When the system is stacked against you, when mainstream society sidelines you (or worse), where do you look for liberatory possibilities? Eve Dunbar describes how Ann Petry, author of the 1946 novel “The Street” as well as YA novels about Harriet Tubman and Tituba, insisted on satisfaction and not merely survival. Dunbar also talks about the value of what she calls monstrous work.

Eve Dunbar, Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing under Segregation University of Minnesota Press, 2024

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Why is it that so many schools fail at teaching their students critical thinking skills that could help them understand the world? Political scientist Agustina Paglayan argues that mass primary education from its origins was set up not to raise children’s prospects — but rather to teach them to obey. She locates the Right’s recent attacks on schooling in the context of the social upheavals of our times.

Resources:

Agustina Paglayan, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education Princeton University Press, 2024

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What role did Irish Catholics play within the U.S. left? Were Irish radicals more interested in freedom from British rule or in anticapitalism? And what effect did religious beliefs have on Irish Americans’ inclinations to break with the mainstream? David Emmons highlights Irish Americans’ contributions to dissidence, progressivism, and radicalism in the United States.

David Emmons, History’s Erratics: Irish Catholic Dissidents and the Transformation of American Capitalism, 1870-1930 University of Illinois Press, 2024

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Few things are more necessary than a roof over one’s head, and yet few things feel as precarious as housing. Rents have skyrocketed across the country, far outstripping wages, and homelessness has risen to an historic high. Fellow tenant organizers Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis argue that this is the latest chapter in a century-long assault on tenants, but that we can draw powerful lessons from housing struggles to fight for a world without landlords.

Resources:

Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis Haymarket Books, 2024

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The dramatic expansion of police power in the U.S. has been fueled by sexual policing—the targeting and legal control of people’s bodies and their presumed sexual activities. So argues Anne Gray Fischer, who describes the historical trajectory of sexual policing and traces the profoundly consequential shift in its targets from white women to Black women. (Encore presentation.)

Anne Gray Fischer, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification University of North Carolina Press, 2022

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Critiques of conspiracy thinking abound—but what if our world needs a conspiracy, of people willing to confront their own participation in institutional injustices? Joseph Dumit explains why large corporations knowingly engage in antihuman activities; he also draws from Adrian Piper’s insights into bullying institutions, the impact of bystanding, and the importance of blowing the whistle when we notice harm being inflicted.

Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen, eds., Conspiracy/Theory Duke University Press, 2024

Joseph Dumit, Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health Duke University Press, 2012

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For over half a century, Big Oil and the plastics industry, through their trade associations and front groups, have sold the public the false idea that plastics are recyclable. Recycling became the mantra of good ecological stewardship, promoted by the likes of city governments, school children, and environmental groups. Davis Allen lays out the mass-marketing of a deception. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Center for Climate Integrity, The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the Plastics Industry Deceived the Public for Decades and Caused the Plastic Waste Crisis February, 2024

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What can sex workers add to discussions around transformative justice, prison abolition, and labor organizing? Heather Berg has spoken with sex worker radicals whose perspectives on left theory and practice are informed by encounters with ever-present threats to their lives and livelihoods. (Encore presentation.)

Heather Berg, “‘If You’re Going to Be Beautiful, You Better Be Dangerous’: Sex Worker Community Defense” Radical History Review

Heather Berg, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism University of North Carolina Press, 2021

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For decades after World War Two, the defense industry polluted the desert near Tucson’s Southside and poisoned the aquifer from which the largely Mexican American neighborhood got its drinking water. Sunaura Taylor, who was born there, reflects on lessons from the residents’ struggle — and asks what a genuine remedy might look like. She discusses an environmentalism that recognizes that we all are or will become disabled — and fights not just for the able-bodied, but to extend care to all, including the rest of the natural world.

Sunaura Taylor, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert UC Press, 2024

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What are discarded materials from extractive activities like mining doing to life on the planet? According to Gabrielle Hecht, what’s happening in South Africa to and around mountainous piles of mining residues crystallizes a number of thorny environmental and sociopolitical issues faced by communities around the globe. (Encore presentation.)

Gabrielle Hecht, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures Duke University Press, 2023 (open access)

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