Carmelo Castro-Netsky and Julian Mithra
Be inspired to facilitate an accessible and inclusive community arts project through the case study of a mural developed and installed at the Ed Roberts Campus in South Berkeley, a hub for disability justice work. Through core principles, like slowness and emergent structure, attendees will accompany us through a circuitous path from concept to design to production to installation. The discussion harmonizes wisdom from community arts engagement (without a legacy of accessibility) and the collective wisdom from a cohort of artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities (who haven’t always been empowered in self-representation). What are the cognitive, creative, and construction tools that help interrupt capitalist demands for efficiency, expertise, or verbal communication? Join us to think critically about our relationship with each other and our bodies, nourishing the soil in which civic engagement grows by acquiring hands-on strategies for a site-specific project whose process and product are both accessible.
Brian Bean in conversation with Melissa Gonzalez Hernandez
Chicago-based socialist activist, writer, and speaker brian bean discusses his new book and analyzes the connections between policing and capitalism, centering global lessons of revolt and resistance. Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing? In his clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism.
An honest and vulnerable discussion about the realities of prison resistance. Oftentimes we romanticize prison. The reality is that resisting inside has very serious consequences, including the lasting trauma when you leave. This talk, based on my book, is about all the things that often get left out when we talk about life inside. Not just how bad it can get for us, but for our families and our free world selves, but also what is needed to help those reconnecting with the free world or still stuck inside.
Dani Burlison and Margaret Elysia Garcia
The editors of “Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country” (AK Press, 6/2025), Dani Burlison and Margaret Elysia Garcia will discuss the book and different approaches to mutual aid covered in the book, including protecting undocumented folks, centering traditional ecological knowledge, highlighting work by formerly incarcerated firefighters, class justice, mental health, rural environmental justice, and more! After our brief conversation/presentation, we will open to a participatory dialogue with attendees to share more ideas and collaborations.
Keith Knight and Fred Noland
Join cartoonists Keith Knight and Fred Noland in conversation about the history of cartoonists speaking truth to power. From Ollie Harrington to Dorothy Zeller (creator of the Black Panther Party logo), Aaron MacGruder to...themselves!
Tiny Gray-Garcia, Muteado Silencio, Aunti Frances Moore
Session will include an author talk, workshop, and dialogue about POOR Magazine's newest book, UnTourBook. This new genre “guide Book” is full of truth about genocide as well as poetry, prayer, stories and art on indigenous resistance to settler colonial erasure, poLice terror, homelessness and the many acts of indigenous/Black/Brown-led resistance from Turtle Island to Palestine and all across Mama Earth. The UnTours across Occupied Turtle Island ( which the book is named after ) was launched in 2016 to reveal the truth about so many acts of settler colonial terror, rape, enslavement removal and murder, Terrifying acts like missionaries and settlers like Juniperro Serra was responsible for under his reign in the California Mission system.
Steve Martinot and more TBD
Paul Messersmith-Glavin and Jasper Bernes
This workshop will explore the ideas of Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito, in the context of other ecological Marxists and the social ecology of Murray Bookchin. We will look at what Saito has found in researching the thinking of Marx during the last 14 years of his life and compare and contrast those ideas to others such as Bookchin who have also thought through the roots of the ecological crisis and ways out. We will explore what we mean when we talk about growth and address both the viability and implications of an anarchist communist degrowth politics. We will also collectively think through what can be done in terms of various forms of revolutionary organizing.
Michelle Markel and Anne Broyles
Children need empowering true stories about protest - now more than ever. They can be inspired by stories that demonstrate how any one of us can- and should- speak out for human rights. Two award-winning authors will have a conversation about the making of their recent biographies: I’m Gonna Paint: Ralph Fasanella, Artist of the People (Holiday House, 2023); and Fearless Benjamin: The Quaker Dwarf Who Fought Slavery (PM Press, 2025).
Josh Fernandez and Jerrod Shanahan
To celebrate the publication of Every Fire Need a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms (PM Press, 2025), author Jarrod Shanahan will appear in discussion with Josh Fernandez, author of The Hands that Crafted the Bomb: The Making of a Lifelong Antifascist (PM Press, 2024). Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help collects a decade of reflections on recent US struggles—Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion—alongside accounts of the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, an apocalyptic shift in popular culture, to paint a dense and complex portrait of a decade of protracted social crisis. Jarrod Shanahan reports from the ground. On the streets in 2014, from the depths of the Rikers Island penal complex, inside the alt-right underground and the carnival of Trump rallies, and in the line of fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, among other scenes that Shanahan accessed not as a credentialed observer but an active participant: prisoner, infiltrator, activist. The resulting essays outline the pitfalls and opportunities facing those seeking to reverse the suicidal course of capitalist society and build a liberated world.
