The IAS is proud to make available the following dynamic, politically engaged speakers for your college campus, nonprofit organization, or political group this 2007-2008 school year: Ashanti Alston, Kazembe Balagun, Mark Lance, Josh MacPhee, Andréa Maria, Todd May, Cindy Milstein, and Shiri Pasternak. Each speaker will support the good work that your political group is doing, and in turn, will use some or all of any honorarium that your school or organization provides to contribute to the IAS as a project.

Please look over the list of speakers below, all of whom are either current or past IAS board members, or have received an IAS grant. By hosting a speaker, you mutually aid both your own political work and the IAS. You not only create an exciting intellectual event in your community that can also underscore your own organizing efforts but you use university or nonprofit resources to support the work of the IAS and the radical scholars it supports. Your political group--or better yet, your college or university, or nonprofit organization--is expected to provide all transportation costs, lodging or lodging costs (where applicable), and an honorarium. Each speaker will then donate from 50 to 100 percent of the honorarium to support the mission and projects of the IAS.

For more information and/or to schedule a speaker(s), please contact us by e-mail: speakers@anarchiststudies.org.

Speakers:

ASHANTI ALSTON is a former member of the Black Panther Party and ex-political prisoner. Formerly an IAS board member, he publishes the zine "Anarchist Panther" and 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 has spent time in Chiapas, Mexico, studying the autonomous structure of Zapatista communities and working on his memoirs. Ashanti resides in New York, where he is presently the national co-chair of the Jericho Amnesty Movement, and an active member of Estacion Libre, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and Critical Resistance.

TOPICS: lessons from the Black Panther Party; the history of Black nationalist movements; Black and postmodernist anarchism; and the relevance of the Zapatistas.

KAZEMBE BALAGUN is a writer, educator, and theorist living in New York City. A former member of the Student Liberation Action Movement and a current member of Estacion Libre, his writings cover the cross-sections of Marxism, anarchism, Black liberation, queer theory, movement history, and popular culture. Kazembe was awarded an IAS grant for his work-in-progress "Queering the X: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and the Third World." Currently, he is the outreach coordinator for the Brecht Forum.

TOPICS: queer theory; African American cultural history; and Black liberation.

MARK LANCE is a professor of philosophy, and professor and chair of the program on justice and peace at Georgetown University. He is widely published on philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Mark has recently completed a book with Rebecca Kukla, forthcoming from Harvard University Press, called "'Yo!' and 'Lo!': The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons." At Georgetown, he teaches a yearly course on anarchism. He is a board member of the IAS, and a member of the editorial collective of "Perspectives in Anarchist Theory." Mark has been an activist on a wide range of issues for over twenty years, and publishes in a number of activist journals. Currently, he is writing a book on "constructive anarchism."

TOPICS: Palestine; U.S. foreign policy; democratic theory; nonviolence; constructive anarchism; introduction to anarchism; and a wide range of issues in philosophy.

JOSH MacPHEE is an artist, curator, and activist currently living in New York. His work often revolves around themes of radical politics, privatization, and public space. His second book, "Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority" (AK Press, coedited with Erik Reuland), was just published. He also organizes the Celebrate People's History Poster Series and is part of the political art collective Justseeds.org.

TOPICS: stencil pirates: a history of the street stencil; taking control of your visual landscape; and printing against the grain: activist printmaking from 1960s to now.

ANDRÉA MARIA is a journalist, researcher, and translator. She has organized for migration justice and against gentrification, and reported from occupied Iraq and Haiti. Andréa is co-organizer of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, and a board member of the IAS. She is currently based in Toronto, where she is involved in local anti-poverty and Palestine solidarity efforts, helps make television, and is working on a book of interviews with international solidarity activists.

TOPICS: anti-imperialism inside fortress North America; international solidarity; new media and tactical resistance to capitalism; current international affairs from an anti-authoritarian perspective.

TODD MAY is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University. He teaches and writes in recent French thought, particularly poststructuralism. Todd is the author of "The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism," and has written and spoken extensively on the relationship between poststructuralism and 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. While living in Pittsburgh, Todd was the co-coordinator of campaigns against aid to the Contras and the anti-Gulf War (I) campaign. He also served as national co-director of the Palestine Solidarity Committee. Currently, he is a member of the IAS board.

TOPICS: the intersection of philosophy and anarchism; poststructuralism; anarchist theory; political theory; and Palestine.

CINDY MILSTEIN is a co-organizer of the Renewing Anarchist Tradition conference, a board member with the IAS, and a member of the Free Society Collective and Black Sheep Books collective in Montpelier, Vermont. For many years, she taught at the "anarchist summer school" known as the Institute for Social Ecology. She does grassroots political work at home and public speaking anywhere else. Her work appears in anti-authoritarian periodicals and the following anthologies: "Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority" (AK Press), "Globalize Liberation" (City Lights Books), "Confronting Capitalism" (Soft Skull Press), and "Only a Beginning" (Arsenal Pulp Press).

TOPICS: anarchism, direct democracy, contemporary anti-capitalist and horizontalist movement(s); capitalist globalization and today's changing statecraft; Murray Bookchin's legacy; and various current issues from an anarchist perspective.

SHIRI PASTERNAK is a Toronto-based writer and researcher who has been organizing around issues of intellectual property for almost a decade. She has contributed chapters to "Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade, and the Globalization of Hunger" (Toward Freedom Press), "Gene Taboos" (SUNY Press, forthcoming), and to journals and magazines, such as "zmag" and the Centre for Bioethics. Shiri is currently a board member of the IAS, a research associate at the Polis Project on Ecological Governance, and working with a broad coalition of community groups in Toronto to map abandoned buildings and wasted infrastructure for expropriation and redistribution. She also moderates the Property Taskforce Web site (www.propertytaskforce.org).

TOPICS: the commons and the co-optation of the commons; colonial history of property rights regimes; intellectual property; security and the terror of mobile capital.