Communities across the U.S. and across the world have been devastated by military occupation, war, and state-sanctioned police violence. The U.S. military is also the single largest consumer of fossil fuels in the world and has served as the enforcer of the occupation of Indigenous sovereign lands while upholding violent resource extraction across the world. Addressing climate change requires ending the military-industrial complex. At the same time, increasingly militarized police forces perpetrate harm in Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Arab, Pacific Islander communities, poor, and marginalized people, and violence against women, and gender non-conforming peoples.
A Just Transition to a Regenerative Economy must end wars, military culture, and the violence of militarized forces and police in our communities and across the world.
Anti-militarism and Abolitionist movements in the U.S. and delegates from our communities will convene in a virtual town hall with our international allies in the Global south while participating in the 2021 UNFCC in Glasgow, Scotland.
We will hear testimonies from communities resisting militarism and occupation in their communities both inside and outside the U.S. and ultimately call on U.S. elected officials to take action to move away from funding unending wars and military presence and prioritize investing in regeneration and repair for communities impacted by militarism in the U.S and all over the planet.
Speakers will include:
Participants at the COP26 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Glasgow:
- Alejandria Lyons – Southwest Organizing Project
- Ramon Mejia – GGJ Alliance
- Sheila Babauta – Micronesia Climate Change Alliance
- Sharif Zakout – Arab Resource & Organizing Center
Testimonies from international allies from the Global South and frontline community leaders in the U.S.:
- Seydi Sarr – African Bureau of Immigration and Social Affairs (ABISA)
- Kyle Kajihiro – Oahu Water Protectors
- Youkyoung Ko – WILPF, Korea Peace Now!
- Sha Merirei Ongelungel – Indigenous Environmental Network
Our speakers will discuss a just transition to a regenerative economy, alternatives to policing and military intervention, and a pledge for U.S. Members of Congress to sign on.
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Cardiff, 1981. A group of women with hand-made banners embark on a march of over one hundred miles to Greenham Common military base – all in the name of nuclear peace.
This protest against nuclear missiles led to the establishment of camps that, for nearly two decades, drew women from all over the world, provided a place for female voices to be heard, and paved the way for future female activists.
Women for Peace displays the incredible craftsmanship and powerful designs of the protest banners from the Greenham camps. Join author Charlotte Dew in conversation about the creativity of the thousands of women who took stand at the protests, and whose struggle and tenacity continues to inspire and motivate activists today.
Charlotte Dew is a curator, researcher and writer, specialising in 20th century and contemporary craft. She is currently Public Programme Manager at The Goldsmiths’ Centre in London. Formerly she has held curatorial roles at the Crafts Council, The National Archives, The Mercers’ Company and The Women’s Library.
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The Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize for 2020 was awarded to Angela Y. Davis for her lifetime achievements as a public intellectual advocating for racial, gender, and economic justice; to Mike Davis for his life’s work as a public intellectual who encourages critical analysis of society in the service of constructing an alternative, post-capitalist future in both theory and practice; and Ruth Wilson Gilmore for a lifetime of achievement as a public intellectual working toward the decarceration of California, the United States, and the world. Join all three, along with acclaimed author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for an urgent conversation on abolition, cultural freedom, and liberation.
***Tickets are $0-25. Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference the day before the event. This event will also be recorded. Live captioning will be available via the webcast.***
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Mike Davis, professor emeritus of creative writing at UC Riverside, joined the San Diego chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1962 at age 16 and the struggle for racial and social equality has remained the lodestar of his life. His City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles challenged reigning celebrations of the city from the perspectives of its lost radical past and insurrectionary future. His wide-ranging work has married science, archival research, personal experience, and creative writing with razor-sharp critiques of empires and ruling classes. He embodies the Lannan vision of working at the intersection of art and social justice. Davis has also helped to develop the theory of the prison industrial complex.
Angela Y. Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and has been an activist and Marxist-Feminist in the Black Power and abolitionist movements since the late 1960s. In the 1980s, her book Women, Race and Class helped to establish the concept of intersectionality. She also helped to develop the concept of prison abolition, especially in her books Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire. Recently, Dr. Davis has written about the international movement in solidarity with Palestine in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Her work helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for the #DefundthePolice movement. Davis’s memoir will soon be published in a new edition by Haymarket Books.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Recent publications include “Beyond Bratton” (Policing the Planet, Camp and Heatherton, eds., Verso); “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence” (Futures of Black Radicalism, Lubin and Johnson, eds., Verso); a foreword to Bobby M. Wilson’s Birmingham classic America’s Johannesburg (U Georgia Press); a foreword to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (HLT Quan, ed., Pluto); and, co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke). Forthcoming projects include Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket); Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso). Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. In April 2019 novelist Rachel Kushner profiled Gilmore in The New York Times Magazine. Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).
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 (a Lannan Cultural Freedom Especially Notable Book Award recipient, recently published in an updated edition by Haymarket Books) and editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. 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. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and professor at Princeton University.
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This event is a partnership between Lannan Foundation and Haymarket Books.
Lannan Foundation’s Readings & Conversations series features inspired writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as cultural freedom advocates with a social, political, and environmental justice focus. We are excited to offer these programs online to a global audience. Video and audio recordings of all events are available at lannan.org.
Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago. Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left.
Lannan Foundation is a family foundation dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity, and creativity through projects that support exceptional contemporary artists and writers, inspired Native activists in rural communities, and social justice advocates.
