The Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) Speakers Bureau

The Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) is pleased to announce our new Speakers Bureau. The Speakers Bureau is a project that arranges speaking engagements for many diverse and dynamic thinkers drawn from our network of scholars and activists.

The Speakers and Topics

Ashanti Alston — is a former member of the Black Panther Party and ex-political prisoner. He is a board member of the IAS and publishes the Zine “Anarchist Panther”. He has been a guest lecturer at the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont—speaking on the Panthers and the history of Black Nationalist movements. He recently spent six months in Chiapas studying the autonomous structure of Zapatista communities and writing his memoirs. He resides in New York, where he served as the regional coordinator for Critical Resistance, a national organization committed to ending the Prison Industrial Complex.

Topics: Lessons from the Black Panther Party, History of Black Nationalist Movements, Black Anarchism and Zapatistas.

Kazembe Balagoon — is a writer/educator living in Brooklyn NY. A graduate of Hunter College with a BA in Africana Studies and Philosophy, he was a member of the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM). He is currently a member of Estacion Libre, a people of colour organization in solidarity with Chiapas. His articles have appeared in The Indypendent, Left Turn magazine, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.

Topics: Queer Theory, African-American Cultural History and Black Liberation.

Paul Glavin — is a writer, acupuncturist and a board member of the IAS. He has been active in social and political movements for over 20 years. He is a founding member of the Youth Greens, and ecological anarchist organization, a former member of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, the Free Society Journal Collective, and the AWOL political collective. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and has been published in Z Magazine, Clamor, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, and the New Formulation.

Topics: Anti-Authoritarian Organizing; Capitalism, the State & Ecology; An Anarchist Perspective on the Black Panther Party; and the Radical Roots of Acupuncture Detox in the Revolutionary Movements of the 1960s.

Mark Lance — is a Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Justice and Peace at Georgetown University. He is widely published on philosophy language, logic, epistemology, ethics and political philosophy. He is a board member of the IAS, and co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Peace and Change. Mark has also been an activist on a wide range of issues for 20 years, and publishes in a number of activist journals. He is currently writing a book on “constructive anarchism”.

Topics: Palestine and the duties of Americans; Taking democracy seriously; Why do revolutions fail; Constructive anarchism and the meaning of community; The responsibilities of citizenship in a time of Empire; Taking terrorism seriously; Academic lectures on a range of issues in philosophy.

Todd May — is a Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University. He teaches and writes in recent French thought, particularly poststructuralism. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. In addition to his academic work, he has been involved in liberation struggles from gay rights to anti-apartheid work to the Palestinian rights struggle.

Topics: The intersection of philosophy and anarchism; Poststructuralism; Palestine.

Cindy Milstein — is a co-organizer of the Renewing Anarchist Tradition conference, a board member with the IAS, and a member of Free Society Collective and Black Sheep Books collective in Montpelier, Vermont. Her work appears in anti-authoritarian periodicals and several recent anthologies, including “Globalize Liberation” (City Lights Books), “Confronting Capitalism” (Soft Skull Press), and “Only a Beginning” (Arsenal Pulp Press).

Topics: Anarchism; Contemporary anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian movement(s);Direct democracy; Globalization; Changing character of statecraft politics; Contemporary issues from an anarchist perspective.

Ramor Ryan — is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and has taught in Managua, Nicaragua and Colombia. He has also worked as a journalist, in print, radio and television. He is based in Chiapas, Mexico along with his two year old son, and is awaiting the publication of his first book Clandestines-The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile by AK this spring.

Topics: Anti-imperialist struggles in Belfast, Belize, Nicaragua and Kurdistan; Anti-capitalist movements in Mexico and Brazil; Zapatistas and grassroots autonomy.

Andréa Schmidt — lives and works from Montreal. She has organized around migration justice issues, reported from occupied Iraq and Haiti, and written dispatches on international solidarity and anti-imperialism. She has also given numerous workshops on anarchism and direct action. Andréa is a board member of the IAS, and an editor of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.

Topics: Anti-imperialism inside Fortress North America; Anarchism and direct action; International solidarity.

Bill Weinberg — is an award-winning journalist and editor of the on-line magazine World War 4 Report (WW4Report.com), which was launched immediately after the 9-11 attacks. He is the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso 2000) and War on the Land: Ecology and Politics in Central America (Zed 1991). As a correspondent for Native Americas, the quarterly journal of Cornell University's American Indian Program, he has won three awards from the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) for his reportage on indigenous issues from Nicaragua to Arizona. He is currently working on a book about Plan Colombia and indigenous resistance movements in the Andes. He lives on New York's Lower East Side.

Topics:: Latin America; Plan Colombia; The Zapatistas; Indigenous movements (especially in the Andes, Mexico and Central America); Secular left resistance in Iraq and the Islamic world; The "War on Terrorism" and the corporate agendas it masks; Building alternative media.

To schedule a speaking engagement or to coordinate around a speaker passing through your area, please contact us by email or post.

We also have speakers for French and Spanish audiences for certain topics.

Host organizations are expected to provide all transportation costs, and honorarium and lodging or lodging costs (where applicable).

Contact Us Institute for Anarchist Studies P.O. Box 1664 New York, NY 10009

Phone: 1-(917)-753-2663

E-mail: info@anarchist-studies.org

http://www.anarchist-studies.org/