Jack Harrison-Quintana, Liz Margolies, Robyn Ochs, Sean Strub, Justin Sabia-Tanis, Ryan Thoreson, Imani Woody, and more—Bodies and Barriers illuminates the health challenges LGBT people experience throughout their lives and challenges conventional wisdom about health care delivery. It probes deeply into the roots of the disparities faced by those in the LGBT community and provides crucial information to fight for health equity and better health outcomes.

The contributors to Bodies and Barriers look for tangible improvements, drawing from the history of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and from struggles against health care bias and discrimination. At a galvanizing moment when LGBT people have experienced great strides in lived equality, but our health as a community still lags, here is an indispensable blueprint for change by some of the most passionate and important health activists in the LGBT movement today.

Adrian Shanker is an award-winning activist and organizer whose career has centered on advancing progress for the LGBT community. He has worked as an arts fundraiser, labor organizer, marketing manager, and served as President of Equality Pennsylvania for three years before founding Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center in Allentown, PA, where he serves as executive director. An accomplished organizer, Adrian has led numerous successful campaigns to advance LGBT progress through municipal nondiscrimination and relationship recognition laws and laws to protect LGBT youth from conversion therapy. A specialist in LGBT health policy, he has developed leading-edge health promotion campaigns to advance health equity through behavioral, clinical, and policy changes.

Join Gabriel Kuhn, author of Liberating Sápmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North, in conversation with Sámi activist Niillas Somby about the Sámi’s ongoing fight for justice and self-determination. Saturday, May 8th from 2pm to 3:30pm ET hosted by Firestorm Books. Learn more here and register here.

The Sámi, who have inhabited Europe’s far north for thousands of years, are often referred to as the continent’s “forgotten people.” With Sápmi, their traditional homeland, divided between four nation-states–Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia–the Sámi have experienced the profound oppression and discrimination that characterize the fate of indigenous people worldwide: their lands have been confiscated, their beliefs and values attacked, their communities and families torn apart. Yet the Sámi have shown incredible resilience, defending their identity and their territories and retaining an important social and ecological voice–even if many, progressives and leftists included, refuse to listen. Liberating Sápmi is a stunning journey through Sápmi and includes in-depth interviews with Sámi artists, activists, and scholars boldly standing up for the rights of their people.

In this beautifully illustrated work, Gabriel Kuhn, author of over a dozen books and our most fascinating interpreter of global social justice movements, aims to raise awareness of the ongoing fight of the Sámi for justice and self-determination. The first accessible English-language introduction to the history of the Sámi people and the first account that focuses on their political resistance, this provocative work gives irrefutable evidence of the important role the Sámi play in the resistance of indigenous people against an economic and political system whose power to destroy all life on earth has reached a scale unprecedented in the history of humanity.

Gabriel Kuhn is a writer and translator based in Sweden. In English, most of his books have appeared with PM Press. Find them here. He runs the blog LeftTwoThree.

Niillas Somby has worked as a reindeer herder, sailor, mechanic, photographer, and journalist. He is a longtime Sámi activist, who spent a number of years on Turtle Island, sheltered by First Nations protecting him from the reach of the Norwegian judicial system.

Introducing the David Graeber Memorial Lecture Series.

First lecture is on May 11th with Alpa Shah on Democracy by Sortition, Liberal Elections and Communist Revolutionaries. Pre-Register Here

This Spring inaugurates our Annual David Graeber Memorial Lecture Series, bringing together David’s friends, collaborators, colleagues, and readers across international and disciplinary boundaries.

David saw anarchism as something you do, and not an identity. While ultimately rejecting the label “anarchist Anthropologist,” David nonetheless undertook a body of work in his lifetime that responds in a singular way to the oddities, contradictions, and limitations of bureaucracy and capitalism, often with a focus on those spaces outside capital domination. This can be seen from his early work in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), and Lost People: Magic and Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (2007). But it is in the field where David formed the relationships and friendships for which he is so fondly remembered, blurring the lines between activism and academia. As much at home talking to Charlie Rose on PBS as he was addressing a general assembly at Occupy Wall Street, David became known as the one who popularized the guiding slogan of Occupy, “We are the 99 Percent!”

Through his activist involvement and a series of book length works on historical anthropology, David still consistently managed a dizzying range of speaking engagements, even while becoming an academic-in-exile after a highly political departure from Yale University, followed by a stint at Goldsmiths (2008-2013), and finally a professorship at London School of Economics from 2013 onwards. His later publications delve into historical anthropology along with critiques of bureaucracy and managerialism, in Debt: The First 5000 Years (2015), The Utopia of Rules: on Technology, Stupidity, and Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015), and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). A posthumous collaboration with David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is due out in late 2021.

Care and freedom remained at the center of David’s work and thought. He believed that all revolutions are essentially moral transformations. It is in that spirit that we offer these memorial lectures, as a way of remaining in dialogue around ideas that are as much about future society as they are the present moment.

The David Graeber Memorial Lecture Series is a collaborative project of Anthropology and Social Change (CIIS),  The Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (BUAP), The Élisabeth Bruyère School of Social Innovation (St. Paul University), and University of Rojava.

David Graeber Memorial Lecture 2021

Alpa Shah: Democracy by Sortition, Liberal Elections and Communist Revolutionaries

**Pre-Register for the 2021 Lecture Here**

May 11th: 5pm London, 9am San Francisco, 11am Central Mexico, 12 noon Ottawa, 7pm Syria

A co-presentation of Anthropology and Social Change (CIIS),  The Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (BUAP), The Élisabeth Bruyère School of Social Innovation (St. Paul University), and Rojava University.

What if we selected our leaders by lottery? Zooming out of the mud hut villages of indigenous communities in the forested hills of eastern India, this lecture will compare three different models of leadership and democracy: liberal electoral democracy, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist democracy, and sortition, that is the drawing of lots. It will turn how we think about democracy and leadership on its head to provide a new vision for the future.

Bio:

Alpa Shah is Associate Professor-Reader in Anthropology at LSE and leads a research team at the LSE International Inequalities Institute on ‘Global Economies of Care’.

Alpa’s “Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas” was winner of the 2020 Association of Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize, shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the New India Foundation Book Prize. It was also a 2018 Book of the Year for the New Statesman, History Workshop, Sroll India, a Hindu Year in Review Book, a Hong Kong Free Press Best Human Rights Book and a Public Anthropologist Must Read. Nightmarch refers to a seven-night trek when Alpa found herself dressed as a man amidst a Naxalite guerrilla platoon, walking 250 km across the dense forests of Eastern India at the peak of counterinsurgency operations in 2010.

Framed by the government and the media as a deadly terrorist group, the Naxalites are Marx, Lenin and Mao-inspired ideologues and tribal combatants, seeking to overthrow a system that has abused them for decades, in what is now the world’s longest running armed insurgency.

Based on years of living as an anthropologist with indigenous communities, Alpa explores why they have taken up arms to fight for a fairer society and asks how they may be undermining their own aims.

Alpa has also co-authored “Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India”, a 2018 Book of the Year for the Hindu. Alpa has also co-curated a photo exhibition, ‘Behind the Indian Boom’ based on this research.

Alpa’s first book “In the Shadows of the State (2010)” is about indigenous politics, environmentalism, migration and development, and is based on long term participant observation amongst indigenous people in the forested state of Jharkhand, India. Alpa has edited seven other volumes on issues ranging from affirmative action, agrarian change, revolution in India and Nepal, emancipatory politics, economic growth in India, and Adivasi and Dalit political pathways.

Peter Cole discussing Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly with the Tolpudddle Martyrs Radical History School in a virtual event on Tuesday, May 11th from 7pm to 8pm (GMT). Learn more and register here.

Ben Fletcher, an African American who helped lead the IWW’s most militant and effective interracial branch, epitomized the union’s brand of anti-capitalism and anti-racism. Fletcher (1890−1949) was a tremendously important and well-loved member of the IWW during its heyday, the first quarter of the 20th century. A brilliant union organizer and a humorous orator, Fletcher helped found and lead Local 8 of the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union. When founded in 1913, this union was a third African American, a third Irish and Irish American, and a third other European immigrants. Despite being hated by the bosses and redbaited by the government, Local 8 controlled the waterfront for almost a decade.

Peter Cole, a Professor of History at Western Illinois University and Research Associate in the Society, Work and Development Program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia and the award-winning Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area. He also is the founder and co-director of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19). He tweets from @ProfPeterCole.

Join Peter Cole for an online discussion of Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly on Wednesday, May 12th from 1:30pm to 3pm PDT via Zoom. Learn more and register here. Sponsored by the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington.

Ben Fletcher, an African American who helped lead the IWW’s most militant and effective interracial branch, epitomized the union’s brand of anti-capitalism and anti-racism. Fletcher (1890−1949) was a tremendously important and well-loved member of the IWW during its heyday, the first quarter of the 20th century. A brilliant union organizer and a humorous orator, Fletcher helped found and lead Local 8 of the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union. When founded in 1913, this union was a third African American, a third Irish and Irish American, and a third other European immigrants. Despite being hated by the bosses and redbaited by the government, Local 8 controlled the waterfront for almost a decade.

Peter Cole, a Professor of History at Western Illinois University and Research Associate in the Society, Work and Development Program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia and the award-winning Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area. He also is the founder and co-director of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19). He tweets from @ProfPeterCole.

Join us for a book launch and panel discussion of Free City! The Fight for San Francisco’s City College and Education for All on Thursday, May 13th from 5:00pm – 6:30pm PDT via Zoom. Resister here.

Featuring coauthors Marcy Rein, Mickey Ellinger, and Vicki Legion along with EK of the CCSF Collective and Beatriz Herrera of AFT 2121. Moderated by Jason Ferreira of the SFSU. Co-sponsored by the Center for Political Education (CPE) and PM Press.

Spanish interpretation and English-language live captioning will be available. To request other accessibility supports, please email us at [email protected] before Wednesday, May 5th.

City College of San Francisco’s working-class students, staff, and faculty are facing the threat of massive class cuts and layoffs – only a few years after the sustained labor and community campaign  that pulled the school through its accreditation crisis and won free tuition. Join us for a panel discussion to learn about the corporate agenda behind the attacks on the college, and how lessons from the 2012-17 organizing campaign can help us further liberatory education at CCSF and beyond.

Order Free City! The Fight for San Francisco’s City College and Education for All from your local, indie bookstore or directly from PM Press where you can use the coupon code FREECITY to save 20% on the paperback or e-Book.

Red Nation Rising: Bordertowns and Native Liberation in the U.S. and Canada on Friday, May 14th at 3 pm PT / 6pm ET. Eventbrite registration link TBA.

Join a panel featuring Jennifer Nez Denetdale and Melanie K. Yazzie, coauthors of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press), Doreen Manuel and Kanahus Manuel, contributors to Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement (Between the Lines), and moderated by Chris La Tray. Cosponsored by PM Press and Between the Lines.

Bordertowns are white-dominated towns and cities that operate according to the same political and spatial logics as all other American towns and cities. The difference is that these settlements get their name from their location at the borders of current-day reservation boundaries, which separate the territory of sovereign Native nations from lands claimed by colonial powers such as the United States and Canada.

Join us for a discussion about bordertowns and Native Liberation more broadly, coinciding with the launch of new book Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press). Speakers are from both sides of the colonial U.S.-Canada border: south of the border, Jennifer Nez Denetdale and Melanie K. Yazzie, co-authors of Red Nation Rising; and north of the border, Doreen Manuel and Kanahus Manuel, co-author and contributor to Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement (Between the Lines).

Bordertowns came into existence when the colonial militaries and trading posts were strategically placed along expanding imperial frontiers to extinguish Indigenous resistance and incorporate indigenous territories into the burgeoning nation-states. This continues today. But little has been written about bordertowns specifically. Red Nation Rising marks the first effort to tell these entangled histories and inspire a new generation of Native freedom fighters to return to bordertowns as key front lines in the long struggle for Native liberation from colonial control. For example, speaker Kanahus Manuel has been living on contested lands in Secwepemc territory, resisting the establishment of man camps, which serve as a base for oil pipeline construction.

After talk from the speakers and a discussion moderated by Chris La Tray, there will be an opportunity for questions from the audience.

Speaker Bios:

Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Diné) is a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico who teaches courses in critical indigenous studies, indigenous gender and sexuality, and Navajo studies. She is a strong advocate for Native peoples and serves as chair of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission. She is the author of Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita and coauthor of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press, 2021).

Melanie K. Yazzie (Diné) is an assistant professor in the Departments of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico. She organizes with the Red Nation, an indigenous-led leftist organization committed to indigenous liberation. She is lead editor of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, an international journal committed to public intellectualism and social justice, and coauthor of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press, 2021).

Doreen Manuel (Secwepemc/Ktunaxa) comes from a long line of Indigenous oral historians and factual storytellers. She is an award-winning filmmaker and educator, the principal owner of Running Wolf Productions, and the director of the Bosa Centre for Film and Animation at Capilano University. She is a co-author of Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement

Kanahus Manuel (Secwepemc/Ktunaxa) is a member of the Secwepemc Women Warrior Society, and a leader with the Tiny House Warriors, a grassroots group of Indigenous Secwepemc Land Defenders resisting the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline in British Columbia. She is a mother and traditional Birth Keeper.

Chris La Tray is a Métis writer and storyteller. His first book, One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays From the World At Large (2018, Riverfeet Press) won the 2018 Montana Book Award and a 2019 High Plains Book Award. His next book, Becoming Little Shell, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2022. Chris is an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians and lives near Missoula, Montana.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) hosts Peter Cole for a free, online discussion of Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly on Saturday, May 15th at 3pm ET / 12noon PT. Presented by the Communications Department of the Industrial Workers of the World. Register for the Zoom here.

Ben Fletcher, founder and leader of the Marine Transport Workers Union Local 8 — the most powerful interracial union of its era (1910s) — is the subject of Peter Cole’s newly revised and expanded biography. Join professor Cole in discussion about who Ben Fletcher was and how he and his fellow workers turned the antiracist vision of the Industrial Workers of the World into a reality most American institutions still have not achieved in 2021: equality and integration.

Support the IWW and purchase Peter Cole’s book in their shop.

Peter Cole, a Professor of History at Western Illinois University and Research Associate in the Society, Work and Development Program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia and the award-winning Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area. He also is the founder and co-director of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19). He tweets from @ProfPeterCole.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is a labor union representing nearly 8,000 workers across North America. Established in 1905, the IWW is known for its high standards of democracy, transparency, multinationalism, and active use of the right to strike.

Join a book launch of Cynthia Kaufman’s new book, The Sea Is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook. Cynthia will be in discussion with Francesca Caparas on Tuesday, May 25th at 6pm PST / 9pm EST hosted by City Lights Books in San Francisco, CA. Learn more and register at the bookstore website here and see the Facebook event here.

The Sea is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook is an invitation to get involved in the movement to build a just and sustainable world in the face of the most urgent challenge our species has ever faced. By explaining the entrenched forces that are preventing rapid action, it helps you understand the nature of the political reality we are facing and arms you with the tools you need to overcome them. The book offers background information on the roots of the crisis and the many rapidly expanding solutions that are being implemented all around the world. It explains how to engage in productive messaging that will pull others into the climate justice movement, what you need to know to help build a successful movement, and the policy changes needed to build a world with climate justice. It also explores the personal side, including how engaging in the movement can be good for your mental health. It ends with advice on how you can find the place where you can be the most effective and where you can build climate action into your life in ways that are deeply rewarding.

Cynthia Kaufman is the director of the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action at De Anza College, where she runs and teaches in a community organizer training program. She is the author of three books on social change: Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World (Bloomsbury, 2020); Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change (2nd ed. PM Press, 2016); and Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope (Lexington Books, 2012). She has been active in a wide variety of social justice movements including Central American solidarity, union organizing, police accountability, and most recently tenants’ right and climate change. She publishes on social justice in Common Dreams.

Francesca Caparas teaches English and Asian American Studies at De Anza College and she is the Faculty Coordinator of the Jean Miller Resource Room for Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is the 2020-21 Fulbright Scholar to the Philippines where she will be researching discourses of digital literacy. Her interests and community work include international human rights, intersectional feminism, digital culture, and decolonization.