Writing and Resistance: Robert Jones Jr. & Kiese Laymon
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Writing and Resistance” here
In this workshop, writers Robert Jones Jr. and Kiese Laymon will join us for a generative conversation on the roles and responsibilities of writers undertaking the work of resistance, truth-telling, and community care. The conversation will be moderated by Deesha Philyaw and will include a brief audience Q&A.
Robert Jones, Jr. (formerly known as “Son of Baldwin”) is a Brooklyn-based writer and public speaker. He is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, The Prophets, which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction, and was named one of “The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature” by The New York Times.
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
Deesha Philyaw is the author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon).
Revolutionary Prison Poetry
Step 1: Donate to Da3m Support here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Revolutionary Prison Poetry” here
From Egypt to El Salvador to the so-called "US," captured revolutionaries have written poetry in defiance of the state's attempt to bury their spirit, and to connect with the communities they have been separated from.
In this workshop, we will read poems written in prison by militant organisers, write our own poems through prompts based off of theirs, and consider the lessons these prisoners offer us for building and sustaining movements with teeth.
We will end by writing messages of support to the current cohort of UK anti-zionist and abolitionist political prisoners that the british state has locked up in an attempt to scare us back into ineffective forms of protest. Let's build a movement worthy of their sacrifices! Free them all!
The workshop will be 2 hours, with a ten minute comfort break. There will be no obligation to read aloud what you have written on the workshop.
Radical Imaginaries for Black Girl Liberation
Step 1: Donate to Sameer here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Radical Imaginaries for Black Girl Liberation” here
This workshop explores how Black girls have always imagined freedom outside of systems that were never built for them. Through the lens of Black feminist thought, speculative fiction, and grassroots histories, we’ll dig into the radical visions that Black girls create in the face of violence, erasure, and control. Participants will engage with texts, art, and oral histories to imagine liberatory futures and build solidarity with struggles for Palestinian freedom.
Morgan Holloman is a community organizer, mom, and founder of Black Girls Know Best, a black feminist cultural and community organization supporting the holistic wellness, safekeeping and education of black girls and gnc young people. As a daughter of the south and a student of liberation movements, she’s committed to organizing for a Free Palestine, Congo, Sudan and a word where all oppressed peoples are free and well.
On Blackmail and Other Settler Colonial Technologies in Occupied Palestine
Step 1: Donate to Sameer here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “On Blackmail and Other Settler Colonial Technologies in Occupied Palestine” here
In this workshop, scholar and organizer Khalil will discuss technologies of control, discipline and surveillance in the context of occupied Palestine, as well as their implications for other colonial contexts.
Expanding on the established discourses of "pinkwashing" in the context of the israeli occupation, Khalil will discuss the use of blackmail as a settler-colonial technology specifically wielded against queer, disabled, and other minority groups within Palestine.
Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and draw connections between technology and settler colonialism in their day to day observations and experiences, as well as discuss how we can fight back against these carceral infrastructures in practical ways.
Khalil is a Moroccan-French artist and PhD candidate in Security, Conflict, and Human Rights at the University of Exeter researching "Blackmail, Framing, and Technological Practices" in the Palestinian context. Khalil's research seeks to highlight the continued use of blackmail in Israeli settler-colonialism as a technique of control and is situated at the intersection of settler colonial studies, queer studies and critical security studies, and seeks to utilize investigative aesthetics (visuality and visualization) as a means’ of producing knowledge.
When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners
Step 1: Donate to Sameer here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “When Only God Can See” here
In this workshop, Dr. Asim Qureshi and Dr. Walaa Quisay will discuss the experiences of Muslim political prisoners held in Egypt as well as in Guantanamo Bay and other detention black sites in the context of the Global War on Terror.
In the context of imprisonment, faith for Muslim prisoners becomes more than a spiritual connection to God; it is also a weapon of resistance and political contestation against state authorities and the prison system at large.
Participants will be invited to ask questions and make connections to our current political context and the increased repression against people everywhere who are criminalized by US empire.
Be sure to also purchase When Only God Can See from our bookstore, where all proceeds are donated to the Sameer Project.
Dr. Walaa Quisay is a cultural anthropologist and scholar of religion at the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. She researches the carceral practices and theologies, subject formations, and meaning-making practices of Muslim communities.
Dr. Asim Qureshi is the Research Director at the advocacy group CAGE Intl, and since 2003 has specialized in investigating the impact of counterterrorism practices worldwide. Since 2009, he has been advising legal teams involved in defending terrorism trials in the US and in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Organizing with Political Prisoners 101
Step 1: Donate to José here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Organizing with Political Prisoners” here
In this workshop, members of the Xinachtli Freedom Campaign will discuss their organizing work with Xinachtli, a political prisoner, artist and Chicano revolutionary who has been unjustly held in solitary confinement for over 20 years. They will share experiences and advice on how to organize with U.S. political prisoners as well as the importance of centering them in broader movement work.
Drawing on lessons from the New Afrikan Independence movement as well as the Palestinian National Liberation struggle, the Xinachtli Freedom Campaign will discuss the role that political prisoners have played historically and presently as leaders in our movement as well as in their own struggles for liberation.
As more of our comrades are captured each day, it is the duty of those of us who remain outside the prison walls to organize alongside them for their release, and to situate their fight for freedom as integral to the broader struggle against state repression that targets all working class and colonized people.
Maria is a teacher, community organizer, historian, and writer. Born in Mexico and raised in Texas, Maria has experienced the violence of the state’s racist government, leading to her involvement in political education, community organizing, and ultimately, political prisoners’ campaigns.
Jazz is a public health researcher, community organizer, writer, and poet. A lifelong Texan, they began organizing in elementary school against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and have since continued to struggle against U.S. imperialism, racial capitalism, and the oppression of all colonized people—from the southern border to Palestine.
Writing Alongside the Nonhuman
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Writing Alongside the Nonhuman” here
It is one thing to write about animals, plants, and other non-human beings, but what would it look like to write with them? In this workshop, we will explore how we can write towards a better understanding of non-human experiences while still respecting the gap between us. We will unpack anthropomorphism and imagine an ethics for our writing that extends beyond empathy, discussing work from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, and others.
Sabrina Imbler is a staff writer at Defector, a worker-owned site, where they cover creatures and the natural world. Their first full-length book, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures (Little, Brown, 2022), won a Los Angeles Times book prize in science and technology. Their chapbook Dyke (Geology), was published by Black Lawrence Press, and selected for the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Program. Sabrina lives in Brooklyn.
Touring the Abyss: Unless and Care in the University
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Touring the Abyss” here
We in the university live and work in a machine that makes us unwell while not allowing us to be unwell, punishes us for being unwell and asks us to punish others for being unwell so that we can prove we are well.
Dr. Mimi Khúc invites us to confront unwellness in the university together in a discussion of her book, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, which traces the contemporary mental health crisis and its intersection with "compulsory wellness," the pressure to pretend we are always ok.
In response, Dr. Khúc offers a pedagogy of unwellness—the recognition that we are all differentially unwell and thus all in need of radical care. Join us to explore what a pedagogy of unwellness reveals for our university community and how we might begin to build the structures of care that we need.
If you are a student, staff, or faculty who would like to bring this workshop to your university, please get in touch with us! We are working with university-affiliated people to bring this workshop into classrooms, reading groups, programs, and student organizations, especially those who have access to institutional funds that can be funneled into urgent campaigns for the Sameer Project.
Dr. Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the creator of the acclaimed mental health projects Open in Emergency and the Asian American Tarot, and the author of dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, a deep dive into the depths of Asian American unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university, and an exploration of new approaches to building collective care. She is currently coping with the terror of these times by collecting cats.
Sticking Together in Tough Times
Step 1: Donate to Wesam Water Project here (suggested $40)
Step 2: Register for “Sticking Together in Tough Times” here
We are all feeling the stresses of state repression, worsening living conditions, and terrifying threats to our well-being and others.’
In times like these, relationships are often strained, people feel impatient, scared, distrustful, and angry and it can come out in our groups and between organizers. Facing ecocide and fascism, we need each other more than ever, to care for each other and fight back.
This workshop will identify some common patterns of emotional activation and conflict that emerge in political organizing, and provide tools for how we can work with them in ourselves, with friends, and in our groups so that we can hold each other with care.
Dean Spade has been working in movements for queer and trans liberation, anti-militarism, and police and prison abolition for the past 25 years. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, and Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) as well as the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!” His new book is Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up and Raise Hell Together, and he is the host of a new podcast with the same name.
Intro to Easy, No-Till Gardening
Step 1: Donate to Thamra here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Intro to Easy, No-Till Gardening” here
In this online workshop, Will from Barbarian Farm and the Institute of Barbarian Books will talk about the meaning (and challenges) of small-scale farming to the cultivation of spaces for radical politics in rural Japan.
In addition to walking participants through an easy to implement method of no-till farming that he has been experimenting with for the last few years, he will reflect on the short visit that he made to Om Sleiman farm in Bil’in, Palestine and how it has shaped his views on farm sovereignty struggles in Japan.
Finally, he will discuss the relationship between Barbarian Farms and the Institute of Barbarian Books, which is an independent print shop, small publisher, and library that has played an important role in building pro-Palestinian, anti-zionist community in Hiroshima, Japan.
Writing Toward Collective Kinship Through Sade Songs
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Writing Toward Collective Kinship” here
How do we cherish the day when empire tries to make us all kings of sorrow? This generative writing workshop invites participants to embrace vulnerability in service to being by each other’s sides. Let the music of Sade alchemize rage into reminders of ways we can hang on to our love for one another through every attack on each kiss of life.
Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi is a Black mother who spends time with forests and waters on unceded lands of the T’Sou-ke Nation. Her work strives to instigate action in service to world-building, social change, and collaboration. Her first full-length poetry collection, DREAMS FOR EARTH, arrives this fall from Deep Vellum.
Little Palestine Walking Tour
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Little Palestine Walking Tour” here
Join Workshops4Gaza, Samar Hussaini, and members of SOMA for Palestine and SOMA Collective for Palestine for an in-person walking tour of “Little Palestine” in Paterson, New Jersey where we will explore local shops, restaurants, bakeries to learn about the culture and community of one of largest Palestinian communities in the United States and talk with local community members.
The final stop of the walking tour will be a local Palestinian grocery store, where participants will be given a handout with several traditional Palestinian recipes and a shopping list of ingredients to buy if they wish.
The walking tour will run approximately four hours in total and is intended for participants aged 12 and above.
Participants should arrange their own transportation to Paterson, NJ, and meeting point will be shared upon registration. They should also bring $40 cash or Venmo to cover the cost of food.
Samar Hussaini is a Palestinian artist based in New Jersey, known for her
captivating artwork that blends various layers of mediums and techniques including traditional Tatreez embroidery and Palestinian patterns. Her work has been showcased in galleries, exhibits and shows around the world.
Samar will be joined by members of SOMA for Palestine and SOMA Collective for Palestine, a coalition of individuals and groups who live in South Orange and Maplewood, New Jersey, and engage in political education and community organizing in service of a liberated Palestine.
Medical BDS: On Boycotting Israeli Pharmaceuticals
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Medical BDS: On Boycotting Israeli Pharmaceuticals” here
In this workshop, representatives from the Boycott Teva USA campaign will discuss the role of Israeli pharmaceutical manufacturing in medical apartheid and genocide in Palestine, focusing on the generic medication manufacturer Teva Pharmaceuticals.
Attendees will learn how to participate in the Teva boycott and work with their pharmacies ensure their prescriptions are non-Teva brand. Workshop hosts will share materials, strategies and educational resources on how to participate in the boycott and how to launch this campaign from anywhere.
Boycott Teva is the BDS arm of Healthcare Workers for Palestine, a collective of healthcare workers throughout the US committed to fighting the Israeli genocide of Palestine. We work with the original BDS Movement to support their Boycott Teva initiative. We are committed to a decolonized and liberated Palestine, an end to colonialism and Zionism, and economic and racial justice for all.
Poetry for the People: A 6-Session Writing Workshop
Step 1: Donate to Khalil’s family here (sliding scale $40-$100).
Step 2: Register for “Poetry for the People” here.
This writer's workshop series offers a respite for reengagement and rediscovery of our internal monologues; a space to unplug from the noise to (re)learn how to listen deeply to ourselves and the world through poetry and prose. Participants will read the works of Leanne Simpson, Fady Joudah, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Mohammad El-Kurd, and many others across across themes of identity, homeland, decolonialism, reclamation, indigeneity, and transformation.
Across six 2-hour sessions, participants can expect a no-frills, rigorous environment where we will read, discuss, and critically engage with powerful texts meant to break us open. Expect plenty of individual and group writing using different styles and structures of creative writing, including responsive poetry, ekphrastic poetry, concrete poetry, elegies, odes, song lyrics, and improv.
Shaira Chaer is a multi-hyphenate creative born and raised on unceded Lenape land in the Bronx, New York. Their visual art, research and writing practices are informed by blending the living archive, autoethnography, queer radical futurity and the wisdom of their ancestors across Kiskeya-Ayiti and the Levant.
Cryptids and Creatures: Mythology in Poetry
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Cryptids and Creatures” here
What role do cryptids and creatures like the Minotaur, the Mapinguari, or the Little Mermaid play in a poem? What do they allow writers to communicate about the myriad costs of being in this world characterized by colonial violence and slavery?
This workshop engages works by poets like Traci Brimhall, Natalie Diaz, and Summer Farah, whose mythical creatures unsettle understandings of loneliness, intimacy, sacrifice, and our relationships between past and present.
This will be an interactive space, where participants will write and share poems as cryptozoologists, architects, and memory workers. This workshop benefits the Sameer Project's North Gaza campaign.
Maya Salameh is the author of HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in The Offing, Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, AGNI, Mizna, and the LA Times, among others. She can be found at @mayaslmh or mayasalameh.com.
Storytelling Out of Your People and For Your People
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Storytelling Out of Your People” here
Join novelist Chantal James in a generative workshop for fiction writers of all levels to think about writing in the role of griot or cultural worker--one who owes something to the community they come from and who writes out of that community.
Chantal will share from and discuss her novel NONE BUT THE RIGHTEOUS along with selections from other writers who seek to hold cultural memory in their work. We will discuss what drives us to write out of who we are and where we come from. Writers of all levels can expect to come away with ideas for new work, drafts, and projects to play with.
Chantal James lives in working-class Black Washington, DC, and has been published across genres—as a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and book reviewer—in such venues as The New Republic, Catapult, Paste Magazine, Harvard’s Transition Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, Obsidian, and Callalloo. Her honors include a Fulbright fellowship in creative writing to Morocco. Her 2022 novel NONE BUT THE RIGHTEOUS from Counterpoint Press was one of Kiruks' 10 most anticipated books of its year and a nominee for the John P. Leonard Prize for Best First Book from the National Book Critics Circle.
Memoir and the Missing
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Memoir and the Missing” here
This workshop considers unavailable archives and missing evidence in life writing. How to write what’s not seemingly there, what’s not known or knowable? How do we make memoir from personal and historical absences? Through facilitated discussions, writing exercises, and sharing of resources, we will contemplate the limits of the memoir genre and explore strategies for working through, around, and against its conventions.
Kyo Maclear is the author of Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation (Scribner, 2017), Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets (Scribner, 2023).
Vinh Nguyen is the author of the speculative memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse (Counterpoint, 2025) the academic monograph Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience (UC Press, 2023).
A Furious Blooming: Writing into Personal and Collective Grief
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “A Furious Blooming” here
Grief is a door into a different world where we are never the same. How do we write from these new selves? How can we lean into our writing practice to not only survive the storms of grief, but also the storms that are unleashed in those who we grieve alongside? In this workshop, we will find inspiration from writers who’ve broken through the boundary of the wordlessness to write of their grief.
Bushra Rehman is a writer, teaching artist and cultural activist. Rehman’s latest novel Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion (Flatiron Books, 2022) is a coming-of-age story about growing up Muslim and queer in NYC. Rehman co-edited Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Seal Press, 2019) and is author of the poetry collection Marianna’s Beauty Salon (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018). Her first novel, the dark comedy Corona (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013), was chosen by the NY Public Library as one of its favorite books about NYC. She was awarded the Queens Public Library Award for contribution to literature on Queens and is founder of the community-based workshop ‘Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction.’
Annah, Infinite: Burning Colonial Visual Cultures of Disbelief
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40).
Step 2: Register for “Annah, Infinite” here.
Khairani Barokka's book ANNAH, INFINITE translates a painting of a child into long histories of colonial disbelief with regards to global majority people and non-normative bodyminds. This workshop will be a guided discussion about this speculative nonfiction book's ideas, disability justice, and the ways each reader can take these concepts and apply them to everyday resistance.
Khairani Barokka is a writer and artist from Jakarta, based in London. She holds a PhD by Practice in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, is the author of four acclaimed poetry books, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, and access as translation in her work; among her honours, in 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards, and longlisted for the Loewe/Studio Voltaire Awards. Okka's speculative nonfiction debut, ANNAH, INFINITE, is a translation of a painting from a disability justice perspective, out with Tilted Axis Press in June 2025.
The PFLP and the Japanese Red Army: An Alliance of Militant Liberation and Revolution
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40).
Step 2: Register for “The PFLP and the Japanese Red Army” here.
This workshop will explore the rise of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as the premier Marxist-Leninist faction within the Palestine liberation movement during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly their alliance with the Japanese Red Army (JRA). We will discuss how and why a Japanese student group chose to ally themselves with the PFLP and fight for the liberation of Palestine to a degree not seen by other non-Arab movements. Jeremy will also discuss his research on the history of shared actions between the PFLP and the JRA and how this created a new paradigm for Palestine liberation, while also challenging more moderate factions of the movement.
Jeremy Randall, Ph.D. in History, is the associate director of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He was recently the residential postdoctoral fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut.
He is a historian of leftism in the Middle East with a focus on Palestine as well as leftist critiques of sectarianism and capitalism in postcolonial Lebanon via intellectual and cultural productions.
He is currently preparing a monograph on the alliance between the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine with counterparts in Japan, Europe, and Latin America as an example of internationalism and solidarity with the Palestinian revolution in the 1970s and 1980s.
Stop Cop Cities Everywhere
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Stop Cop Cities Everywhere” here
Join organizers from struggles against cop cities and carceral infrastructures in Atlanta, GA, San Pablo, CA, Charlotte, NC, and New York City to learn about what organizers are doing locally and how you can resist a cop city that might be coming to your city. Following the publication of No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement, this workshop will zoom out to share lessons, insights, and challenges from organizers across the U.S., discussing tactical diversity, organization, and repression of movements--and how we can combat it.
Mon M (she/they) is an organizer at Community Justice Exchange (CJE), who have recently published “If They Build It: Organizing Lessons & Strategies Against Carceral Infrastructure.” Mon was a founding coordinator of the No New Jails Network, a national network of campaigns fighting new jail construction and to close old jails, without expanding supervision and social control.
Juan has been involved in the movement to Stop Cop Campus in the Bay Area since it launched. He currently organizes tenants to protect each other against their landlords and the police in the Bay Area as member of Tenant and Neighborhood Councils.
Micah Herskind is an organizer, writer, and law student who is active in abolitionist movements against police and jail expansion. He is the co-editor of No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement (Haymarket Books, 2025), and has written for publications including New York Magazine, Scalawag, MSNBC, Prism, Teen Vogue, and Race & Class.
Writing Liberatory Futures
Step 1: Donate to Gazan refugees in Cairo (sugg. donation $40)
Venmo @honeylocust1312 with the note “groceries”
Step 2: Register for “Writing Liberatory Futures” here
What if we won? Premised on the belief that social movements need to imagine liberation in order to work toward it, this workshop will lead participants through writing liberatory speculative fiction in a near future. We will discuss different short story structures and create characters and story arcs collectively.
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, organizer and writer based in Chicago. 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. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is a columnist at In These Times magazine where she writes on the Palestine Liberation movement and American politics. Eman organizes with the Salon Kawakib collective, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at the University of Chicago, Scholars for Social Justice and other formations.
Pedagogy in Pandemic Times
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Pedagogy in Pandemic Times” here
This workshop offers practical tools and strategies for adult educators of all kinds interested in the transformative potential of online teaching. How can we steward and hold trauma-informed learning communities without the sensory input of an in-person space?
What does anti-colonial education mean in a "landless" modality that relies on global and local infrastructures of extraction, exploitation and death? Together, we will consider the radical possibilities and profound dangers of online education in times of mass disablement, pandemic erasure, technofascist surveillance, and climate catastrophe.
griffin epstein (they/them) is an educator, researcher, poet and musician in Tkaronto who has been building community and organizing for Mad liberation, disability justice, and harm reduction for 15+ years. As a white settler living uninvited on Haudenosaunee, Wendat, and Mississauga land, they aspire to be accountable to their treaty responsibilities. Since 2020, they have been running community arts programs, stewarding participatory action research and teaching in the post-secondary system exclusively online.
Students Not Soldiers: Demilitarizing Our Schools and Communities
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Students Not Soldiers” here
In this workshop, organizers from the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD) and Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO) in San Diego will share about their long-standing struggle of resisting militarism and military recruitment in schools and their communities.
COMD and Project YANO have fought for decades against the military’s predatory recruitment tactics. In the 2000s, they were part of the San Diego Education Not Arms Coalition that successfully campaigned to remove JROTC shooting ranges from San Diego schools. Since then, they have continued to fight to restrict JROTC on campuses and other facets of militarism that prey on their communities.
In this moment of hyper-militarization and authoritarianism, their work is crucial to making young people aware of how, as recruits, they could be used to carry out deportations, suppress dissent and terrorize communities, and enforce Trump’s threats to intervene militarily in places like Gaza, Panama, Mexico, and cities across the US.
Join us to learn about COMD and Project YANO's past and present struggles in San Diego, and discuss strategies for combating militarism in schools and communities where you are.
Oren Robinson is a tech worker, learner and educator based in Kumeyaay land (San Diego). Oren serves as program coordinator at Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD), and its sister organization, Project on Youth and Non-military Opportunities (Project YANO).
Davíd Morales is an educator and counter-recruitment activist rooted in San Diego. Since high school, he has organized with COMD and Project YANO to challenge the U.S. military’s predatory recruitment of racialized and working-class youth. His work is informed and inspired by global struggles against empire and militarism.
Ana Yelí Ruiz is a research analyst and activist with roots in Mexico and raised in the midwest. At 18 she joined the Marine Corps where she completed 4 years of active duty and walked away with military sexual trauma (MST). She currently resides in Chicago, IL and practices research and operations on county courts. She volunteers with COMD and Project YANO in her free time.
Kanafani and the Spectre of Palestinian Statehood
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Kanafani and the Spectre of Palestinian Statehood” here
In this workshop, scholar and translator Hazem Jamjoum will offer a genealogy of the project of Palestinian statehood through the work of Ghassan Kanafani, focusing in particular on The Revolution of 1936-1939 as well as "The Specter of the Palestinian State," an article Kanafani wrote around the same time.
Hazem will discuss the process of translating Kanafani's text into English, presenting an in-depth overview of how the concept of Palestinian statehood has fit into Zionist colonial strategies since Kanafani's death, as well as how his analysis helps us understand the current moment. Participants will be asked to read both texts beforehand and arrive ready to engage and discuss.
Hazem Jamjoum is an educator, archivist and translator living in London. He is the editorial lead of the newly established publishing house Safarjal Press.
Pedagogy of the Dysphoric
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40).
Step 2: Register for “Pedagogy of the Dysphoric” here.
This workshop is for teachers, writers, and artists who have been depleted of connection to their bodies, imaginations, and voices.
Dysphoria describes the feelings of separation, grief, anxiety and disembodiment plaguing most people today attempting to live ethically and with joy under capitalism, changing climates, multiple genocides, and a rise in global nationalism.
How to embody learning when the ground, the body, is dysphoric? When it resists embodiment? How can sensuality and connection encourage learning when the present moment is unbearable?
This workshop will be a horizontal space in which mindfulness and reflection, and somatic exercises in combination with writing prompts and discussions will encourage participants to reflect on how their teaching and learning can engage with dysphoria.
Callum Angus is a writer, editor, and publisher of smoke and mold, a literary journal invested in the narrative possibilities trans lives bring to our changing nature-culture. His first story collection, A Natural History of Transition, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and an Oregon Book Award. His work has appeared in many publications, and he writes the newsletter Sex Weather Climate Death, monthly(ish) meditations on a body and the planet in transition. Based in Portland, Oregon, he teaches independent workshops online & through Corporeal Writing.
LA Warman is a poet, death doula, and principal of the independent Warman School. She is the author of the poetry collection Dust, and the erotic novella Whore Foods, which won a Lambda Literary Award.
Craft Day for Gaza: Basics of embroidery
Step 1: Donate to the Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40).
Step 2: Register for “Craft Day for Gaza: Basics of Embroidery” here.
This workshop will cover basic embroidery skills and teach a number of beginner stitches with all supplies provided. Participants will learn using a sampler in the shape of the Palestinian flag, which they will be able to frame in a hoop and take home. After the workshop, participants will have enough knowledge to continue to craft embroidery pieces on their own. The project will take most folks less than the allotted time - feel free to arrive late, leave early, or hang out with us until the end!
All materials will be provided. This event will be indoors in a fully accessible building. KN95 or N95 masks are required and provided as well.
Noa Samson (they/them) is a NYC-based embroidery artist who has been hand-stitching for 7 years. Their specialty work includes thread painting and stop motion embroidery animation. They are the founder of Queer Craft Club, a covid-conscious meetup group that has hosted over 70 events since 2021.
Light from Deep Under
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)
Step 2: Register for “Light from Deep Under” here
We are honored to host a special online reading and discussion of a powerful new poetry collection written by Shukri Abu Baker, a Palestinian political prisoner who has spent the last 17 years unjustly incarcerated, and who remains behind bars today.
His daughter, Nida Abu Baker, a nationally known speaker and advocate, will read and share select poems from her father’s collection while also speaking about the Holy Land Foundation (then and now) along with reflections on her father’s life behind bars.
Nida will also speak about how this book became her father’s way of coping and surviving, as well as his way of sharing his message with the world. These poems are more than words; they are resistance, memory, and love in their rawest form.
Nida will be joined in conversation by scholar and writer Zarefah Baroud. Join us for an evening of truth, art, and the enduring power of the human spirit as we reflect on Nida’s father’s words and raise funds to support Palestinians in Gaza
Nida Abu Baker is a nationally recognized speaker and advocate. Bold, driven, and unapologetically creative, she channels the fire of being a Palestinian political prisoner’s daughter into a force for justice. Now a nationally known speaker and advocate, her voice carries the weight of lived experience and the power to move hearts. Her story weaves resilience, activism, and purpose into everything she does. She’s dedicated her life to making sure her father’s voice reaches far beyond the prison walls built to silence him.
Zarefah Baroud is a PhD Candidate at the University of Exeter’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, where her research examines the application of carcerality under colonial and settler-colonial formations in Palestine. Baroud’s writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, Mondoweiss, Middle East Monitor, CounterPunch, The Palestine Chronicle, and other prominent outlets.
Fund Abortion Not War
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40).
Step 2: Register for “Fund Abortion Not War” here.
In this workshop, three reproductive healthcare providers who have been silenced in their workplaces for speaking out about the Palestinian liberation struggle will discuss what it means to practice medicine ethically in the midst of imperial wars.
Fund Abortion Not War is a campaign and intervention of the repro world that seeks to connect the global anti imperial movement to the movement for reproductive autonomy: <https://fundabortionnotwar.org>
Rachna Vanjani (they/them) is a physician, reproductive justice advocate & community organizer whose work focuses on upholding the tenants of reproductive justice and dismantling systems of oppression. they are an all-trimester abortion provider & birth worker currently focused on the integration of indigenous medicine with their allopathic training to create a supportive environment of healing and liberation for patients.
Dr. Sabrina Das is an OBGYN specialising in high-risk pregnancy, at Imperial College Healthcare in London, UK. She is also an abortion surgeon with Marie Stopes International and is currently the UK Harkness Fellow 24/25, based out of New York and being hosted by CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Healthcare Policy, studying the abortion access landscape in Post Roe USA. She was volunteering in Gaza in March 2025, before and after the ceasefire ended.
Umaymah Mohammad is a Palestinian organizer, artist, and MD/PhD candidate in Sociology with over a decade of experience building movements for justice. Her work spans grassroots mobilization, arts-based organizing, and the development of organizational infrastructures at the national level. She has organized against state violence in its many forms, including the colonization of Palestine and anti-Muslim racism. Currently, her doctoral research centers on decolonial medicine, health justice, abolition, and Palestinian freedom—grounded in a vision for collective liberation.
Pan-Africanists for Palestine
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40).
Step 2: Register for “Pan-Africanists for Palestine” here.
This workshop will identify and analyze the support of 20th-century Pan-Africanists like Kwame Ture, Malcolm X, and Walter Rodney for Palestinian liberation. Together we will explore the ways Pan-African thinkers mobilized solidarity, political education, and writings to defend Palestinian liberation and self-determination and linked the fate of Africa with that of Palestine.
Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is a professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University and a member of Black Alliance for Peace.
Dr. Layla Brown Layla Brown is a professor of Anthropology at Northeastern University and a member of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party- GC.
Dr. CBS and Layla are the hosts of Life Study Revolution podcast about the realities of life, the importance of study, and the politics of revolution.
Proposals for Life Against the Fourth World War
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40).
Step 2: Register for “Proposals for Life Against the Fourth World War” here.
According to the Zapatistas, the 4th World War is underway, a war against humanity. What constitutes this war? What are its defining characteristics? In this workshop, renowned journalist Raul Zibechi will provide an overview of the Zapatistas' framing of the 4th World War. We will also cover the ways in which pueblos or peoples throughout Latin America and forging new pathways for life in the face of the 4th world war.
Raúl Zibechi is an Uruguayan writer, popular educator, and journalist. He writes for La Jornada, Desinformémonos, and NACLA Report on the Americas, among other outlets. Zibechi has published numerous books, including Dispersing Power, Territories in Resistance, and Constructing Worlds Otherwise.
Parables and Palestine
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40).
Step 2: Register for “Parables and Palestine” here.
This workshop is designed to analyze and apply Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents to the Palestinian liberation struggle and our daily lives. We will begin by mapping the context of the original parables of Jesus, then Octavia's parables and their parallels with Palestine, then each person will reflect on which parables resonate the most with them.
We will end with each applying our selected parable and "The Social Change Ecosystem Map," by Building Movement Project and Deepa Iyer to our lives for sustainable political organizing. Attendees should plan to read Octavia Butler's two parables before attending.
Tramaine Suubi is a multilingual writer, editor, and teacher from Kampala. They are a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and have published creative writing in over fifteen literary anthologies, magazines, journals, and reviews. They are the author of phases (Amistad, 2025). Tramaine works towards the total liberation of all oppressed people by any means necessary.
Forgotten Pages from the History of the Palestinian Resistance
Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $60)
Step 2: Register for “Forgotten Pages from the History of the Palestinian Resistance” here
Over the course of three sessions (June 14, 15, & 21), this workshop will explore some of the lesser known episodes of the history of the Palestinian Resistance.
The first session will explore the early struggles that the Ottoman Palestinians and Arabs waged against the Zionist project as early as the first Zionist settlement, recognizing how the years 1878-1920 shaped the contemporary Palestinian struggle.
The second session will explore the history of Fateh's "Student Brigades," its trajectory in the "Jarmaq Battalion" and later the Islamic Jihad Brigades.
And the final session will focus on the internationalist dimension of the Palestinian struggle. While emphasizing the imperialist nature of the Zionist movement (relying mainly on Kanfani's study of the 1936 uprising) the session will revisit the history of the "external operations" and the careers of internationalist individuals and groups that dedicated their lives to the Palestinian aspect of the anti-imperialist struggle.
Ahmed Diaa Dardir is the co-founder of the Institute for De-Colonising Theory (IDCtheory); he holds a PhD in Middle East Studies from Columbia University.
Majd Khalid Darwish is an instructor, researcher, and editor at IDCtheory; he holds an MA in International Law from SOAS.
Ameed Faleh is a researcher at IDCtheory, and a fellow with the Good Shepherd Collective; he is a graduating senior at al-Quds Bard.