Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements

Radical Organizations and Projects Cited

The Abolitionist: https://abolitionistpaper.wordpress.com
Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition: http://al-awda.org
Anarchists Against the Wall: http://awalls.org
Arab Resource and Organizing Center: http://araborganizing.org
Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante: http://www.asse-solidarite. qc.ca
Black Orchid Collective: http://blackorchidcollective.wordpress.com
Bloquez l’empire / Block the Empire: http://blocktheempire.blogspot.ca
Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions: www.bdsmovement.net
Bring the Ruckus: http://bringtheruckus.org
Californians United for a Responsible Budget: http://curbprisonspending.org
Canadian Union of Postal Workers: www.cupw.ca
Catalyst Project: http://collectiveliberation.org
Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid: www.caiaweb.org
Coalition of Immokalee Workers: www.ciw-online.org
Colours of Resistance: www.coloursofresistance.org
Common Cause: www.linchpin.ca
Common Ground Collective: www.commongroundrelief.org
Common Struggle: commonstruggle.org
Courage to Resist: www.couragetoresist.org
Critical Resistance: http://criticalresistance.org
Decarcerate PA: http://decarceratepa.info
Direct Action to Stop the War: https://bayareadirectaction.wordpress.com
El Kilombo Intergaláctico: www.elkilombo.org
End the Prison Industrial Complex: http://epic.noblogs.org
Experimental Community Education of the Twin Cities: www.excotc.org
First of May Anarchist Alliance: http://m1aa.org
Food Not Bombs: www.foodnotbombs.net
Heads Up Collective: http://collectiveliberation.org/resources/heads-up-collective
Idle No More: http://idlenomore.ca
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence: http://incite-national.org
Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement: http://ipsm.ca
Industrial Workers of the World: www.iww.org
Institute for Anarchist Studies: www.anarchist-studies.org
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network: www.ijsn.net
International Solidarity Movement: http://palsolidarity.org
Iraq Veterans Against the War: www.ivaw.org
LA Garment Workers Center: http://garmentworkercenter.org
Left Turn: www.leftturn.org
Make/Shift: www.makeshiftmag.com
Miami Autonomy and Solidarity: http://miamiautonomyandsolidarity.word-press.com
Montréal-Nord Républik: http://montrealnordrepublik.blogspot.ca
Mujeres Unidas Y Activas: www.mujeresunidas.net
No One Is Illegal: www.nooneisillegal.org
Occupy Our Homes: http://occupyourhomes.org
Occupy Sandy: www.occupysandy.org
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty: www.ocap.ca
Organization for a Free Society: www.afreesociety.org
Peoples’ Global Action: www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp
Pittsburgh Organizing Group: www.steelcityrevolt.org
Project South: www.projectsouth.org
Public Interest Research Groups (Canada): www.pirg.ca
Purple Thistle Centre: www.purplethistle.ca
Queers for Economic Justice: www.q4ej.org
Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism: http://quitpalestine.org
Regeneración Childcare: http://childcarenyc.org
Repeal Coalition: www.repealcoalition.org
Rising Tide North America: www.risingtidenorthamerica.org
Rock Dove Collective: www.rockdovecollective.org
San Francisco Community Land Trust: www.sfclt.org
Seattle Solidarity Network: www.seattlesolidarity.net
Solidarity Across Borders: www.solidarityacrossborders.org
Solidarity and Defense: http://solidarityanddefense.blogspot.com
Strike Debt: http://strikedebt.org
Students for a Democratic Society (new): www.newsds.org
Student/Farmworker Alliance: www.sfalliance.org
Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty: http://sudburycap.com
Sylvia Rivera Law Project: http://srlp.org
Tadamon!: www.tadamon.ca
Take Back the Land: www.takebacktheland.org
2640: www.redemmas.org/2640
United Students Against Sweatshops: http://usas.org
Upping the Anti: http://uppingtheanti.org
War Resisters Support Campaign: www.resisters.ca
Women’s Health and Justice Initiative: www.whji.org
Workers Solidarity Alliance: http://workersolidarity.org
Young Workers United: www.youngworkersunited.org

Biographies of Interviewees

Sarita Ahooja is a grassroots anti-capitalist organizer in Montreal. Over the past two decades she has been active in self-determination liberation struggles including Indigenous solidarity, anti-police brutality, and migrant justice movements. She is a founding member of La convergence des luttes anti-capitalistes, No One is Illegal-Montreal, and Solidarity Across Borders.

Ashanti Alston is an anarchist activist, speaker, writer, former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA), and former political prisoner. He joined the BPP while still in high school, starting a chapter in Plainfield, New Jersey, and later going underground with the BLA. In 1974, he was involved in a Connecticut “bank expropriation,” and was captured and imprisoned for more than twelve years. Ashanti has worked as an organizer with Estacion Libre to support the Zapatistas, Critical Resistance, and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Today, he is active in the National Jericho Movement and Anarchist People of Color organizing. He lives with his wife Viviane Saleh-Hanna and two children, Biko and Yasmeen, in Providence, Rhode Island.

Clare Bayard was raised in a military family and came up in queer and feminist activism as a teenager. Clare got involved in anarchist organizing in the late 1990s, working locally on issues of homelessness and displacement, and internationally against war and global capitalism. Through the Catalyst Project, the War Resisters League, and the War Resisters International network, Clare organizes for demilitarization and racial justice, with a particular focus on migrant justice, Palestine self-determination, and G.I. resistance.

Jill Chettiar spent many of her formative years working as an organizer in Vancouver. She is currently working in public health research, parenting two young daughters, and going to school full time.

Rosana Cruz is the associate director of V.O.T.E., a grassroots membership- based organization of formerly incarcerated persons that builds political and economic power with the people most impacted by the criminal justice system in New Orleans. Previously, Rosana worked for a diverse range of community organizations, including Safe Streets/Strong Communities, the National Immigration Law Center, the New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice, Hispanic Apostolate, the Lesbian and Gay Community Center of New Orleans, People’s Youth Freedom School, and the Southern Regional Office of Amnesty International in Atlanta.

Mike D is an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty in Toronto.

Rayan El-Amine is a former editor and founding member of Left Turn Magazine and a former San Francisco Bay Area Arab community organizer. He currently resides in Lebanon, where he works at American University of Beirut and teaches at Lebanese American University.

Francesca Fiorentini is an independent journalist and comedian based in Argentina. A former coeditor ofLeft Turn Magazine and WIN, the magazine of the War Resisters League, she is presently a regular contributor and member of the online anti-militarist publication War Times. She is also the creator of the YouTube comedy vlog Laugh to Not Cry.

Mary Foster is a community organizer in Montreal who has worked with initiatives such as Block the Empire, Iraq Solidarity Project, Solidarity Across Borders, Tadamon!, and the People’s Commission Network.

Harjit Singh Gill is a South Asian American activist living in Oakland and a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. He holds advanced degrees in humanities and social work. His work focuses on providing clinical support for low-income people in the Bay Area and is informed by a commitment to anti-imperialist, feminist, and queer-positive perspectives toward collective liberation. Harjit is a Unitarian Universalist, and is deeply committed to a vegan and straight-edge lifestyle.

Tatiana Gomez has been active on labor and migration issues for over ten years. Currently, she is a community-based lawyer in Montreal.

Harjap Grewal organizes in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories, working within movements against immigration controls, in solidarity with Indigenous struggles, for environmental justice, and to promote anti-capitalist resistance. While he has been a part of various spaces and communities, his work has pre- dominantly been with the No One Is Illegal-Vancouver collective.

Stephanie Guilloud is the codirector at Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide, based in Atlanta, Georgia. An organizer with over seventeen years of experience, Stephanie was a lead local organizer in the Seattle World Trade Organization shutdown in 1999 and edited and designed Voices from the WTO, an anthology of first-hand narratives from the participants in the historic demonstrations. Her essays have been published in Letters from Young Activists (Nation Books) and The Revolution Will Not be Funded (South End Press). Since 2005, she has served on the board of Southerners On New Ground (SONG), a multiracial queer organization building power for racial and economic justice.

Rachel Herzing is a member of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex.

Helen Hudson is a queer Black anti-authoritarian organizer living in Montreal. For close to two decades, she has been actively involved in immigration struggles; prisoner justice; queer, trans, and feminist struggles; and student organizing. She spent four years working as the coordinator of QPIRG Concordia, an activist resource center at Concordia University that serves as a central hub for student and community activists in Montreal. A former board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, Helen currently is a member of the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair collective and the Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoner Calendar collective. She is also a mother and a nurse.

Pauline Hwang was active in youth, immigrant, worker, tenant, and Indigenous solidarity organizing for many years. She has more recently focused on meditation, traditional Chinese medicine, and creativity. Pauline intends to bridge radical organizing with personal and community healing, and be part of a revolution that connects us back to our bodies, our ancestors, the Earth, and each other.

Rahula Janowski grew up white and working class in a rural New England community. She came of age politically in the 1990s in the West Coast anarchist community/movement. She lives in queer, radical left community in San Francisco, where she engages in political work including taking arrest at direct actions against war, supporting the development of younger white anti-racist activists and organizers, Palestine solidarity work, and organizing with other parents (most of whom know she is an anarchist) in her child’s school.

Tynan Jarrett is a Montreal-based community organizer and activist. His work has revolved primarily around queer and trans youth, and political prisoners. Some projects he has been involved in include the Trans Health Network, a coalition of groups working for better access to health care services for trans- gender, transsexual, and gender-variant people in Montreal and Quebec, and the Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar.

Sharmeen Khan became an activist with socialist and activist media organizations in Regina, Saskatchewan. She has organized in women’s centers, transit justice organizations, and community radio stations in Victoria and Vancouver. She moved to Toronto in 2005 where she finished a masters degree in communication and culture and worked in community radio and the PIRG circuit. She currently works at CUPE 3903, is on the board of the Media Co-op, and edits Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action.

Brooke Lehman has been active as an educator and organizer in New York City since the mid-1980s. She was a founding member of the Direct Action Network and of Bluestockings Bookstore. Brooke is currently the codirector of the Watershed Center, an educational center in upstate New York, where she leads seminars and retreats on designing healthy democratic organizations. She also serves as a faculty member of the Institute for Social Ecology, and as a board member for smartMeme and the Yansa Foundation.

RJ Maccani, based in New York City, has played many different roles in the struggle for a better world over the past fifteen years. As a cofounder and organizer with the Challenging Male Supremacy Project and a leadership team member for generationFIVE, his work focuses on building transformative jus- tice responses to violence against women, queer and trans people, and children. RJ is a generative somatics practitioner and pays the bills as coleader and com- munity programs producer for the Foundry Theatre.

Andréa Maria began organizing with Montreal’s Anti-Capitalist Convergence more than a decade ago, then worked as an ally to migrant justice struggles with No One Is Illegal-Montreal. Since then, she has worked with a range of anti-authoritarian collectives, international solidarity projects, and anti-poverty organizations in both Montreal and Toronto. Now a journalist, she continues to be student of resistance movements, learning about politics, strategy, and tactics from many angles and many sides.

Pilar Maschi is a survivor, former prisoner, mother, anarchist, and prison industrial complex abolitionist. Formerly the national membership and leader- ship development director of Critical Resistance, Pilar is currently a member of All of Us or None and Anarchist People of Color. She is also an alumna of the New Voices fellowship program and a founding member of Community in Unity. She lives in New York City.

Sonya Z. Mehta is a recent graduate of the City University of New York School of Law. She was first an organizer, then codirector, at Young Workers United San Francisco, a workers’ center of young and immigrant service-sector workers and students. YWU passed the first paid sick leave law in the country, improved conditions at work, won $4.5 million in backpay for employment law violations, and built community solidarity and leadership.

Amy Miller is a media maker and social justice organizer based in Montreal. She directed the featurette documentary Myths for Profit: Canada’s Role in Industries of War and Peace, which was screened extensively across Canada and at festivals. She has worked with The Dominion and the Media Co-op as both a writer and editor. She continues to focus on developing critical documentaries for transformative social change.

Rafael a. Mutis Garcia is an immigrant from Colombia living in the United States. He has worked in community and academic settings across the United States in defense of poor communities of color, immigrant communities, women, and LGBTQ folks, as well as in Nicaragua, Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. A popular educator between 1994–2006 in the Escuela Popular Norteña, an organizer with Critical Resistance NYC between 2003–2008, and with Anarchist People of Color since 2003, currently Rafael does food justice work through the Morning Glory Garden in the Bronx. He is completing a doctorate in earth and environmental sciences focusing on geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research is an ethnobotany project with Afro and Indigenous communities in Colombia.

Michelle O’Brien is an organizer and scholar living in Brooklyn. Much of her fifteen years of social justice activism has been within the U.S. communities hardest hit by HIV and AIDS. She writes on revolutionary strategy, the politics of social services, and the nonprofit industrial complex. Currently, Michelle organizes with Power for Rank and File Employees in the Social Services, a project to support union struggles at New York City’s nonprofit social service agencies. She is a graduate student in sociology at New York University.

Adriana Paz is a Bolivian born and raised community organizer, social researcher and popular educator with over ten years of experience working on social justice, labor and (im)migrant rights. She has a background as a community radio broadcaster, columnist for Latin American newspapers, and contributor to online magazines in Canada. Adriana is founding member and organizer of Justicia for Migrant Workers in B.C., a grassroots national organization advocating for migrant farm workers’ social, economic, and labor rights. She has participated in research studies and written about migrant farmworkers on the borders of Bolivia/Argentina, Mexico, and Canada. She just completed her Masters degree at the University of British Columbia, focusing on transnational labor migration and transnational organizing models for migrant farmworkers in North America.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is a facilitator, organizer, writer, and activist-scholar living between New York City and New Orleans. She was originally politicized through the Unitarian Universalist youth movement as a teenager. Over the past ten years, Lydia has been involved in organizing against prisons and policing, supporting affordable housing struggles in New Orleans, and strengthening solidarity economies. She is also a cofounder of the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA).

Leila Pourtavaf has organized with a number of Montreal-based migrant justice and radical queer groups including No One Is Illegal, Solidarity Across Borders, the Anti-Capitalist Asspirates, and Qteam. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in history at the University of Toronto.

Paula Ximena Rojas-Urrutia has twenty-one years of experience working as a community organizer. Born in Chile and raised in Houston, she spent thirteen years as an organizer in Brooklyn. Her experiences working for social justice nonprofit organizations led her to cofound various community organizations focused on issues affecting young and adult women of color, including Sista II Sista, Pachamama, and Community Birthing Project. Paula’s organizing work and life experience have drawn her to work at the intersections of welfare injustice and women of color, midwifery and local grassroots organizing. In addition, she has supported and amplified local work, as a national board member and trainer for INCITE! She is currently living in Austin, Tejas, continuing to work collectively with other women of color to model a more just and loving world. She is a doula, apprentice midwife, self-defense teacher, mother of two, and an advisor to Mamas of Color Rising.

Joshua Kahn Russell is an organizer working to bridge movements for eco- logical balance and racial justice. He is a strategy, organizing, and nonviolent direct action trainer with the Ruckus Society, and coauthor of Organizing Cools the Planet (PM Press). You can keep up with him at www.praxismakesperfect.org.

Sophie Schoen is a community organizer based in Montreal. She was an active member of Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante from 2003 to 2008.

Mac Scott is an anarchist who does legal work in Toronto (go figure). He is also a member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and No One Is Illegal- Toronto. When he’s not fighting against the man, he enjoys his collective house, his family, beer, and bad suits, not necessarily in that order.

Jaggi Singh is a community organizer and anarchist based in Montreal whose work focuses on indigenous solidarity, migrant justice and anti-capitalist struggles, as well as community-based popular education. He has helped to initiate and continues to be active with several local campaigns, initiatives, and groups, including the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, No One Is Illegal, Solidarity Across Borders, the Indigenous Solidarity Committee, and the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair.

David Solnit has been a mass direct action organizer for over three decades in global justice, anti-war, environmental justice, climate justice, and solidarity movements in North America, including the mass direct action shutdowns of the Seattle WTO in 1999 and the San Francisco Financial District on March 30, 2003, the day after the United States invaded Iraq. He is a trainer, an arts organizer, a puppeteer, and editor/coauthor of Globalize Liberation (City Lights), Army of None (Seven Stories), and The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle (AK Press). He lives in San Francisco.

Mick Sweetman is the managing editor of The Dialog newspaper at George Brown College and a labor and community journalist. His articles and photos have also been published in Alternet, Basics, Canadian Dimension, Clamor, Industrial Worker, Linchpin, Media Co-op, rabble.ca, and ZNet. He calls Toronto home and is unabashedly a supporter of Toronto FC.

James Tracy is the coauthor of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (Melville House Publishers). Based in San Francisco, he is a longtime organizer active in housing and economic justice work.

Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist and writer currently based in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories. For the past decade she has been active in migrant justice, anti-racist, feminist, Palestine solidarity, Indigenous sovereignty, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-poverty movements. She is involved in No One Is Illegal, Radical Desis, Defenders of the Land, Women’s Committee for Missing and Murdered Women, and works as a frontline anti- violence worker and legal advocate in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She is also a writer, with work in numerous publications and anthologies. Her most recent book is Undoing Border Imperialism (AK Press).

Marika Warner is a black/mixed race actor, writer, and anarchist based in Toronto. She has been active with anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-poverty organizations in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Toronto. Most of her organizing work has focused on violence against women and prison abolition.

Jennifer Whitney has been a healthcare worker and organizer in New Orleans, since the levees broke and flooded the city in 2005. Prior to that, she worked with global justice coalitions in Seattle, Prague, Quebec City, Cancun, Edinburgh, Mexico City, and elsewhere to disrupt summit meetings of transnational power brokers, and also to help bring about effective, creative alternatives. She is a coauthor of We Are Everywhere, has published extensively on Latin American social movements, and continues to write about and work at the intersection of health, justice, art, dignity, ecology, and liberation.

Ora Wise cofounded the Palestine Education Project and coproduced Slingshot Hip Hop, a grassroots documentary about hip-hop in Palestine which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2008. Ora is the youth education director at an independent synagogue in Brooklyn and is the curriculum specialist for Detroit Future Media, an intensive program that trains people to use media for a more just, creative, and collaborative city. Ora maintains the- bigceci.wordpress.com, a space dedicated to elevating our consciousness about what we eat by sharing stories and resources, supporting the creation of alternatives to the industrial food system, and indulging in the sensuality and wisdom of the culinary arts.

 

Author Chris Dixon’s Presentation on the Project

In the interview he describes himself as a “deprofessionalized academic”. He describes this as meaning he got a PhD not as someone who wanted to stay within the academic field, but to support the movements he was a participant in.