Radical Imagination: Is Another World Possible? Silvia Federici and Kshama Sawant in Conversation with Miriam Ticktin and Ujju Aggarwal
Both neoliberals and the extreme Right have demonstrated consistent endurance in imagining and planning new worlds—and they have done this globally. How are we, as leftists, imagining and building the world we need? We will discuss the place of social reproduction, the state, commoning, and think about the different struggles around the world that are inspiring and enacting revolutionary possibilities.
Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, writer, and teacher. In 1972 she was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Wages for Housework campaign internationally. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti–death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and educational systems. From 1987 to 2005 she taught international studies, women studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons.
Kshama Sawant is a revolutionary socialist and co-founder of Workers Strike Back. She was the lone socialist on the Seattle City Council for a decade and won four elections. She used her office to lead movements to win the nation’s highest minimum wage and the Amazon Tax on wealthy corporations to fund affordable housing. Kshama ran as an independent antiwar socialist in the August 2026 primary election and won the highest-ever vote for an openly Marxist candidate for the US Congress.
Miriam Ticktin is Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center. She has held positions at the New School for Social Research, University of Michigan, and at Columbia University, and she has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, and an invited visiting professor at the EHESS in Paris. She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities, and most recently, she has written about the idea of a decolonial feminist commons. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (University of California Press, 2012), and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Duke University Press, 2010). Her latest book is Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World (University of Chicago Press, 2025). She is currently working on her next book, Containment and Commoning: From Bordered Worlds to Collective Life. Ticktin writes in public venues such as Truthout, LARB and Open Democracy, and organizes with migrant social justice groups in the US and in France.
Ujju Aggarwal is trained as a community organizer, popular educator, and cultural anthropologist. She is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology & Experiential Learning at The New School. Her research centers on education as a practice of freedom and as a site of containment, and engages questions of public infrastructures, urban education, governance, and critical race studies. Her first book, Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education (University of Minnesota Press,2024) received the American Education Studies Association Critics’ Choice Book Award (2025). Ujju also brings a long history of work as a community organizer and popular educator. For over two decades, she has worked to build organizations that advance educational justice, immigrants’ rights, abolition and transformative justice as well as projects at the intersection of art, popular education, and adult literacy. Her work has appeared in popular outlets, scholarly journals, and edited volumes, and she has also co-led participatory and community-engaged research projects with social justice organizations. Ujju currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Parent Leadership Project (Bloomingdale Family Head Start Center, PLP), the Public Scholarship Practice Space (CUNY Graduate Center), and PARCEO (Participatory Action-Research Center for Education, Organizing).
This event is organized by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, the Left Education Project/Left Forum, and Democracy at Work. This event is free and open to the public, with a suggested donation to support the work of the organizing institutions.
