Housmans Bookshop

Uncontrollable Women: Radicals, Reformers and Revolutionaries, with Nan Sloane [online event]
2022-01-26 19:00 - 20:30 (Europe/London)
Author Nan Sloane charts the history of forgotten women revolutionaries between the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and 1832.

We’re pleased to welcome author Nan Sloane to virtual Housmans for the book launch of Uncontrollable Women: Radicals, Reformers and Revolutionaries.

Uncontrollable Women is a history of radical, reformist and revolutionary women between the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832. Very few of them are well-known today; some were unknown even in their own day. All of them contributed something to the world we now inhabit.

At a time when women were supposed to leave politics to men they spoke, wrote, marched, organised, asked questions, challenged power structures, sometimes went to prison and even died. History has not usually been kind to them, and they have frequently been pushed into asides or footnotes, dismissed as secondary, or spoken over, for, or through by men and sometimes other women. These are their stories.

SPEAKERS

Nan Sloane is an author, speaker and trainer with an interest in the role of women in the public space, particularly in politics and the Labour Party. Her previous books include The Women In the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History (2018), In Our Own Words: A Dictionary of Women’s Political Quotations (2016), and A Great Act of Justice: The Flapper Election and After (2009).

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation link to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book Uncontrollable Women then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Suburban Socialism (or Barbarism), with Oly Durose [online event]
2022-01-27 19:00 - 20:30
Reflecting on his own landslide loss in conservative suburbia, Oly Durose asks how we can transform the urban outskirts of the status quo into centres of transformative change.

In December 2019, Oly Durose lost by over 25,000 votes as the Labour Party Parliamentary Candidate for Brentwood & Ongar. Revealing what it’s like to stand on a socialist platform in one of the safest Conservative seats in the UK, this book makes the case for socialism in the suburbs, unveils the challenges of its electoral realisation, and proposes a strategic revolution required to win.

SPEAKERS

Oly Durose is a socialist activist, parliamentary researcher and writer. In the 2019 UK General Election, he stood as the Labour Party Parliamentary Candidate for Brentwood & Ongar. In February 2020, he was a Caucus Site Leader for the Bernie Sanders Campaign in Nevada.

Rhian E. Jones is a writer, critic and broadcaster from South Wales on history, politics and popular culture. She is co-editor of Red Pepper and writes for Tribune magazine. Her books include Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender, Petticoat Heroes: Gender, Culture and Popular Protest, Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible, the anthology of women’s music writing Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them and Paint Your Town Red: How Preston Took Back Control and Your Town Can Too.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book Suburban Socialism (or Barbarism) then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR RSVP FOR THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile, with Jade Bentil, Lola Olufemi and Jumanah Younis [online event]
2022-02-02 19:00 - 20:30
Housmans is delighted to announce this special event in partnership with publishers Lawrence Wishart to celebrate the publication of Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile by Marika Sherwood.

Lawrence Wishart editor Jumanah Younis will be chatting to Jade Bentil and Lola Olufemi about the life of visionary and pioneer Claudia Jones.

Born in Trinidad, Claudia’s family moved to Harlem, New York where Claudia became a leading figure in communist and black politics. Claudia arrived in London in 1955 penniless and friendless. She became active in civil rights campaigns amongst the new West Indian communities established in the capital and launched an annual Carnival (Notting Hill Carnival) to showcase the talents and culture of the Afro-Caribbean community. The book’s particular focus is on the time that Jones spent in Britain.

Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile is a fitting and long overdue testament to a remarkable woman who was quite simply years ahead of her time

Marika Sherwood has published many books and articles on the history of Black peoples in Britain. A founder member of the Black and Asian Studies Association, she remained editor of its newsletter until it ceased publication in 2012. Her latest book is Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War: the West African National Secretariat, 1945-48, Pluto Press, 2019; Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2020 (with Martin Spafford, Dan Lyndon & Hakim Adi), Explaining the Modern World: Migration, (OCR GCSE History), Hodder Education, 2016.

SPEAKERS

Jade Bentil is a Black feminist historian and PhD researcher at the University of Oxford. Her scholarship uses oral history methodologies to centre the experiences of women of African and African-Caribbean descent in Britain and their long history of feminist activism. Jade’s debut book, REBEL CITIZEN, uses oral history interviews to explore the lived experiences of Black women who migrated to Britain following the Second World War and is forthcoming from Allen Lane.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and organiser from London. She is author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021) and Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020). She was shortlisted for the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in the Fiction and is currently researching for a PhD with the Stuart Hall Foundation.

Jumanah Younis is books editor at Lawrence Wishart and the creator of the Radical Black Women Series. In the past, she worked as a freelance writer, translator and editor. She has written for publications including the Guardian, Red Pepper and the LRB blog.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation link to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. Confirmation emails sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR REGISTER FOR THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic, with Paolo Gerbaudo [online event]
2022-02-09 19:00 - 20:30
What comes after Neoliberalism?

In these times of health emergency, economic collapse, populist anger and ecological threat, societies are forced to turn inward in search of protection. Neoliberalism, the ideology that presided over decades of market globalisation, is on trial, while state intervention is making a spectacular comeback amid lockdowns, mass vaccination programmes, deficit spending and climate planning.

We are joined by sociologist and political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo to explore the themes of his latest publication: The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic (Verso) in which he fleshes out the contours of the different statisms and populisms that inform contemporary politics.

The central issue in dispute is what mission the post-pandemic state should pursue and how socialists may turn the present phase of involution into an opportunity for social transformation.

SPEAKERS

Paolo Gerbaudo is a sociologist and political theorist based at King’s College London where he acts as Director of the Centre for Digital Culture. He is the author of Tweets and the Streets, The Mask and the Flag and The Digital Party. He has written for the New Statesman, Guardian, and other publications.

James Meadway is director of the Progressive Economy Forum and former advisor to shadow chancellor John McDonnell.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book The Great Recoil then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Post-Internet Far Right [online event]
2022-02-16 19:00 - 20:30
How has the far right changed since the rise of the internet? How can we be ready for it?

We are very pleased to announce this event in collaboration with Dog Section Press for one of Housmans bestselling titles of 2021: Post-Internet Far Right.

We’ll be joined by Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, authors of Post-Internet Far Right and hosts of12 Rules for WHAT, a podcast and writing project about the far right.

Sam and Alex will be discussing how the the far right has changed since the rise of the internet, causing the decline of some formations and the break-up of others.

But the far right has not gone away – far from it – it is more powerful now than it has been for a generation. It has produced new configurations of tactics, priorities, and goals. Those who have survived the arrival of the internet have found a greater capacity to exert power than at any point since the Second World War.

The far right is in a state of productive diversification. It has yet to cohere around a new stable formulation; however, it almost certainly will, and we must be ready for it.

SPEAKERS

Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, authors of Post-Internet Far Right and hosts of12 Rules for WHAT, a podcast and writing project about the far right.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of Post-Internet Far Right then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO RSVP OR BUY TICKETS FOR THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Warp & Weft: Psycho-emotional Health, Politics and Experiences, with Lisa Fannen [online event]
2022-02-23 19:00 - 20:30
Warp & Weft explores radical frameworks to develop new ways of understanding experiences of distress within social and systemic contexts.

Warp & Weft gathers together ideas, radical frameworks and reference points to explore consciousness, and ways of understanding experiences of distress as they occur within our social and systemic contexts.

It looks at what gets called ‘mental health’ and challenges the idea that our experiences of distress, struggle or variable consciousness are only ‘mental’. It challenges the way biomedicine splits mind from body and soul, and names that we are embodied beings, who are shaped by and unfold within the contexts we have inherited and live in.

It looks at some of the history of psychiatry and examines the ways it has been, and continues to be used as a colonial force. It reframes trauma; it looks at the effects of trauma in the bodymindsoul, acknowledges the intersection of personal and collective trauma, and explores ways we might move towards healing.

Warp & Weft considers how we are given cultural ‘scripts’ for experience, and how we might relanguage experience on our own, and non-medical terms. Terms which address root causes of distress and point towards holistic approaches, in order to foster liberatory personal and collective transformation.

**This event will be a Zoom meeting and will not be recorded*

SPEAKERS

Lisa Fannen is a poet and performer, a bodyworker and community herbalist who has been active for many years in info exchange and organising around holistic and radical health in the context of movement for social justice and liberation.

inthebody.uk

lisafannen.uk

There is more information about Warp & Weft, access to a free pdf as well as related online resources at: threadsbook.org

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book Warp & Weft then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Always Red, with Len McCluskey [online event]
2022-03-02 19:00 - 20:30
The major autobiography of a central player in a tumultuous period of British political history

Len McCluskey is the standout trade unionist of his era. Head of the giant Unite union for more than a decade, he is a unique and powerful figure on the political stage.

In this major autobiography, McCluskey throws back the curtains on life at the top of the Labour movement—with explosive revelations about his dealings with Keir Starmer, the behind-the-scenes battles of the Corbyn era, his secret Brexit negotiations with Theresa May’s government, the spectacular bust-up with his former friend Tom Watson, and his tortuous relationship with Ed Miliband.

McCluskey is no run-of-the-mill trade unionist. Fiercely political, unflinchingly left wing, he is a true workers’ leader. His politics were formed in Liverpool at a time of dock strikes, the Beatles, and the May 1968 revolution in Paris. An eyewitness to the Hillsborough tragedy, he recounts in harrowing detail searching for his son.

Witty and sharp, McCluskey delivers a powerful intervention, issuing a manifesto for the future of trade unionism and urging the left not to lose sight of class politics.

A central player in a tumultuous period of British political history, McCluskey’s account is an essential—and entertaining—record of our times.

SPEAKERS

Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite the Union for more than a decade, is a trade unionist from Liverpool. Elected a shop steward on the Liverpool docks aged 19, he rose through the Transport and General Workers’ Union before playing an instrumental role in the creation of Unite. As its leader, he became a national political figure and a powerful influence in the Labour Party. He is a lifelong supporter of Liverpool Football Club and the author of Why You Should Be A Trade Unionist.

Chloe Schlosberg, Director of Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Commoning Care and Collective Power with Manuela Zechner [online event]
2022-03-09 19:00 - 20:30
Childcare Commons and the Micropolitics of Municipalism in Barcelona

Commoning Care & Collective Power traces the twin genealogies of childcare commons and the micropolitics of municipalism in Barcelona. It shows how grassroots movements engaged new institutional experiments after Spain’s 15M movement, marked by struggles for social reproduction and a new feminist politics, leading towards commons municipalisms. Interested in both struggles for and to care, this book looks across subjective and collective processes. Interdependence and autonomy, care and micropolitics, building power and commons, neighbourhood and city: those are some of the terms brought into resonant tension.

Zechner honours the groundwork of mothers’ networks and commons nurseries, telling of powerful webs and infrastructures of care in the neighbourhood of Poble Sec. Midwives, mothers, carers and councillors prefigure schools and cities of care, as this book turns to explore how institutions are themselves sites of struggles to care. How to stay with the trouble of embodiment, interdependence and collective learning, even within institutional contexts? How might we grapple with the relation between movements and institutions? This book’s interweaving of concepts and experiences traces a powerful cycle of collective learning, yielding new articulations between the commons and the public, and channeling new feminist forces.

SPEAKERS

Manuela Zechner is a researcher, facilitator and cultural worker. She currently co-produces the Earthcare Fieldcast for translocal and transversal struggles across ecology and care, and is building a Future Archive since 2005.

Stevphen Shukaitis is an academic worker. He likes to do things with his friends, some of which end up making books: https://www.minorcompositions.info.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Reclaiming Economics for Future Generations [online event]
2022-03-16 19:00 - 20:30
How can economics be diversified, decolonised and democratised? Join us for a discussion on how to reclaim economics.

Housmans is pleased to present “Reclaiming Economics for Future Generations”, an event in collaboration with Manchester University Press.

Across the world, economics students are coming together under the banner of the student movement, Rethinking Economics, to create a better economics – one which can help to create a world where all our children can flourish regardless of their gender, background or birthplace.

At this event, we are joined by two researchers from Rethinking Economics: Lucy Ambler and Nicola Scott. Lucy and Nicola are also co-authors alongside Joe Earle of Reclaiming Economics for Future Generations. Drawing on over sixty interviews with students and professionals from identities and backgrounds marginalised in economics and a wide range of global and historical research, Reclaiming Economics for Future Generations illustrates the ways in which economics is currently not fit for purpose and sets out a vision for how it can be diversified, decolonised and democratised.

Join the discussion to learn how we can reclaim economics to build a better future for everyone.

SPEAKERS

Lucy Ambler, Researcher at Rethinking Economics and Intersectionality Advocate, is a passionate feminist and a campaigner for menstrual health rights following her previous research projects in East Africa. She lives in Manchester with her boyfriend and her ever-growing book collection.

Nicola Scott, Research Manager at Rethinking Economics, investigated the political economy of GM crops during her PhD research in Mexico/US, then published articles for Ethical Consumer about corporate social responsibility. She has taught social science students at university to think critically about what they study. Nicola has been an environmental activist for over fifteen years.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. Ticketholders will also be able to access the zoom link via the eventbrite page. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book Reclaiming Economics for Future Generations then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Small Town Girl, with Donna McLean [online event]
2022-03-23 19:00 - 20:30
A memoir from a voice at the centre of the Spy Cops scandal

“You live with someone for two years and then . . . they simply don’t exist.”

Over four decades, British undercover police deliberately and systematically started relationships with women in order to infiltrate protest groups. They lived with these women, some had children with them, and when the job was done they simply left.

It took over ten years for Donna to find out what really happened – and who her fiancee really was. Carlo was an undercover police officer. He targeted Donna and started a relationship with her so he could get close to her activist friends. Carlo had been leading a double life the whole time he was with Donna – with his own wife and son living a short distance away.

We have heard very little from the women at the heart of this extraordinary scandal. Most felt forced to accept anonymity. Donna decided to drop her pseudonym last year so she could tell her story in her own words and under her own name. Small Town Girl is that story.

The great love story of Donna McLean’s life wasn’t just built on lies, it was one. With an inquiry underway, Small Town Girl is a reclamation of a truth that was ruthlessly buried.

SPEAKERS

Donna McLean is a working class writer, activist and mental health practitioner. She has written for several publications including the Guardian, The Morning Star, The Independent and the Telegraph. Donna has also published several pieces of short fiction, including the 2020 anthology The Middle of a Sentence. Small Town Girl is her first book.

and more tbc

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO RSVP OR BUY TICKETS FOR THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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A Normal Life with Freedom Press [online event]
2022-04-06 19:00 - 20:30
A Normal Life is the autobiography of Vassilis Palaiokostas, known to the public as the “Greek Robin Hood,” to police as “The Uncatchable.” His is an illegalist existence lived in defiance of the police and of the state, and for decades, it has been a life lived as a fugitive.

In Greece he has become a household name, a modern folk hero of sorts, taking millions in bank raids — including the famous Kalambaka heist, Greece’s biggest ever — and ransoming CEOs whilst distributing his gains to those who needed it. But he is most famous for his prison breakouts — infamously escaping the high-security wing of Korydallos Prison by helicopter.

Twice.

Vassilis Palaiokostas is hated by the authorities, deemed a terrorist, his freedom a continued insult to the Greek State. Now his memoir, an instant bestseller in Greece, has been translated to English for the first time so he can tell his story in his own words. He does not offer any mealy-mouthed, “socially acceptable” justifications for his actions, but honestly elaborates his dreams and their totality.

A Normal Life is a gripping account of life on the run and in jail, of car chases, daring escapades and the camaraderie of the bandit. It is also the story of his motivations.

In collaboration with Freedom Press

Freedom is Britain’s oldest anarchist press

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Abolition. Feminism. Now.
2022-04-19 19:00 - 21:00
Aviah Sarah Day (Sisters Uncut) in conversation with Gina Dent and Beth Ritchie.

Abolition. Feminism. Now. is an urgent call for a truly intersectional, internationalist, abolitionist feminism.

The Black Feminist Bookshop and Housmans are very pleased to announce a joint event to celebrate the publication of Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie’s new book Abolition. Feminism. Now. (published by Penguin).

Gina Dent and Beth Ritchie will be in conversation with lecturer, activist and a member of the direct action group Sisters Uncut Aviah Sarah Day.

About the book:

As a politics and as a practice, abolitionism has increasingly shaped our political moment, amplified through the worldwide protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a uniformed police officer. It is at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement, in its demands for police defunding and demilitarisation, and a halt to prison construction. And it is there in the outrage which greeted the brutal treatment of women by police at the 2021 Clapham Common vigil for Sarah Everard.

As this book shows, abolitionism and feminism stand shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting a common cause: the end of the carceral state, with its key role in perpetuating violence, both public and private, in prisons, in police forces, and in people’s homes. Abolitionist theories and practices are at their most compelling when they are feminist; and a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism for these times.

In this landmark work, four of the world’s leading scholar-activists issue an urgent call for a truly intersectional, internationalist, abolitionist feminism.

‘This extraordinary book makes the most compelling case I’ve ever seen for the indivisibility of feminism and abolition, for the inseparability of gendered and state violence, domestic policing and militarism, the street, the home, and the world. Combining decades of analytical brilliance and organizational experience, the authors offer a genealogy of the movements that brought us here, lessons learned, battles won and lost, and the ongoing collective struggle to build a thoroughly revolutionary vision and practice.’ ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, AUTHOR OF FREEDOM DREAMS: THE BLACK RADICAL IMAGINATION

‘In this powerful, wise and well-crafted book, filled with insight and provocation, the authors make it patently and abundantly clear why abolitionist feminism is necessary . . . Attentive to histories of organising that are too quickly erased, and alive to new possibilities for working collectively in the present time, this book is as capacious and demanding as the abolitionist feminism it calls for. It gives us a name for what we want. Abolitionism. Now.’ SARA AHMED, AUTHOR OF WILLFUL SUBJECTS

Accessibility information:

This event will take place online. We will use Closed Captions to subtitle the event. Please get in touch at blackfeministreading@gmail.com with any questions or access needs you would like us to be aware of.

Ticket information:

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans and the Black Feminist Bookshop then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and people who are experiencing economic hardship.

Black Feminist Bookshop Patreon members gain access to the book club as part of their membership. More information here.

How to access this event online:

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the Black Feminist Bookshop.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

Gina Dent is associate professor of feminist studies, history of consciousness, and legal studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the editor of Black Popular Culture, and lectures and writes on African diaspora literary and cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and critical area studies. Her current project Visualizing Abolition grows out of her work as an advocate for transformative and transitional justice and prison abolition.

Beth Richie is Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice and Black Studies, Sociology, Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her most recent book is Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation.

Aviah Sarah Day can be found teaching and researching at Birkbeck, University of London when working, and organising in her East London community the rest of the time. She is involved in Sisters Uncut, a national direct-action collective fighting cuts to domestic violence services and state violence as well as Hackney Cop Watch. She is co-author of the book Abolition Revolution with Shanice McBean, which is due to be published by Pluto Press autumn 2022.

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The Rise of Ecofascism with 12 Rules for WHAT [online event]
2022-04-20 19:00 - 20:30
The world faces a climate crisis and an ascendant far right. Are these trends related? How does the far right think about the environment, and what openings does the coming crisis present for them?

This incisive new book traces the long history of far-right environmentalism and explores how it is adapting to the contemporary world. It argues that the extreme right, after years of denying the reality of climate change, are now showing serious signs of reversing their strategy. A new generation of far-right activists has realized that impending environmental catastrophe represents their best chance yet for a return to relevance. In reality, however, their noxious blend of conspiracy, hatred and violence is no solution at all: it is the ‘eco-socialism of fools’. Only a real commitment to climate justice can save us and stop the far right in its tracks.

No-one interested in the struggle against right-wing extremism and the crusade for climate justice can afford to miss this trenchant critique of burgeoning ecofascism.

SPEAKERS

Sam Moore and Alex Roberts are researchers, anti-fascist activists and the hosts of 12 Rules for WHAT, a podcast about the far right.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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The Starmer Project: A Journey To The Right, with Oliver Eagleton [online event]
2022-04-27 19:00 - 20:30
A forensic political biography of the Labour Party leader

The Labour Party has virtually disappeared from view under the leadership of Keir Starmer. Hailed as a human-rights champion and political outsider, what sort of politician is he really, and what mark is he making on the new politics of Labour?

In The Starmer Project, Oliver Eagleton provides a careful reading of Starmer’s record at the Crown Prosecution Service and as a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, tracing the political alliances he forged and the roots of his bid for the party leadership.

Starmer originally pledged to revitalise Corbynism with a dose of lawyerly competence. To understand what happened afterwards it is necessary to understand the man himself. So little known about Starmer that his actions are usually interpreted as overtures to others. On closer inspection, however, he is anything but an empty political vessel.

SPEAKERS

Oliver Eagleton is an Assistant Editor at New Left Review and Sidecar. He writes on culture and politics for the Guardian, TLS, Literary Review and Novara.

more speakers TBC

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Taking Control! Humanity and America After Trump and the Pandemic, with Anthony Barnett [online event]
2022-05-04 19:00 - 20:30
In 2020, two mighty sets of forces battled for control of the United States.

Trump led the charge, threatening to continue his brand of racist, gangster capitalism. Revolted by the prospect, the Democrats, influenced by Bernie Sanders, mobilised voters in record numbers. But, now in the White House, can Biden and the liberal centre ally with progressives under the banner of humanity to renew democracy on Earth and save our ecosystem?

From Anthony Barnett, co-creator and former editor-in-chief of openDemocracy, comes this blazing response to the confrontation between Trumpism and Biden in America, that sets out how the future of humankind is at stake. As democracy rests on a knife edge in the USA, changed forever in the wake of Black Lives Matter, the ongoing climate crisis and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Taking Control! shows how what is happening in America may yet give us hope for change across the world.

SPEAKERS

Anthony Barnett is the author of Iron Britannia, Soviet Freedom, This Time and The Lure of Greatness. He was the first Co-ordinator of Britain’s Charter 88, Co-director of the Convention on Modern Liberty, and was a founding Editor of openDemocracy from 2001-2007.

Marcus Gilroy-Ware is the author of Filling the Void: Emotion, Social Media and Capitalism, and After the Fact?: The Truth About Fake News. He writes, teaches, researches, creates and codes at the intersection of culture and communication.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS

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Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales [online event]
2022-05-11 19:00 - 20:30
What does it mean to imagine Wales and “The Welsh” as something both distinct and inclusive?

For many people, Wales brings to mind the same old collection of images – if it’s not rugby, sheep and rolling hills, it’s the 3 Cs: castles, coal, and choirs. Heritage, mining and the church are indeed integral parts of Welsh culture. But what of the other stories that point us toward a Welsh future?

In Welsh (Plural), some of the foremost current Welsh writers offer imaginative, radical perspectives that take us beyond the clichés and binaries that so often shape thinking about Wales and Welshness.

SPEAKERS

Charlotte Williams is an academic and writer. She is Honorary Professor in the School of History, Philosophy and Social Sciences, Bangor University. In 2020 she was appointed as Chair of the Ministerial Working Group: Communities, Contributions and Cynefin: Black Asian Minority Ethnicities in the New Curriculum.

Morgan Owen is an essayist and poet originally from Merthyr Tydfil. In 2019, he won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry in a Celtic Language. His work often has a particular focus on the weaving of landscape, temporality and identity.

Darren Chetty has worked in education for twenty-five years. He is a co-editor of Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales. He is a contributor to the bestselling book The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla. Darren co-authored What Is Masculinity? Why Does It Matter? And Other Big Questions and How To Disagree: Negotiate Difference in a Divided World.

Cerys Hafana is a musician from Machynlleth. She plays arrangements of Welsh folk tunes and songs, alongside original compositions on the triple harp and piano. Cerys is also a member of Avane, the Welsh youth folk ensemble, and released her debut solo album, Cwmwl, last year.

Originally from Worcestershire, Mike Parker has lived in mid Wales for over twenty years. The country has been his muse for TV and radio programmes, and numerous books including Neighbours From Hell?, Map Addict, The Greasy Poll, Real Powys and On the Red Hill. The latter won the 2020 nonfiction Wales Book of the Year and was runner up for the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK

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Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia, with Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan [online event]
2022-05-16 19:00 - 20:30
Islamophobia is everywhere. It is a narrative and history woven so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t even notice it – in our education, how we travel, our healthcare, legal system and at work. Behind the scenes it affects the most vulnerable, at the border and in prisons. Despite this, the conversation about Islamophobia is relegated to microaggressions and slurs.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan reveals how Islamophobia not only lives under the skin of those who it marks, but is an international political project designed to divide people in the name of security, in order to materially benefit global stakeholders. It can only be truly uprooted when we focus not on what it is but what it does.

Tangled in Terror shows that until the most marginalised Muslims are safe, nobody is safe.

Part of the Pluto Outspoken series

SPEAKERS

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a writer, poet and educator disrupting understandings of history, race, knowledge and violence.

more speakers TBC

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY A TICKET OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Expansion Rebellion with Celeste Hicks [online event]
2022-06-01 19:00 - 20:30
This is is a story of hope in the face of widespread consternation over the global climate crisis. For many people concerned about global warming, the 2018 vote by UK parliamentarians to proceed with the plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport was a devastating blow. Aviation was predicted to make up some 25% of the UK’s carbon emissions by 2050 and so the decision seemed to fly in the face of the UK’s commitment to be a climate leader.

Can the UK expand Heathrow airport, bringing in 700 extra planes a day, and still stay within ambitious carbon budgets? One legal case sought to answer this question. Campaigning lawyers argued that plans for a third runway at one of the world’s busiest airports would jeopardise the UK’s ability to meet its commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

This book traces the dramatic story of how the case was prepared – and why international aviation has for so long avoided meaningful limits on its expansion.

SPEAKERS

Celeste Hicks is a freelance journalist and author. She was the BBC correspondent in Chad for many years and has lived in Chad, Mali, and Somalia.

Alethea Warrington is a campaigns manager at climate charity Possible, which works on positive, practical action on climate change. Ali leads on Possible’s work on energy decarbonisation and cutting emissions from aviation. Her aviation work includes managing published research projects on consumer travel choices and job creation from a modal shift away from plane travel, running Possible’s campaign for a frequent flyer levy and managing Possible’s ongoing research project with Chatham House quantifying the potential for technological solutions to decarbonise aviation.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY A TICKET OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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Girl Online with Joanna Walsh
2022-06-06 19:00 - 20:30
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.

The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as ‘girls online’, vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil’s bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with ‘accounts’ of personal ‘experience’. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?

Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.

SPEAKERS

Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of seven books, including Hotel, Vertigo, Worlds from the Word’s End and Break*up she also works as a critic, editor, teacher and arts activist. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers” and currently runs @noentry_arts.

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She has published three books: Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (Dalkey Archive, 2007); Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015); and a volume of short stories, Variations (Influx Press, 2021). Her fourth, Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021, is due out on Cipher Press in July 2022. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, for whom she documented her gender reassignment in a series entitled A Transgender Journey (2010-12) as well as London Review of Books, Granta, Sight & Sound, Frieze, Art Review, New York Times, The Washington Post, TimeOut, The New Statesman and many other places.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

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Tenants with Vicky Spratt
2022-06-08 19:00 - 20:30
The urgent story of this country’s biggest crisis, told through the lives of those it most affects

Tony is facing eviction instead of enjoying retirement; Limarra isn’t ‘homeless enough’ to get help from the council; and for Kelly and her asthmatic son Morgan, another new rented house is a matter of life and death. This is twenty-first century Britain, where millions are forced into the private rental sector – a sector that creates profit for landlords, not safe and stable homes for tenants.

In this fierce and moving account, journalist Vicky Spratt traces decades of bad policy decisions to show how and why the British dream of homeownership has withered and the safety net of social housing has broken. Through the lives of those in the renting trap, she illuminates the ways this crisis is devastating our health, communities and political landscape. But, as the Covid epidemic showed, there are also real, radical steps we can take to give everyone the chance of a good home.

SPEAKERS

Vicky Spratt is a journalist whose work regularly shapes public policy. Her 2016 campaign ‘Make Renting Fair’ led to letting fees in England and Wales being banned, and she has spoken at political conferences, all-party parliamentary groups and panels across the country on the issue of housing. She has appeared on BBC News, Newsnight, Woman’s Hour, Radio 4 and NTS Radio. In 2020, she was nominated as Journalist of the Year at the Drum Awards for Online Media, and in 2021 her stories delving deep into Britain’s housing emergency saw her shortlisted for a British Journalism award. She is currently the i Paper’s Housing Correspondent and a writer and editor at Refinery29.

Nick Bano is a tenants’ rights lawyer and campaigner. He writes regularly about the housing crisis for Tribune and other publications, and is currently writing a book.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

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Charged with Matt Foot and Morag Livingstone
2022-06-15 19:00 - 20:30
Who do the police protect? An investigation into 40 years of battling protest that reveals a hidden police agenda against dissent.

Charged is an essential investigation into the role of policing protest in Britain today. As the UK government tries to suppress all forms of dissent, in their pursuit of more control, how do the police manage crowds, provoke violence and even break the law?

Since the 1980s under successive governments the police have been allowed to suppress protests, using aggressive tactics—from batons to horse charges to kettling. The landscape of how police deal with protest changed following criticism of the police during the 1981 Brixton riots. New military-style tactics were sanctioned by the Thatcher government, in secret. Over the next forty years those protesting against racism, unfair job losses, draconian laws, or for environmental protection were subject to brutal tactics. In the aftermath, media attention denigrates protesters while the police are praised and continue to act with impunity.

Looking through these moments of conflict widens our understanding of policing public order to reveal the true character of the state. Since the 1980s successive governments, from Thatcher to Johnson, covertly plot to suppress protests, using standardised aggressive tactics, from batons to horse charges to kettling. Through undisclosed documents and eyewitness accounts the authors reveal organised police violence against miners at Orgreave, print workers at Warrington, anti poll tax campaigners, student protestors and Black Lives Matter. The voices of protesters have been undeterred.

SPEAKERS

Matt Foot is a criminal defence Solicitor. He specialises in representing protestors and victims of miscarriages of justice. As a campaigning lawyer, he co-founded Justice Alliance to protect legal aid and Asbo Concern. He has also written in the Guardian and the London Review of Books.

Morag Livingstone is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, writer and internationally published author. She is also a lecturer and tutor in photojournalism, moving image and storytelling.

Joe Rollin is an organiser in Unite the Unions National Organising and Leverage Department and a founding member of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

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Pride Special: Signing with Peter Staley
2022-06-19 18:30 - 20:00
We’re honoured to host a ‘Never Silent’ book signing with nibbles as a celebration for AIDS & gay rights activist Peter Staley and London’s HIV+ community and friends, organised by ACT UP London.

There are limited spaces so sign up free here: https://www.outsavvy.com/event/8978/pride-special-never-silent-act-up-and-my-life-in-activism-peter-staley-book-signing

And reserve a copy of NEVER SILENT: ACT UP and My Life In Activism to get it signed on the evening: https://housmans.com/product/never-silent-act-up-and-my-life-in-activism-june-19th-signing-pre-order/

This is part of Pride Special 4 days of events welcoming Peter to London to celebrate his life-long commitment to ‘healthcare for all’ all encapsulated in his fab book ‘Never Silent – ACT UP and My Life in Activism’ all details to be announced on the ACT UP LONDON website – all press and general requests please email actuplondonhealthcareforall@gmail.com

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Doreen Massey: Selected Political Writings
2022-06-21 19:00 - 20:30
In collaboration with Lawrence Wishart Books

Doreen Massey was one of the most influential human geographers of the post-war period. A key feminist and socialist thinker, she brought geographical inequality to the fore of left politics. Through her activism, she combined a focus on class with a prescient awareness of its intersections with gender, race and sexuality.This book is a collection of Doreen Massey’s essential political writings, from reflections on support groups during the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike to assessments of the Sandinistas’ spatial policies and ownership campaigns relating to Liverpool Football Club. It gives a vivid sense of Massey’s dynamic style as a left public intellectual whose work impacted major political initiatives, and introduces her important ‘politics of place’ to a new generation of activists.

Doreen Massey was a pioneering radical geographer, theorist and activist, whose work challenged how we understand space, place and power. This collection of her writings brings together articles on social justice and previously un-digitised essays, for a fresh insight into Massey’s political commitments. It aims to give geographers a better sense of her political commitments while introducing her theory of location to a new generation of social justice activists.

SPEAKERS

David Featherstone is Reader in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Resistance, Space and Political Identities: the Making of Counter-Global Networks and Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism. He is a member of the editorial collectives of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography and Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture. He holds a PhD from the Open University.

Diarmaid Kelliher is a postdoctoral researcher and trade unionist at the University of Glasgow. His book, Making Cultures of Solidarity: London and the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike was published by Routledge in May 2021.

Hilary Wainwright is co-editor of Red Pepper and research director of the New Politics Project of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam. Her most recent books include Public Service Reform: But Not As We Know It! (Compass/UNISON) and Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy (Seagull).

Dr Ulises Moreno-Tabarez is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. He is also a Research Associate for LSE London and Associated Academic at the Latin American and Caribbean Centre. He serves as a core Editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action. He holds a PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies from the LSE.

Amelia Horgan is a writer, researcher and editor from London. She is currently a PhD candidate on work at the University of Essex’s School of Philosophy and Art History. Her first book, Lost in Work (Pluto Press) came out in June 2021.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

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Race to the Bottom: Reclaiming Antiracism, with Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee [online event]
2022-06-22 19:00 - 20:30
Antiracist movements are more mainstream than ever before. Liberal democracies boast of their policies designed to stamp out racism in all walks of life. Why then is racism still ever-present in our society?

This is not an accident, but by design. Capitalism is structured by racism and has relentlessly attacked powerful movements. Race to the Bottom traces our current crisis back decades, to the fragmentation of Britain’s Black Power movements and their absorption into NGOs and the Labour Party.

The authors call for recovering radical histories of antiracist struggle, championing modern activism and infusing them with the urgency of our times: replacing anxieties over ‘unconscious bias’ and rival claims for ‘representation’ with the struggle for a new, socialist, multi-racial organising from below.

Part of the Pluto Outspoken series.

SPEAKERS

Azfar Shafi is a researcher and organiser with a focus on policing, counter-terrorism and imperialism. He has been published by the Transnational Institute and Novara Media, and organised in movements against racism, state violence and for the Palestinian liberation struggle.

Ilyas Nagdee is an activist and writer focusing on anti-racism, civil liberties and policing. He has written for the Independent, Guardian and HuffPost, and has appeared on BBC, ITV and Sky News.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

TO BUY TICKETS OR RSVP TO THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

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High Desert with Andre Naffis-Sahely
2022-06-29 19:00 - 20:30
High Desert is a psychedelic journal of end-times and an ode to the American Southwest. Exploring such key events as the First Red Scare, the Tulsa Race Massacre and the West Coast’s wildfire epidemic, Naffis-Sahely’s reflections on class, race, and nationalism chart the region’s hidden histories from the Spanish Colonial Era to the recent pandemic. The poems in High Desert also revel in their rootlessness, as the author shifts his gaze outside of the US, travelling from Venice and Florence to Chittagong and St Petersburg, tackling our turbulent times and the depths of its problems in searing, extraordinary poems of witness and vision.

High Desert is André Naffis-Sahely’s second collection, following his debut The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin Books, 2017), a gathering of portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: travellers, labourers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. It includes poems from his recent pamphlet The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). All his collections present poetry as reportage, as much an act of memory as of sinuous, clear-eyed vision.

SPEAKERS

André Naffis-Sahely is a poet, editor and translator, and editor of Poetry London. He is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Manchester Writing School in the UK, and a Lecturer at University of California, Davis, in the US.

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

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Against the Law with David Renton
2022-07-13 19:00 - 20:30
Should we shrink the law? One of Britain’s leading social justice barristers puts the case against the constant expansion of the law into new areas, and its greater control over more and more of our lives.

Since 2016, Britain has been ruled by populists, who have promised to expand democracy and decrease the law by taking back power from abroad. Yet what these populists have actually done is institute a vast increase in new laws, made by ministers and not Parliament, regulating every aspect of our lives.

Against this backdrop of ever-increasing laws and regulations, Renton argues that instead of seeking change within the bounds of the law, social movements should rather look to their own ability to force change, their willingness to protest, occupy and strike.

Against the Law dares us to imagine a world in which workers are winning, and ecocide is treated with the urgency that it deserves. But as this book argues, this world can only become a reality if the movements of the oppressed choose to disengage from the law.

SPEAKERS

David Renton is one of Britain’s leading social justice barristers. His clients have included Occupy protesters and blacklisted trade unionists. He writes regularly on law and justice for The Guardian and The London Review of Books.

more speakers tbc

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TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

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Mixed Narratives
2022-07-18 19:00 - 20:30
Laila Woozeer, Natasha Devon and Jackson Bliss on creating a narrative framework to discuss mixed stories

About this event

In this conversation, we will discuss our various approaches to telling mixed stories, consider some of the existing frameworks for understanding the experiences of mixed people, and weigh up how useful those have been and if they impacted our own choices in the writing and telling of our stories.

SPEAKERS

Laila Woozeer, writer, musician and author of Not Quite White

Laila Woozeer is a queer non-binary London-born writer and musician who grew up in rural Wales, fully enchanted by the ancient magic found there. Laila’s work ranges from award-winning soundtracks, off-the-wall theatre shows and original songwriting. Laila is a long-term vegan, practising mixed-religion sorceress, lover of all things pink and/or shiny, rescue snake owner, overuser of major sevenths, and avid arcade gamer.

Natasha Devon activist, writer, presenter and author of Toxic

Natasha Devon MBE is a writer, presenter & activist. She tours schools, universities and events throughout the world, delivering talks as well as conducting research on mental health, body image, gender and equality.

Natasha is founder of the Mental Health Media Charter, a Trustee of Student Minds, a Patron for No Panic and an Ambassador for Glitch and the Reading Agency.

Jackson Bliss, author and screenwriter

Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Book Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, Amnesia of June Bugs, Dream Pop Origami, and the speculative hypertext, Dukkha, My Love. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, Kenyon Review, Huffington Post UK, STAND, and Hypertext, among others. He lives in LA with his wife and their two fashionably dressed dogs.

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

RSVP OR BUY A TICKET TO THIS EVENT

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The Peace Protestors
2022-07-20 19:00 - 20:30
A history of modern-day war resistance

From Afghanistan to the Falklands, from Northern Ireland to Iraq, British troops are nearly always in action somewhere in the world. But whenever there is war, there will be people who resist it. Sometimes, they can draw on public sympathy. At other times, they stand alone against the crowd. Peace movements large and small have been a constant part of UK history, not least in the last 40 years. This book tells their stories.

Drawing on interviews, fresh research and newly released government documents, the book sheds light on some of the most surprising and overlooked events of recent decades. Peace activists in the 1980s did not know that Margaret Thatcher’s government feared that US troops on UK bases would fire on unarmed demonstrators. When the ceasefire came about in Northern Ireland, few noticed the peace work that Quakers had been doing behind the scenes for years. While the jingoistic atmosphere of the Falklands War is much remembered, there is less talk about the protests against it that saw more than 100 arrests at navy recruitment centres and public demonstrations. Four women who successfully disarmed a warplane in the 1990s were just a few of those to be acquitted after actions that could have resulted in years in prison. Apparent public support for the campaign against the Iraq war masked deep and bitter divisions amongst anti-war activists. Dissent and disobedience within the armed forces continues far from the public gaze. As recently as 2011, Michael Lyons was refused discharge from the Royal Navy despite developing a conscientious objection to war. He spent seven months in a military prison. This is a book that brings to life the realities of resistance by people whose refusal to conform has much to say about how we see the UK and British history today.

SPEAKERS

Symon Hill is a historian and peace campaigner. He is a tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association, in which role he has developed new courses on anti-war movements, social conflict and overlooked aspects of British history. He is Campaigns Manager of the Peace Pledge Union and was previously press officer for the Campaign Against Arms Trade. He edited the writings of First World War pacifists for the White Feather Diaries, an online storytelling project. He has written three previous books and articles for publications including the Guardian, Morning Star, Church Times and Independent.

More speakers tbc

HOW TO ACCESS THIS ONLINE EVENT

An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to register for this event. Confirmation emails and invitation links sometimes end up in spam folders, so please check there before emailing the shop. Thank you.

TICKET INFORMATION

If you’d like a copy of the book then choose the book plus entry ticket. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. There’s also a free access ticket for students, low income and unwaged comrades.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

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A Black Feminist Book Club
2022-07-21 19:00 - 20:45
A (monthly) book club for Black women, femmes and non-binary people to focus on self care, empowerment and community connections.

This month we’re back at Housmans Bookshop.

Our July pick is Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker.

Feel free to bring snacks. We’ll hang around after the event for a bit of late night shopping, socialising and some tunes. You’ll also get a 20% discount on Black feminist books purchased on the night.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

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Rethinking Class in the 21st Century: Are Labels like "Working Class" and "Middle Class" Still Relevant Today?
2023-04-29 16:00 - 17:30 | St Pancras & Somers Town Living Centre, Francis Crick Institute, 2 Ossulston St, London, United Kingdom
Part of a series of events on class relations in the UK today. For information on the whole series of events for Rethinking Class in the 21st Century, see here.

ARE LABELS LIKE ‘WORKING CLASS’ AND ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ STILL RELEVANT TODAY? Dan Evans with Tom Gann

Class has been a definitive aspect of British society for centuries. But are the lines which distinguish the working, middle and upper classes as clear-cut as they once were? In the seminal new book A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie Dan Evans explores this misunderstood and politically influential demographic which exists between the working and middle classes. Marx argued that the petty bourgeoisie, composed of small business owners, landlords, self-employed tradespeople and artisans, would disappear. However, the opposite has happened. Not only does this class continue to grow, it has been an important force within many major political movements in recent memory, including Brexit, Trump, Sanders, Corbyn and The Arab Spring.

How might we come to better understand the class categories and their political impulses in our world today? Dan will be in conversation with Tom Gann covering these ideas and more; talking about his book, the contemporary class system and what we might be able to do next.

Tom Gann is a founding editor of New Socialist, a magazine that aims to provide critical and constructive perspectives on socialist politics, culture and theory. He is also a writer and researcher on topics such as class, populism, ecology and urbanism, and has written extensively on the history and challenges of the British left.

**Please note: these events will NOT be taking place at Housmans, but at a nearby events space, the St Pancras & Somers Town Living Centre, directly behind the British Library, and adjoining the Francis Crick Institute**

Ticket Information

If you’d like a copy of Dan Evans’ book A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie then choose the book plus entry ticket: this ticket includes free entry to this event. If you’d like to support Housmans then please choose a solidarity ticket. If you are short on funds, please email us to gain free entry.

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