We Grow The World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition Virtual Launch

Join us for a virtual book launch and conversation on caregiving, abolition, and hope amid chaos!

As we await a second Trump presidency, it's easy to feel frozen -- as if any action we take can't possibly be enough, and may be futile. Now is a moment to bring in the stories of folks who are taking action to build a liberatory world every day, sometimes in ways that go completely unrecognized: caregivers. In this heavy time, it's important to recognize the centrality of care to movement work. In their new anthology, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson have drawn together the insights of a wide range of authors and organizers, including Dorothy Roberts, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Beth Richie, Harsha Walia, Dylan Rodriguez, Victoria Law, adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown, and many more. Together, these essays illuminate the ways in which caregiving and struggles for liberation intertwine, offering both transformative ideas and practical tools for building new worlds even in the direst of circumstances.

The virtual book launch for We Grow the World Together is November 20 at 7:30pm Eastern Time, and will feature Dorothy Roberts, Harsha Walia, Kim Wilson, and Maya Schenwar in conversation about parenting, caregiving, abolition, and liberation. 

Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow) says of We Grow the World Together, "This is the book that I wish I had when my children were young! Taken together, these powerful essays offer an irresistible invitation to embrace the ‘soul work’ of parenting which is vital collective labor for a liberatory future.” Booklist writes, "With too many powerful and thought-provoking pieces to name, this collection will inspire caregivers of all kinds to imagine and work for a more interconnected, interdependent, and caring world.” Andrea Ritchie (author of Practicing New Worlds) writes, “The beautiful chorus of voices gathered in We Grow the World Together invites us to take up the work of parenting ourselves and each other toward becoming and bringing into being people who can live the liberation we long for. As we continue to enact and survive intergenerational trauma on a global and genocidal scale, the practice of parenting toward healing and uprooting all forms of violence, policing, and punishment in all our relationships is key to shifting the shape of societies toward the world we want."

We hope you glean some sparks of hope from this conversation, and from the book!

***Register through Ticket Tailor to receive a link to the live-streamed video on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and captioning and ASL will be provided.***

Speakers:

Maya Schenwar is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism and board president at Truthout. She is the coauthor (with Victoria Law) of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms and the author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better. Maya is also the coeditor (with Joe Macaré and Alana YuLan Price) of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States, and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and numerous other publications. Maya is a cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund and organizes with the Love & Protect collective. She lives in Chicago with her partner, child, and abolitionist cat.

Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the cofounder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.

Harsha Walia is the award-winning author Border and Rule and Undoing Border Imperialism. Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One Is Illegal and Women’s Memorial March Committee.

Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School where she holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander chair. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies. Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and biopolitics. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.

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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Beyond Prisons, Truthout, and upEND. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.