M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi in conversation with Kae Bara Kratcha, Tamara Santibañez, and Taylor Thompson on speculative oral history.
About this event
Please note: The public conversation for this event will be a little longer, from 6:30-7:45pm ET.
M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi in conversation with Kae Bara Kratcha, Tamara Santibañez, and Taylor Thompson about Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, a work of speculative oral history.
“By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.
Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.”
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, artist and activist based in Chicago who writes and thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, politics and identity. She is co-author of "Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072," a revolutionary sci-fi novel published in 2022 with Common Notions Press. Abdelhadi received her PhD in Sociology in 2019 and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.
Kae Bara Kratcha (they/them/theirs) is a librarian at Columbia University Libraries and an oral history student at Columbia's Oral History Master's program (OHMA) [depending on when this goes live, could also read “a February 2023 graduate of Columbia's Oral History Master's program (OHMA)]. Kae's work as an oral historian centers on queer and trans experience, speculative oral history, and queer networks, organizing, and mutual aid in their neighborhood of Astoria, Queens. Listen to or read their speculative oral history project “bodyhome maker” at bit.ly/bodyhomemaker.
M. E. O'Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. Everything for Everyone was her first book, coauthored with Eman Abdelhadi. Her second book, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, will be out from Pluto in June 2023. She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. She works as a therapist, and is pursuing training as a psychoanalyst.
Tamara Santibañez (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian living and working in Brooklyn. As a queer and trans artist, their practice memorializes the language and resistance strategies used by “othered” populations to build alternative worlds, focusing most recently on investigating the intersection of tattooing and the prison system. They are a graduate of Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts program, receiving the Future Voices Fellowship in 2021, and are the author of Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work (Afterlife Press 2021). Their work can be found at tamarasantibanez.com.
Taylor W. Thompson is a doctoral student in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. She works to develop research at the intersection of Economic History and Black Feminist Theory. Taylor earned her master’s degree in Oral History at Columbia University where her thesis unfolded into a public, online oral history, and speculative archive. The project developed Black Feminist listening practices for engaging with oral histories of mutual aid organizers as they spoke about the types of economies and futures they are working to produce through their organizing. Taylor graduated from Barnard College, where she majored in Economics & Social History and minored in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Learn more about Spring 2023's Oral History and Fiction: A Book Club
Image Description: Book cover of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, with a blue, brown, orange, and white cartographic design.
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