Socialism 2025: Full Schedule

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10:00am CDT

Stop Cop City: Lessons From the Movement

Saturday July 5, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

The Stop Cop City movement is a decentralized effort to stop the construction of a $120 million police training facility and the destruction of 170 acres of the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Featuring a range of tactics, and in the face of enormous state repression, the SCC movement brought together forest defenders, environmental justice advocates, political prisoners, Indigenous activists, abolitionists, educators, legal scholars, and academics in a struggle for police abolition, environmental liberation, and Indigenous sovereignty. SCC organizers Kamau Franklin, Mariah Parker, and Micah Herskind will share insights from their newly published No Cop City, No Cop World, discussing the campaign's history, lessons learned, and challenges that lay ahead--with an eye towards how Stop Cop City can inform abolitionist organizing across the globe.

Speakers

Kamau Franklin

Kamau Franklin is the founder of Community Movement Builder, a Black, member-based collective of community residents and organizers. Kamau has been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years and is a former practicing attorney, beginning in New York City and now based in... Read More →

Micah Herskind

Micah Herskind is an organizer, writer, and law student at Harvard Law School. He is a co-editor of No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement (Haymarket Books, 2025), and has written for outlets including New York Magazine, Scalawag, MSNBC, Teen Vogue, Inquest, and Race... Read More →

Mariah Parker

Mariah Parker is an emcee and labor organizer born and raised in the South. Their cultural work and organizing have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, SPIN, Al Jazeera, Scalawag and Hammer & Hope. They are a co-editor of No Cop City, No Cop World... Read More →

Saturday July 5, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Abolition

1:00pm CDT

Survival and Resistance Behind Bars

Saturday July 5, 2025 1:00pm - 2:30pm CDT

TBA

This session will discuss the organizing and survival strategies that the panelists practiced to stay alive, maintain hope, and fight for freedom and liberation from behind bars and with co-strugglers on the outside.

Speakers

Asha Ransby-Sporn

Asha Ransby-Sporn is a Chicago-based organizer, writer and columnist for In These Times. She was a co-founder of Black Youth Project 100 where she directed the group’s national organizing program at the height of the movement for Black lives and has since led on a diversity of winning... Read More →

James "Jimmy" Soto

James "Jimmy" Soto is a community organizer, artist, prisoner advocate, writer, and future JD candidate. He was wrongfully convicted and was released after serving 42 years. He is a paralegal at Northwestern University Pritzker's School of Law in the Community Justice and Civil... Read More →

Stanley Howard

Stanley Howard co-founded the Death Row 10 while he was on Illinois' Death Row and after surviving 38 years of incarceration, including 16 years on death row, is now a paralegal at Uptown People's Law Office. He also works with the Illinois Coalition for Liberation, Chicago Torture... Read More →

Renaldo Hudson

Renaldo Hudson is an educator, artist, minister and community organizer who survived 37 years of incarceration including 13 years on death row, and he is the Director of Education at the Illinois Prison Project. He is currently making a documentary about the death penalty in Illi... Read More →

Alice Kim

Alice Kim is an educator, cultural organizer and writer who was a leader in the movement to end the death penalty in Illinois. She directs the Beyond Prisons Initiative at the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture, teaches inside Illinois prisons... Read More →

Saturday July 5, 2025 1:00pm - 2:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

1:00pm CDT

Their End is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition

Saturday July 5, 2025 1:00pm - 2:30pm CDT

TBA

Where do cops come from and what is their true function in a global capitalist system? Are police at the core of the capitalist states that prop up systems of exploitation the world over? Join author brian bean and Chenjerai Kumanyika for a critical conversation weaving together the threads of the movement for police abolition and the social revolution against capitalism.

Check out bean's new book, Their End is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition, available at the conference from Haymarket Books.

Speakers

brian bean

brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist activist, writer, and speaker originally from North Carolina and the author of Their End is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition. He is one of the founding editors of Rampant magazine. His work has been published in Jacobin, Socialist... Read More →

Chenjerai Kumanyika

Chenjerai Kumanyika teaches nonfiction audio journalism and podcasting at New York University. He is the co-creator, co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, a podcast on the Civil War and is the creator and host of the new podcast, Empire City, an eight-part narrative series... Read More →

Saturday July 5, 2025 1:00pm - 2:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

3:00pm CDT

One Million Experiments: Redefining and Creating Abolition Five Years After Uprising

Saturday July 5, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

On the five-year anniversary of uprising after the murder of George Floyd, how have we learned to redefine and create safety without police and prisons? Join the team behind One Million Experiments, a resource, podcast, film, and webseries, to discuss how communities build experiments grounded in transformation instead of punishment.

Moderators

Lewis Raven Wallace

Lewis Raven Wallace is an award-winning independent journalist based in Durham, NC. He is the author of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and the host of The View from Somewhere podcast. His work centers around... Read More →

Speakers

Eva Nagao

Eva Nagao is the Creative Director of Interrupting Criminalization and an organizer based outside of Seattle. Her work focuses on communications for grassroots organizations and resource development that supports community-based structures working to decrease reliance on policing... Read More →

Damon Williams

Damon A. Williams is a movement builder, organizer, hip-hop performing artist, educator and media maker from the south side of Chicago. He is the Co-Founder of Respair Production & Media, and the Co-Creator of AirGo, a weekly podcast in Chicago that reshapes culture for the more liberatory... Read More →

Daniel Kisslinger

Daniel Kisslinger is an award-winning Chicago-based host and producer who creates dialogue-based media showcasing the stories, voices, and artworks of communities challenging power, reconfiguring public life, and reimagining our world. He is the Co-Founder of Respair Production... Read More →

Sponsors

Interrupting Criminalization

Saturday July 5, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

3:00pm CDT

Skyscraper Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City

Saturday July 5, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

Join scholars and organizers Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan for a damning account of mass incarceration that reveals how progressive forces in New York City appropriated the rhetoric of social movements and social justice to promise “downsized” and “humane" jails. The story at the heart of their book, Skyscraper Jails is at once a case study and a cautionary tale for what will be coming to cities and towns across the United States and beyond.

Speakers

Zhandarka Kurti

Zhandarka Kurti is an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Loyola University Chicago. She is the co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform and the Future of America’s Punishment System and editor of Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanit... Read More →

Jarrod Shanahan

Jarrod Shanahan is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage, co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and America's Punishment System, and City Time: On Being Sentence to Rikers Island and editor of Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to... Read More →

Saturday July 5, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition