Content:

Join us to welcome Ash Bohrer and Eman Abdelhadi to launch Ash Bohrer's new groundbreaking new book, Capitalism and Confinement.

A dynamic system of perpetual movement, capitalism is paradoxically dependent on means of confinement—in land, labor, and life. Goods, capital, and people move around the world faster and over greater distances than ever before. But capitalism’s voracious expansion violently imposes confinement at every turn in the form of border walls, prisons, police, and property lines. Our lives are constricted in more subtle ways as well, through wages, the state, and social reproduction. Capitalism and Confinement examines why confinement seems to be intensifying, who benefits, and what we can do about it.

A.J. Bohrer is a theorist, activist, and translator based in Chicago. Their first book, Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism (Transcript Verlag, 2019) was short-listed for the Deutscher Prize and has been translated into Spanish (Verso Libros 2025) and Greek (Ektos Grammis 2026). Their work has appeared in dozens of publications including Al Jazeera, In These Times, Truthout, as well as in academic journals like Historical Materialism, Hypatia, and Philosophy Today. Their next book, We Don’t Buy It: A Global History of Boycott, is forthcoming from Ecco Books.

Eman Abdelhadi is a Chicago-based scholar, organizer, and writer. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and author of the forthcoming Impossible Futures: Why Women Leave Muslim Communities (University of Chicago Press). With M.E. O'Brien, she co-edited the forthcoming science fiction anthology When We Win: Dispatches from Revolutionary Futures (Haymarket Press, June 2027) and co-authored the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). Together they also co-edit the revolutionary fiction website Project 2052. Her scholarship, poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. A long-time organizer, she is currently active in Scholars for Justice, Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine, and the AAUP at the University of Chicago.