Socialism 2025: Full Schedule

2:30pm CDT

Reproductive Justice, Family Policing, and Abolition

Thursday July 3, 2025 2:30pm - 4:00pm CDT

Since chattel slavery, state violence has regulated reproduction, evolving into institutions like family policing, which disproportionately targets marginalized communities under the guise of child protection. Using a reproductive justice framework, this session examines how surveillance, punishment, and control in family policing perpetuate reproductive oppression, undermining autonomy and justice.

Speakers

Josie Pickens

Josie Pickens (she/her) is a Houston-based organizer, educator, journalist, and cultural critic whose work explores race, gender, and sexuality. Her writing has appeared in *Ebony, Essence, Bitch, The Root, Cassius, Mic,* and more. With over 20 years of community organizing experience... Read More →

connease warren

connease warren (she/her) is a veteran communications strategist and writer who has led bold, innovative campaigns centering racial justice and abolition. connease thinks daily about ways the written word advances and sustains abolitionist conversations, ideas, and actions. She believes... Read More →

Sponsors

upEND Movement

Thursday July 3, 2025 2:30pm - 4:00pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

4:30pm CDT

Abolitionist Organizing Under Authoritarianism

Thursday July 3, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT

TBA

A number of frameworks have been articulated across the Left for resisting rising authoritarianism, fascism, white Christian cisheteropatriarchal supremacy, and imperialism in the U.S. Recognizing that criminalization is instrumental to authoritarian regimes and Right-wing agendas, facilitators will workshop an approach to situating abolitionist organizing within these broader frameworks while simultaneously expanding them.

Speakers

Andrea J. Ritchie

Andrea J. Ritchie (she/her) is an abolitionist Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades... Read More →

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 →

Maria Thomas

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 →

Thursday July 3, 2025 4:30pm - 6:00pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

10:00am CDT

No New Cages: Lessons from Organizers Resisting Carceral Infrastructure

Friday July 4, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

The new, authoritarian, administration has promised to expand prison infrastructure, requiring remobilizations of efforts against expansion, construction, entrenchment, and net-widening. Alongside the release of a new resource on undertaking fights against carceral infrastructure, a panel of organizers who have organized against prisons, jails, detention centers, and cop cities will offer reflections and strategic recommendations on what these fights will look like in coming years.

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 →

Mon Mohapatra

Mon Mohapatra (she/they) is a writer, organizer and artist originally from India, based on Canarsee Land (NYC) whose work involves building capacity for abolitionist organizing through political education, participatory research, and direct action. In particular, her work focuses... Read More →

Hannah Riley

Hannah Riley is a writer and activist based in Atlanta.

Stevie Wilson

Stevie Wilson (he/him) is a currently imprisoned Black queer abolitionist organizer and facilitator from Philadelphia. Wilson is the founder of the inside abolitionist study collective 9971 and is the founder of the abolitionist journal In the Belly. He is a columnist for the Abolitionist... Read More →

Sponsors

Community Justice Exchange

Friday July 4, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT
TBA

Abolition

12:00pm CDT

Fighting Carceral Infrastructure to End Mass Incarceration

Friday July 4, 2025 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT

TBA

Participants will learn tactics and strategies from campaigns against carceral infrastructure, including jails, prisons, and police training facilities. Panelists will also discuss how their work ties into the broader movement to end mass incarceration and other struggles for justice.

Speakers

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 →

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 →

Avalon Betts-Gaston

Avalon Betts-Gaston is a Chicago native, non-licensed attorney, ordained minister, and passionate advocate to dismantle and change current systems while building a system of care and accountability focused on humane justice and harm reduction, not just punishment. She is the first... Read More →

Alicia Brown

Alicia Brown is a community leader and currently co director of Final 5 Campaign. She is a restorative justice practitioner, circle keeper, and abolitionist. She enjoys writing and was recently published in the “Envisioning Justice Curricular Concepts Resource Guide, Incarcerated... Read More →

Sponsors

Institute to End Mass Incarceration

Friday July 4, 2025 12:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

3:00pm CDT

Caregiving Toward Abolition: Workshop and Story Circles

Friday July 4, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

Caregiving is an integral part of movements for liberation. In this moment of rising fascism, it's especially crucial to uplift this care work, including care for children. Supporting young people and each other in concrete, material ways, day to day and hour to hour, is an essential component of resistance. In this workshop, we will engage with these themes, informed by the anthology We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. We'll also offer an opportunity to be part of a circle in which we'll share stories of caregiving in a supportive space.

Speakers

Nadine Naber

Kim Wilson

Maya Schenwar

Maya Schenwar is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism and board president of Truthout. She is the co-editor of We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition and co-author of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, among... Read More →

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

Abolition

3:00pm CDT

“Texas is infamous for its taste for death:” Lethal Practices in the Lone Star State

Friday July 4, 2025 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT

TBA

Texas is the U.S.’s lead executioner. Its use of the death penalty has decreased, but the descriptive profile of those who are executed remains the same. This session will examine the racial lineage tied to Texas’s death penalty, and strategies to strengthen the death penalty abolition movement.

Speakers

Tony Ford

Howard Guidry

Tania Siddiqi

Obie Weathers

Sponsors

Texas People's Tribunal

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

Abolition

5:00pm CDT

Prison Made Us Militants: A Conversation with In The Belly

Friday July 4, 2025 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT

TBA

How does the work of prison and police abolition fit within a broader socialist movement? How can the left meaningfully engage incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people? How can we build strong movements where imprisoned people are leaders and comrades in the struggle? Join In the Belly for a conversation about prison organizing with currently and formerly incarcerated organizers, who will discuss movement building behind bars, inside-out organizing, prison repression and censorship, and more.

Speakers

Safear Ness

Safear Ness (they/them) is a formerly incarcerated abolitionist, released from Pennsylvania State Prison in 2023. Their lineage is traced through Indigenous peoples (Apache Chiricahua), Spanish colonizers, and white settlers. They still organize against the PIC with incarcerated comrades... Read More →

R. Ya'iyr Carter

R. “Ya’iyr” Carter is a currently incarcerated poet and essayist, working to dismantle the prison industrial complex from a cell in Pennsylvania. He is an editor for In the Belly, a revolutionary abolitionist magazine by and for incarcerated people and their communities.

Pierre Pinson

Sponsors

In the Belly

Study & Struggle

Friday July 4, 2025 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT
TBA

Abolition

10:00am CDT

Stop Cop City: Lessons From the Movement

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

TBA

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

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

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

Speakers

Eva Nagao

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

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

10:00am CDT

Challenging Mass Surveillance in the Time of Trump

Sunday July 6, 2025 10:00am - 11:30am CDT

TBA

Police agencies at all levels are rapidly adopting new digital surveillance tools and using these systems to intensify oppression and repression. This panel will look at how these tools are transforming policing, patterns in where and how they are adopted, and ways that we can organize against the alignment of state and corporate power that is fueling this era of mass surveillance.

Moderators