Facilitators
We are very fortunate to have the following facilitators join us (arranged alphabetically):

Ashanti Omawali Alston
National Jericho Movement
Center for Grassroots Organizing
Areas of Specialization: Anarchism, Black liberation, Black nationalism. As a result of his membership in both the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, he served a total of 14 years as a political prisoner and prisoner-of-war.
Seminar: Undoing Conquest: Getting This Empire off the Back of the Turtle

Akilesh Ayyar
Sifting to Truth
Areas of Specialization: Advaita Vedanta; jurisprudence; psychology; psychoanalysis; Proust
Seminar: How to Find What Isn’t Lost

Ulrich Baer
New York University
Professor of German and Comparative Literature
Areas of Specialization: German literature; poetry; poetics; Rilke; Baudelaire; continental philosophy; photography; trauma.
Seminars: • Rilke’s Poetics of Immanence • Lying & Truth in Politics: Hannah Arendt and the Fragility of Democratic Life • For Our Present Moment: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time

Rich Blint
The New School
Assistant Professor of Literature, director of the program in Race and Ethnicity, and affiliate faculty in Gender Studies
Areas of Specialization: American and African American literature and culture; the life and work of James Baldwin; race, gender, and contemporary visuality; postcolonialism and diaspora; urban life and politics in the context of the global.
Seminar: For Our Present Moment: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time

Thomas Conners
University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Studies
Areas of Specialization: theories of affect, queer theory, and Latin American and Latinx literature. Seminar: Don’t Worry. Be Happy! Feeling Good, Bad, and Everything in Between

Daniel Denvir
Host of “The Dig,” a Jacobin magazine podcast
Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Areas of Specialization: contemporary politics, immigration, criminal justice.
Seminar: Empire of Xenophobia: The Long Political History of Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” Wall

Amir Eshel
Stanford University
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies; Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature
Areas of Specialization: contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.
Seminar: Lying & Truth in Politics: Hannah Arendt and the Fragility of Democratic Life

Yomaira C. Figueroa–Vásquez
Michigan State University
Associate Professor of Global Afro-Diaspora Studies in the Department of English and African American & African Studies.
Co-director and curator of Electric Marronage.
Areas of Specialization: the textual, historical, and political relations between diasporic Afro-Puerto Rican, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Dominican, and Equatoguinean poetics. Seminar: “Radical Relating as Decolonial Practice,”

Eleanor Finley
PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst;
Associate editor at ROAR Magazine ;
Board member of the Institute for Social Ecology.
Areas of Specialization: social ecology; anthropology; practices of direct democracy in the Kurdish Freedom Movement and beyond.
Seminar: Reinventing “Democracy” in the 21st Century: The Rojava Revolution

Patricia Gherovici
Philadelphia Lacan Group
Psychoanalyst in private practice
Areas of Specialization: Lacanian psychoanalysis; transgenderism; race, class, and the unconscious; psychoanalysis and comedy. Seminar: Please Select Your Jacques Lacan

Adam Greenfield
Speedbird
Areas of Specialization: the intersection of design, technology and culture; colonization of everyday life by information technology; city life and urban design; anarchism. His most recent works are Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (Verso, 2017), and At the End of the World, Plant a Tree (Liberia). Seminar: At the End of the World, Plant a Tree

Marisa Holmes
Brooklyn, NY
Organizer, Filmmaker, and Educator
Areas of Specialization: Sociology of media, critical theory, networks, the public sphere, anarchism. Seminar: Mutual Aid: How to Survive the Crisis

Cleo Kearns
Dartmouth College, Visiting Scholar
Areas of Specialization: continental philosophy, comparative religion, western literature, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, shamanism and sacrifice.
Seminars: • Ritual and Resistance • Sacrifice, Debt & Grief • Sacrifice, Gender & Eros • Virgil, Sovereignty & Eros

Ruth Kinna
School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, U.K.
Areas of Specialization: late nineteenth century anarchism; history of ideas; political theory; contemporary radical politics.
Seminars: • Seek No Master: Voltairine de Cleyre’s Anarchism Without Adjectives

Steven Koteff
Philadelphia, PA
Areas of Specialization: fiction writing
Seminar: Reality Beyond Realism: Storytelling for/versus Enlightenment

Brooke Lavelle
Courage of Care Coalition
Areas of Specialization: Buddhist studies; cognitive science; contemplative theory; anti-oppressive pedagogy; social justice; educational equity.
Seminar: Critical and Contemplative Pedagogies for Eco-Justice

Rebecca Manski
Unsettling Wall Street/Borderless Walks and Social Justice Tours Collective
Independent educator, curriculum designer, researcher
Area of Specialization: The interplay between enclosure and mobilization of contested spaces; prefigurative mapping; the fortresses, walls and detention centers in one of this country’s first border zones: New York’s financial district.
Seminar: Unsettling Territory: A Decolonial Mapping Workshop

Katherine McKittrick
Professor of Gender Studies
Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada.
Areas of Specialization: Ecology in the work of black studies theorists; color, color theory, image-making, and black aesthetics; black geologies; Sylvia Wynter.
Seminar: Black Methodologies | Black Collaborations

Cindy Milstein
Institute for Anarchist Studies
Author, organizer, activist
Areas of Specialization: Creating autonomous spaces of resistance, reconstruction, and education.
Seminars: • Anarchism and its Aspirations • Viral Grief, Rebellious Mourning

Lisa Miracchi
University of Pennsylvania
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Areas of Specialization: Mind, epistemology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, action and practice, feminism, language. Seminar: How Living Well Matters In the Pursuit of Knowledge

Alison McDowell
Activist and Philadelphia-based independent researcher. She blogs about race, financialization, and technology, at wrenchinthegears.com. Seminar: Level Up: Life In A Post-Pandemic Video Game

Philip Murphy
Buddhist Action Coalition NYC
Animal Rebellion NYC
Areas of Specialization: practitioner of Theravada Buddhism; former director at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, the Insight Mediation Center of the Pioneer Valley (Easthampton, MA), and New York Insight Meditation Center; founding member of the Buddhist Action Coalition NYC; co-founder of the New York City chapter of climate and animal justice organization Animal Rebellion.
Seminar: Total Liberation: The Buddhist Eight-Fold Path, Animal Justice, and Liberatory Praxis

Joshua M. Myers
Howard University
Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies.
Areas of Specialization: Africana intellectual histories and traditions; Africana philosophy; musics and foodways; critical university studies; and disciplinarity.
Seminars: We Will be Black: Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism,and Beyond

Matthew O’Connell
Imperfect Buddha Podcast
O’Connell Coaching
Areas of Specialization: Buddhism; non-buddhism; shamanism; critical thinking skills. Seminar: Rethinking Practice at the Great Feast

John Paetsch
Temple University
Areas of Specialization: Continental philosophy; Deleuze; Bergson; philosophy of time; poetics; poetry.
Seminars: • The Noise of Time • Gilles Deleuze: Larval Subjects, Lost Time • “Exhausting All Possibilities:” An Introduction to Deleuze & Guattari’s Political Philosophy • A Map Through the Ethics: Spinoza’s Geometric Vision of Liberation

Joshua Ramey
Independent Scholar
Areas of Specialization: Contemporary continental philosophy; critical social theory; political economy; political theology; Gilles Deleuze; non-philosophy.
Seminars: • Money and Metaphysics Why the Debt Strike is Not Impossible • Debt Strike Now? • Debt as Original Sin • Production or Enslavement?

Scott Ritner
Temple University
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Areas of Specialization: Political theory; critical theory; Simone Weil; Marxian political thought; political philosophy; political theology. Seminar: Revolutionary Pessimism: On Political Action Without Expectation

Richard Robbins
SUNY Plattsburgh
Professor of Anthropology
Areas of Specialization: global problems, utopian societies, Indigenous peoples of North America, comparative religion, and activist anthropology.
Seminar: Debt Strike Now?

Clelia O. Rodríguez
University of Toronto
Seeds of Change
Areas of Specialization: Pedagogies of liberation and resistance; decolonizing academia; politics of research and methodology critical race theories; cultural and literary theories; critical writing and thinking; discourses of power; Spanish as a second Language; literary production of Spanish-speaking writers Seminar: Pedagogies Under Microscopes

Gabriel Rockhill
Villanova University
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Areas of Specialization: Modern and contemporary philosophy; social and political thought; aesthetics; social theory; cultural history and historiography; literary and film theory; ethics; psychoanalysis.
Seminars: • Contemporary French Philosophy: A Primer • Aesthetics: Toward a Radical History • Why Marx Matters

Pierce Salguero
Penn State, Abington College
Associate Professor of Asian Studies
Areas of Specialization: History of medicine; Buddhist studies; Asian religions; cultural exchange; Thai massage.
Seminar: Speculum of Pain: Buddhism on Illness

Ken Scriboni
Graduate student in Comparative Literature
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Areas of Specialization: Italian literature; Italo Calvino; “down with the Buddhist dharma; a believer in the promises of communism, an Italian teacher, an ex-food-and-beverage-industry worker, and an apprentice of dialectical materialism.”
Seminar: Cospiration: Breathing, Poetry, and Making Atmosphere.

Devin Singh
Dartmouth College
Associate Professor of Religion
Areas of Specialization: religion, philosophy, ethics, organizational dynamics, and the connections among religion, economics, and politics.
Seminar: Debt Strike Now?

Natalia Smirnov
Writer, Researcher, Learning Experience Designer.
Areas of Specialization: Prefigurative pedagogy, post-capitalism, play as liberation. Groups: Ludic Liberation Lab. Editor: REFUSE: A Journal of Iconoclasms

Judith Suissa
Professor of Philosophy of Education UCL Institute of Education, London, UK
Areas of Specialization: Political and moral philosophy, with a focus on anarchist theory; questions of social justice; radical and libertarian educational traditions; utopian theory; the role of the state, and the parent-child relationship.
Seminar: Learning in the Crisis: On Rediscovering “the Social” in the Midst of a Pandemic

Anthony Paul Smith
La Salle University
Associate Professor of Philosophical Theology
Areas of Specialization: continental philosophy; non-philosophy; philosophical theology; religious studies; scientific ecology.
Seminar: Alienation and Its Antidotes: On the Thought of François Laruelle

AK Thompson
Ithaca College
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Areas of Specialization: Walter Benjamin; social movements and social change; social theory; activism; politics; aesthetics; anti-capitalism. Seminars: • The Culture of Revolt • Black Bloc/White Riot • Confronting the Demobilizing Wall of Uncertainty

Kevin Tucker
Black and Green Press
Wild Resistance Journal
Primal Anarchy Podcast
Areas of Specialization: Primal anarchism; the nature of colonialism and extractivism in expanding civilization; trauma of genocidal and ecocidal campaigns; the impacts of domestication.
Seminar: Narratives With Consequences: Storytelling Animals in a Colonized World

Glenn Wallis
Incite Seminars
Linktree
Areas of Specialization: Buddhism; non-buddhism; non-philosophy; critical educational theory; anarchism; ideological critique; ritual studies; contemplative theory and practice. Seminars:
• Critical Introduction to Buddhist Thought
• Philosophical Concepts for Thinking
• Buddhism in the Age of Trump
• Meditation: Self and Society
• Is This How it Ends: On Human Stupidity and the Meagre Promise of the Epoché
• Darkness
• Unlearning: Radical Education Theory
• Buddhism in Ruin
• For Education: The College Classroom as Concrete Utopia
• Buddhism: What Can It Offer Us Today?
• Non-Buddhist Redescription: Workshop
• Radical Education Workshop
• Darkness and Its Discontents
• A Strange Subject
• A Strange Subject: Participant Workshop
• A Strange Subject: X-Fiction
• Principles of Non-Philosophy: Wresting Vital Potentialities of Humans“

Zack Walsh
One Project
Areas of Specialization: process studies; contemplative studies; engaged Buddhism; critical theory; radical ecology; post-capitalism; and China.
Seminar: Critical and Contemplative Pedagogies for Eco-Justice

Alexander Wilson
Institute of Research and Innovation, Paris, France
Areas of Specialization: philosophy of science, technology, and aesthetics conversing with cultural studies, environmental humanities, art, and media theory.
Seminar: How We Remained Human: Posthumans, the Technosphere, and the Selfish Meme