From the depths of the Rikers Island penal complex, inside the alt-right underground and the carnival of Trump rallies, and in the line of fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020...

We're delighted to be hosting a spirited discussion of "rebellion, reaction, and morbid symptoms" with Chicago-based author and agitator Jarrod Shanahan, joined in conversation by public intellectual Eman Abdelhadi.

Jarrod's recent essay collection, Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help, brings together a decade of reflections on recent US struggles—Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion—alongside accounts of the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, an apocalyptic shift in popular culture, to paint a dense and complex portrait of a decade of protracted social crisis. Jarrod Shanahan reports from the ground.

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Jarrod Shanahan is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage (Verso, 2022); coauthor of States of Incarceration (Field Notes, 2022), City Time (NYU Press, 2025), and Skyscraper Jails (Haymarket, 2025); and editor of Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity, a Noel Ignatiev reader (Verso, 2022). He works as an associate professor of criminal justice at Governors State University.

Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072.