Join Barbara Ellen Smith and Chris Hamby as the discuss their new books, Digging our Own Graves and Soul Full of Coal Dust. Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded. Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged by the state and coal industry. Barbara Ellen Smith 's essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves. In Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hamby uncovers the tragic resurgence of black lung disease in Appalachia, its Big Coal cover-up, and the resilient mining communities who refuse to back down. Decades ago, a grassroots uprising forced Congress to enact long-overdue legislation designed to virtually eradicate black lung disease and provide fair compensation to coal miners stricken with the illness. Today, however, both promises remain unfulfilled. Levels of disease have surged, the old scourge has taken an aggressive new form, and ailing miners and widows have been left behind by a dizzying legal system, denied even modest payments and medical care. In this urgent work of investigative journalism, Hamby traces the unforgettable story of how these trends converge in the lives of two men: Gary Fox, a black lung-stricken West Virginia coal miner determined to raise his family from poverty, and John Cline, an idealistic carpenter. ---------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Barbara Ellen Smith is professor of women's and gender studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and the author of Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease. Chris Hamby is an investigative reporter at The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2014 and was a finalist for the prize in international reporting in 2017. He has covered a range of subjects, including labor, public health, the environment, criminal justice, politics and international trade. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, he lives and works in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia. ---------------------------------------------------- Get a copy of Digging Our Own Graves here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1521-digging-our-own-graves Get a copy of Soul Full of Coal Dust here: https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/chris-hamby/soul-full-of-coal-dust/9780316299497/ Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/MKjnYpLY0ow Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A conversation about internationalism from below, uprisings, repression and solidarity in Thailand, Nigeria, Belarus and beyond. ———————————————— The last year has seen a tsunami of protests and uprisings across the world — in Algeria, Chile, France, Guinea, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Poland, Sudan, the United States and beyond, millions of people have taken to the streets to protest austerity, authoritarianism, racial injustice and state violence, and to demand equality, democracy, justice, and liberation. In the most recent wave, popular uprisings in Thailand, Nigeria, and Belarus have brought their countries to a standstill with demonstrations and strikes, and have faced brutal repression in response. In this panel discussion, activists from each country will explain their movements, demands, and strategic and tactical debates — and will offer ideas about how activists throughout the world can build international solidarity from below to help them win. ———————————————— Speakers: Lek Patchanee is a member of the Socialist Workers Thailand Group, labor rights activist, researcher and journalist in Bangkok. Lai Brown is the Organizing Secretary of the Automobile, Boatyards, Transport, Equipment and Allied Senior Staff Association (AUTOBATE) and National Secretary of the Socialist Workers and Youth League in Lagos. Siarhei Biareishyk is an activist from Belarus and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Lala Peñaranda ( moderator) is an activist from Colombia, labor organizer with Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED) and member of the International Committee of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) ————————————————————— This event is presented by Internationalism from Below and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/M0kmiNy2asY Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Rodrick and Sandra Reed, Mark Clements, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Liliana Segura in conversation about fighting the racist justice system. Join family members of death row prisoner Rodney Reed, Rodrick and Sandra Reed, police torture victim and former juvenile life without parole prisoner Mark Clements, author and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and journalist Liliana Segura for a discussion about fighting racism in the criminal “injustice” system. The massive uprising this year against police brutality and murder has sharply illuminated the racism of not only the police, but also the institutions that protect them. This struggle has thrown into sharp relief questions about the true nature of cops, the courts and prisons. The Black Lives Matter movement has given new life to movements for prison abolition, criminal justice reform and the abolition of the death penalty. The connection between these struggles is clear: the fight against racism. The same system that allows police to murder unarmed people of color in the streets is the system that incarcerates, tortures and murders people behind the walls. Speakers: Rodrick Reed is Rodney Reed’s younger brother. Rodrick and his family have been fighting to prove Rodney’s innocence and to free him for decades. Rodrick is the Vice President of Reed Justice Initiative. The idea for Reed Justice Initiative was born out of a series of conversations between Rodrick and Rodney, during which Rodney encouraged Rodrick to establish a collaborative to advocate for Rodney and people in similar situations to Rodney. Sandra Reed is the mother of Texas death row prisoner Rodney Reed. In the 23 years since her son was wrongly convicted, she has been a tireless advocate for justice for Rodney. Sandra served on the board of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) for many years. Following the folding of the CEDP, Sandra and her family founded the Reed Justice Initiative (RJI) to continue campaigning for Rodney and against the death penalty. Sandra currently serves as President of the RJI. Mark Clements is a Chicago police torture survivor. At age 16 in 1981 he was taken to area 3 violent crime unit where he was tortured to confess to a crime. Mark was one of Illinois first juvenile’s sentence to natural life without parole in the state of Illinois. He remained incarcerated for 28 years before his conviction was overturned in 2009. In 2009 he was hired as administrator and organizer with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and later served as a Board member with CEDP. Mark also helped establish the Illinois Fair Sentence of Youth through Northwestern University of School of Law, while sitting on the board of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Her third book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press, was a finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. Liliana Segura is an award-winning investigative journalist covering the U.S. criminal justice system, with a longtime focus on harsh sentencing, the death penalty, and wrongful convictions. While at The Intercept, Segura has received the Texas Gavel Award in 2016 and the 2017 Innocence Network Journalism Award for her investigations into convictions in Arizona and Ohio. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/OS6uT8PPWSo Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A conversation about the struggle against neoliberalism in higher education with leading voices from the front lines. ———————————————— Higher education has been transformed over the last several decades. State funding has been dramatically reduced, tuition fees have exponentially increased, tenure track jobs have been replaced with adjuncts and graduate students, and staff have laid off and those that remain forced to work longer and harder for less, The pandemic and recession have triggered an enormous crisis in this neoliberal model of higher education, putting not only jobs but entire institutions in jeopardy. This panel, organized by Spectre Journal, will address how faculty, staff and graduate students can organize and defend their jobs, programs, and higher education in the US. ———————————————— Panelists: Tithi Bhattacharya is a professor of South Asian History and the Director of Global Studies at Purdue University. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005) and the editor of the now classic study, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017). Her recent coauthored book includes the popular Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019) which has been translated in over 25 languages. She writes extensively on Marxist theory, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia Research, Electronic Intifada, Jacobin, Salon.com, The Nation, and the New Left Review. She is on the editorial board of Studies on Asia and Spectre Journal. Cinzia Arruzza is associate professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. She is the Vice-President of the New School AAUP chapter and the co-author of Feminism for the 99%. A Manifesto. She is a member of the editorial board of Spectre Journal. Kathleen Brown is a doctoral student at the University of Michigan in the department of American Culture and a member of the Graduate Employees' Union Local 3550. She helped organize GEO's historic 9-day abolitionist strike in September 2020 and studies 1930s transnational movements against fascism. Henry Drobbin has been active in the Higher Education Labor Movement for the past 12 years. He held the title of Steward, Lead Steward, and Lead Organizer with The International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 1205. Most recently, he worked with the Leadership of ACT-UAW 7902, AAUP, AFM 802, and IBT 1205 to form the New School Labor Coalition. Nancy Welch(moderator) is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and a member of UVM United Academics AFT-AAUP. Her recent publications include the co-edited collections Unruly Rhetorics (with Jonathan Alexander and Susan Jarratt) and Composition in the Age of Austerity (with Tony Scott). Her essay "A Semester to Die For" and interview "Standing Together Against Sexual Assault at Dartmouth" were published last summer at spectrejournal.com ————————————————————— Find more about Spectre: https://spectrejournal.com/ Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/73y_TVExf_g Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

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 fourth webinar theme is Movement Building and Transnational Freedom Struggles and will be a conversation about how we can build a global movement for abolition, and the types of shared knowledge, strategies, and organizing an internationalist movement to abolish police and prisons will require. For more on Study and Struggle: https://www.studyandstruggle.com/ ————————————————————— Speakers: Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. She is the author of several books, including Women, Race, and Class, Freedom is a Constant Struggle and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is the subject of the acclaimed documentary "Free Angela and All Political Prisoners" and is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Lorgia García Peña is a public facing scholar, activist, and the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a non-profit organization that provides college instruction to undocumented students. She is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions and the co-director of Mind the Gap, Archives of Justice. Currently she is an untenured associate professor at Harvard University. Medhin Paolos is a filmmaker, researcher, musician and an activist working for LGBTQ and citizenship rights in Italy. She is the director of the acclaimed documentary film "Asmarina" (2015), the co-founder of the Milano Chapter of Rete G2 (the largest citizenship rights organization in Italy) and the creator of the G2 Lab. Her work with immigrant, refugee and LGBTQ communities in Milan, Italy is internationally recognized. Leti Volpp is a law professor at UC Berkeley who has published multiple pieces on immigration and citizenship law with a particular focus on how law is shaped by ideas about culture and identity. She currently directs the campus-wide Center for Race and Gender. Makani Themba (moderator) is Chief Strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies based in Jackson, MS. A social justice innovator and pioneer in the field of change communications and narrative strategy, she has spent more than 20 years supporting organizations, coalitions and philanthropic institutions in developing high impact change initiatives. ————————————————————— Order copies of Angela Y. Davis's books: Women, Race, & Class: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9780394713519 Are Prisons Obsolete?: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781583225813 Order The Borders of Dominicanidad: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9780822362623 Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/58ivOoKv9-E Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Jesse Hagopian and Denisha Jones, editors of Black Lives Matter at School, discuss antiracist education with contributor Brian Jones. ---------------------------------------------------- Join us for the launch of Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Education Justice, an essential collection of essays, interviews, poems, resolutions, and more from educators, students, and activists who have been building the Black Lives Matter at School movement across the country, including a foreword by Opal Tometi. “Black Lives Matter at School is an essential resource for all those seeking to build an antiracist school system." —Ibram Kendi “Black Lives Matter at School centers the humanity of our children. It is a sharp rebuke of white supremacy—the very thing that interrupts the healthy development of Black youth. School communities must affirm Black lives. This book is essential. Period.” — Stacy Davis Gates, Vice President Chicago Teachers Union "There is no easy way to talk about the complexities of race facing our school system in America—but we have to talk about it if we are ever going to achieve the schools our children deserve. Black Lives Matter at School is a playbook for undoing institutional racism in the education system. — Michael Bennett, NFL Super Bowl champion and author ---------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Jesse Hagopian is a member of the national Black Lives Matter at School steering committee and teaches Ethnic Studies at Seattle’s Garfield High School. He is the co-editor of Black Lives Matter at School, an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine and is a co-editor of Teaching for Black Lives. Denisha Jones is a member of the national Black Lives Matter at School steering committee and Director of the Art of Teaching, graduate teacher education program, at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the co-editor of Black Lives Matter at School. Brian Jones is the Associate Director of Education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He writes about black education history and politics. ---------------------------------------------------- Get a copy of Black Lives Matter at School here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1554-black-lives-matter-at-school ---------------------------------------------------- This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Black Lives Matter at School. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important education, organizing and publishing work. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/PJOOVBvHcAw Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks