ADVANCED REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED

Direct from Palestine: Short Documentaries and Conversation with Filmmaker Dina Amin
Sunday, March 17 · 4pm to 6pm EDT

Join us for an insightful evening of cinematic exploring a collection of multi-generational short documentaries of the Palestinian filmmaker Dina Amin. Immerse yourself in the powerful narratives that capture the essence of Palestinian culture, resilience, and the spirit of change.

A Q&A with Dina and Yaqeen Yamani from La La Lil Jidar follows after the screening.

All donations go to local GoFundMe from Philly family to support their relatives in Gaza.

This event is sponsored by Independence Public Media Foundation in collaboration with Making Worlds Bookstore and La La Lil Jidar.

About Dina Amin
Dina is an award-winning and multi-talented Palestinian filmmaker & vocalist who wants to tell inspiring stories on social and humanitarian issues.While studying in London (UK) for a BA degree in Filmmaking, Dina co-directed and co-produced her first short documentary, “Rise Up” screened in five international film festivals. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine. Dina became the co-founder of Space Collective, an art house working to build a stronger community in film and music.

About La La Lil Jidar
La La Lil Jidar is a chest-hitting exhibit at the intersection of art, activism, and archive, which includes an enriching, fortifying program of events aimed at keeping Gaza alive in our eyes, and in our minds. Bear witness, think of Palestine, and reflect with the La La Lil Jidar Collective.

About Independence Public Media Foundation's Vision of a Liberatory Future
The Independence Public Media Foundation (IPMF) sees a future where media accurately represents the diverse, complex lived experiences and imaginations of Black, Indigenous, people of color, and other communities harmed by systems of oppression and media erasure. We envision a local media ecosystem fueled by communities who produce and distribute their own media narratives. In this ecosystem, media technologies advance social justice movements and people over profit. We imagine a world where media are tools of liberation, joy, memory, and accountability.

Sunday, March 17 1p to 3pm | Acupuncture for Rebel Debtors
Advance registration encouraged and appreciated.

Acupuncturist Mariko Wirth (he/they) from Rise Acupuncture & Wellness will offer a history of ear/acupuncture in activist spaces and treat participants. While Mariko treats attendees, others will gather around food, drink, and some prompts for writing, reflecting and visualizing our debt. We will also start to consider next steps, debt analysis, and the possibilities of creating a toolkit on education debt for groups to bring into existing campaign spaces.

Some of the offerings to come in the series include: meditation, nutrition and food scarcity, yoga, and techniques from Theater of the Oppressed . . . to support grounding, strength and collective resistance in everyday debtor life.

Please save the date for the next three sessions in the series:

Sunday, April 28th, 4pm | Meditation and mindfulness for Rebel Debtors
Sunday May 26th, 4pm | Nutrition and confronting food scarcity for Rebel Debtors
Sunday June 23rd, 4pm | Theater of the Oppressed and techniques for liberating oneself and others from oppressive situations for Rebel Debtors

Philadelphia Debt Solidarity Healing Clinic
A four-part series

To our beloved community of Philly K-12 educators, please join the Philly Debt Abolition Coalition for a series of convenings dedicated to healing from living indebted life, learning with other educator debtors about debt cancellation, and creating new ways of being, teaching, and abolishing debt.

Beginning on Sunday, March 17th (1p to 3pm), and continuing through June, Making Worlds Bookstore and Community Center will be a site of critical consciousness building, emotional well-being practices, and skill-sharing that aims to free us from the debts that burden us and that plague our K-12 school system.

Note: Drop-ins are welcome (advance registration appreciated), but for the purposes of developing community and continuity we ask participants to attend at least three out of four encounters. We are able to offer a $100 gift certificate to those who participate in three of the events listed below. Drinks and refreshments will be provided at all events. Childcare available upon request. All events are at Making Worlds Cooperative Bookstore and Social Center (www.makingworldsbooks.org; info@makingworldsbooks.org. For questions and more information, please email jason@debtcollective.org.

Necropolitics Reading Group is a DIY reading group focused on examining the links between statehood, violence, and dehumanization.

Necropolitics Study Group Details, Reading List, & Community Agreements

Please RSVP here

Saturdays 2PM - 3:30 PM starting February 24th at Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center

ADVANCED REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED

James Baldwin, revolutionary artist and freedom fighter, turns 100 in 2024. Celebrating his legacy, we will read his works throughout the year, to study and learn from his ideas on race, empire and love for our times, and for the great contribution they make towards the revolutionary remaking of both the American people, as well as world humanity. This reading group is a part of the Year of James Baldwin in Philly, a citywide celebration of Baldwin's birth centennial through reading campaigns, film screenings, and symposia.

This reading group will meet at 2pm every two weeks on Sundays starting on March 10th.

Learn more about the Year of James Baldwin at https://www.yearofjamesbaldwin.org

We will host Charisse Burden Stelley, author of Black Scare / Red Scare in conversation with Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition.

The discussion will be introduced and moderated by Geo Maher. 

Advanced Registration Requested

Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing suppression of Black radical activism today.

New Bones Abolition weaves a narrative of a historically complex and engaged people seeking to quell state violence. Joy James analyzes the “Captive Maternal,” which emerges from legacies of colonialism, chattel slavery and predatory policing, to explore the stages of resistance and communal rebellion that manifest through war resistance.

Speakers:

Charisse Burden-Stelley, is associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. She is the author of Black Scare / Red Scare and the coauthor of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and the coeditor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing.

Joy James, is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College, in addition to New Bones Abolition, James is the author of eight books including Resisting State Violence, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, and Contextualizing Angela Davis. James's work as an editor includes The New Abolitionists, Imprisoned Intellectuals, and The Angela Y. Davis Reader

Moderator: 

Geo Maher is the coordinator of the W.E.B. Movement Du Bois School for Abolition and Reconstruction, and the author of five books including A World Without Police and Anticolonial Eruptions.

Necropolitics Reading Group is a DIY reading group focused on examining the links between statehood, violence, and dehumanization.

Necropolitics Study Group Details, Reading List, & Community Agreements

Please RSVP here

Saturdays 2PM - 3:30 PM starting February 24th at Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center

Necropolitics Reading Group is a DIY reading group focused on examining the links between statehood, violence, and dehumanization.

Necropolitics Study Group Details, Reading List, & Community Agreements

Please RSVP here

Saturdays 2PM - 3:30 PM starting February 24th at Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center

Join author Bécquer Seguín, a regular contributor to The Nation, in a conversation about his new book The Op-Ed Novel. Focusing on the unique case of Spain, where 1 in 3 op-ed columnists at the country's most important newspaper is a novelist, the book explores the intricate relationship between opinion journalism and contemporary literature, drawing parallels with renowned authors such as James Baldwin and Joan Didion, who transitioned from being novelists to becoming influential voices on current events. 

He will be in conversation with Luis Moreno-Caballud, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Advance registration is appreciated.

Bécquer Seguín is an assistant professor of Iberian studies at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches the literary, cultural, and political history of modern Spain. He is a regular contributor to The Nation, where he has been reporting on Spain since 2015, and has written for Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books, where he co-edits the literature in translation and sports sections.

The last couple years’ Black-centric revolts have been organized mostly informally. Informality is often overlooked when it comes to discussing Black liberation organizing, yet today’s cutting edge rebels are almost exclusively organized along these lines. We’ll be discussing informality, and anarchists' strategies surrounding it, to better understand Black revolt and the Black left and to strategize destroying the civil society that has made Black liberation movements so necessary.

Advance registration appreciated.

This event will be a presentation followed by open discussion.

Atticus is a communist theorist and an anarchist in action. He’s been involved with anti-police struggle for the past 10 years of his life. His published writing is concerned with Black anarchism, the Black Radical Tradition, and small city organizing.

Cres is an anarchist living in Philadelphia. She’s participated in various struggles and uprisings over the last decade and a half. She’s interested in anarchy, incorrect and subversive uses of space and tools, and making memes.

ADVANCE REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED

Connecting India’s tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries to its distant past and its potentially apocalyptic future, this sweeping tale of rebellion, courage, and brutality reinvents fiction for our time.

Delhi, the near future: Bibi, a low-ranking employee of a global consulting firm, is tasked with finding a man long thought to be dead but who now appears to be the source of a vast collection of documents. The trove purports to reveal the secrets of the Indian government, including detention centers, mutated creatures, engineered viruses, experimental weapons, and alien wrecks discovered in remote mountain areas.

Bhopal, 1984: an assassin tracks his prey through an Indian city that will shortly be the site of the worst industrial disaster in the history of the world.

Calcutta, 1947: a veterinary student’s life and work connect him to an ancient Vedic aircraft that might stave off genocide.

And in 1859, a British soldier rides with his detachment to the Himalayas in search of the last surviving leader of an anti-colonial rebellion.

These timelines interweave to form a kaleidoscopic, epic novel in which each protagonist must come to terms with the buried truths of their times as well as with the parallel universe that connects them all, through automatons, spirits, spacecraft, and aliens. The Light at the End of the World, Siddhartha Deb’s first novel in fifteen years, is a magisterial work of shifting forms, expanding the possibilities of fiction while bringing to life the India of our times.

SIDDHARTHA DEB was born in Northeast India in 1970. He was educated in India and at Columbia University. His first novel was the semi-autobiographical The Point of Return, set in a hill-station that closely resembles Shillong in India’s Northeast. His second novel, Surface, also set in Northeast India, is about a disillusioned Sikh journalist. He has contributed to the Boston Globe, the Guardian, The Nation, the New Statesman, Harper’s, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. He currently teaches at The New School in New York.

Born into a "formerly untouchable manual-scavenging family in small-town India," Yashica Dutt was taught from a young age to not appear “Dalit looking.” Although prejudice against Dalits, who compose 25% of the population, has been illegal since 1950, caste-ism in India is alive and well. Blending her personal history with extensive research and reporting, Dutt provides an incriminating analysis of caste’s influence in India over everything from entertainment to judicial systems and how this discrimination has carried over to US institutions.

Dutt traces how colonial British forces exploited and perpetuated a centuries old caste system, how Gandhi could have been more forceful in combatting prejudice, and the role played by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, whom Isabel Wilkerson called “the MLK of India’s caste issues” in her book Caste. Alongside her analysis, Dutt interweaves personal stories of learning to speak without a regional accent growing up and desperately using medicinal packs to try to lighten her skin.

Raw and affecting, Coming Out as Dalit brings a new audience of readers into a crucial conversation about embracing Dalit identity, offering a way to change the way people think about caste in their own communities and beyond.

After its enthusiastic reception in India upon publication in 2019, Yashica Dutt’s much-awaited Coming Out as Dalit has recently been published in the US with two new chapters, covering how the caste system traveled to the US, its history here, and the continuation of bias by South Asian communities in professional sectors. Amid growing conversations about caste discrimination prompting US institutions including Harvard University, Brandeis University, the University of California system, and the NAACP to add caste as a protected category to their policies, Dutt’s work sheds essential light on the significant influence caste-ism has across many aspects of US society.

Dutt will read excerpts from the book, speak about anti-caste movements in India and the US and engage in a scintillating conversation with historian and associate professor at the University of Delaware, Ramnarayan Rawat.  

Advance registration recommended and appreciated.

Yashica Dutt is an internationally acclaimed journalist and one of the leading feminist voices on caste. Dutt's work has been published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy and The Atlantic, and she has been featured on the BBC, The Guardian and PBS Newshour. Her writing has been part of Pen America’s India at 75 anthology that featured prominent Indian writers looking back on India’s history in its 75th year of independence, and a collection titled Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India’s Best Writers. Coming Out as Dalit is currently part of the curriculum in over 50 colleges and universities worldwide, including Harvard University and UC Berkeley, and won the prestigious Indian Arts and Letters Award for young writers in 2020. She graduated from Columbia Journalism School and lives in Brooklyn.

Ramnarayan Rawat is a historian of South Asia with particular interests in colonial and postcolonial India, racism and social exclusion, subaltern histories, and histories of democracy. His research focuses on Dalits of India and their engagement with colonialism, nationalism, spatial and social exclusionary regimes, and democratic thought and practice in modern India. His first book 'Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India' is the recipient of Joseph Elder book prize awarded by American Institute of Indian Studies (2009) and received ‘Honorable Mention’ in 2013 Association of Asian Studies Bernard S. Cohn book prize.

Join Beehive Design Collective as they present their newly released 10 Year Anniversary edition of “MesoAmerica Resiste!”, their new book, “The True Cost of Coal”, and even a peek into their work-in-progress about California: “The Callegory”.

Advance registration strong recommended.

The Bees use their massive, collaboratively produced, and intricately detailed fabric murals to tell complex global stories of stories of resistance, resilience, and solidarity. Packed with nature metaphors, peoples histories, and teeming with biodiversity, these images offer the foundation for an event of participatory discussion, poetic storytelling, and popular education. "MesoAmerica Resiste!' focuses on stories from Mexico to Colombia. A map drawn in old colonial style depicts the modern invasion of megaprojects planned for the region… and opens to reveal the view from below, where communities are organizing locally and across borders to defend land and traditions, protect cultural and ecological diversity, and build alternative economies.  

"The True Cost of Coal" tells many stories from the frontlines of Southern Appallachia who fought mountaintop removal for coal extraction for decades. This graphics campaign reflects the complexity of the struggles for land, livelihood, and self-determination playing out in Appalachia, and was made with the intention of honoring the tremendous history of organized resistance and the courage of communities living in the shadow of Big Coal.