Woodbine

Woodbine Woodbine is an experimental hub for developing the skills, practices, and tools needed to build autonomy. https://www.patreon.com/woodbine

“The beginning and the end are common.” –Heraclitus, Fragment 103

Woodbine is an experimental hub for developing the skills, practices, and tools for building autonomy. We host workshops, lectures, discussions, and serve as a meeting and organizing space.

Please join the Woodbine Research Group next Tuesday the 30th as we present the fourth in our series roundtables, with t...
06/23/2026

Please join the Woodbine Research Group next Tuesday the 30th as we present the fourth in our series roundtables, with this edition on Migration and Cosmopolitanism. We’re hosting this event as part of The Peoples Want’s global call, Mujawara: Weaving a Revolutionary Neighbouring Beyond Borders. Doors at 6pm, event at 6:30pm.

Since Donald Trump’s first election in 2016 the question of migration has become central to the politics of Western Europe and the United States. Partly determined by ongoing trends – including climate migration, the Syrian Civil War, and the broader post-Arab Spring strife in the Middle East – this “problem” is also a reflection of increasing internal tensions around inequality, identity, state capacity, and belonging. The resulting discussion is sharply polarized between an increasingly nativist and authoritarian discourse on the right, and an insurgent and defensive posture on the left. Both are increasingly biopolitical and tactical. One side speaks of needing to expel bodies to maintain the integrity of the body politic; the other side of the need to defend life against state aggression. Yet the question of migration and asylum has a dimension beyond this, raising essential questions about political identity: Who are we? Who is our ‘people’? Where do we ‘belong’?

The predominant left answer to this question has been cosmopolitan, encapsulated in the famous slogan from the Communist Manifesto, “The workingmen of the world have no country”. But this sounds incredibly utopian in present circumstances. Despite the slogan of ‘open borders’, even the most progressive proposals seem to amount to little more than combating the cruelest effects of the status quo. So what should our positive horizon be? Is it possible to have a meaningful cosmopolitan identity in a world of closing borders, resource conflicts, and anti-migration sentiment? Or is it the case that, as British Prime Minister Theresa May put it, “to be a citizen of the world is to be a citizen of nowhere”?

In this roundtable, the Woodbine Research Group and a member of The Peoples Want will present a range of perspectives on the question of migration and cosmopolitanism.

Woodbine will show Game 5 of the NBA Finals this Saturday. We'll open doors at 8:15pm, following the poetry reading. Tip...
06/11/2026

Woodbine will show Game 5 of the NBA Finals this Saturday. We'll open doors at 8:15pm, following the poetry reading. Tip-off is usually around 8:40pm.

Bring snacks and drinks to share. 414 Broadway, 3rd Floor.

For this week's episode Candice Bernd and John Kendall join Matt and Sam to talk about their reporting and research into...
06/06/2026

For this week's episode Candice Bernd and John Kendall join Matt and Sam to talk about their reporting and research into the nexus of the fossil fuel industry and the build-out boom of data centers across Texas and Pennsylvania. https://www.patreon.com/posts/49-data-centers-160339621

We discuss the repurposing and co-location of coal and fracked natural gas plants with the data centers, along with the lobbying efforts being done to situate the apparently futuristic AI technology as a lifeline to the historic fossil fuel industry. We hear about the populist localism inspiring some of the movements emerging to protest the data centers, but also how those same coalitions might be mobilized to protest green energy transition.

READINGS:
--"AI Data Center Development in Frackland" - Phases, 2025: https://phases.substack.com/p/ai-data-center-development-in-frackland
--"Crypto’s Cryptic Texas Takeover" - Candice Bernd, 2025: https://www.texasobserver.org/crypto-energy-grid-texas-bitcoin-water/
--"The Fossil-AI Nexus: Petrostate Capitalism, Computing Power, and the Production of Powered Land" - Justin Kollar, 2026: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400945937_The_Fossil-AI_Nexus_Petrostate_Capitalism_Computing_Power_and_the_Production_of_Powered_Land

Candice Bernd is a special investigative correspondent for the Observer covering climate justice and grassroots movements. She is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Austin whose work has also appeared in The Nation, The American Prospect, In These Times, Salon, Truthout, and Earth Island Journal. She is the author of Blood, Soil, and Oil: Far-Right Acceleration in the Age of Climate Crisis.

John Kendall is a postdoctoral researcher in energy geographies at Penn State. Currently, his research is primarily focused on the political and industrial ecologies of natural gas and petrochemical development in northern Appalachia. His most recent publication, written for the think tank Common Wealth, analyzes how the fracking boom continues to thwart decarbonization initiatives in the US.

Sam Law is an Austin-based researcher and organizer focused on the data center buildout across Texas.

For this week's podcast episode Benj and israa' from The Peoples Want join Malek and Matt to discuss the network's new b...
05/30/2026

For this week's podcast episode Benj and israa' from The Peoples Want join Malek and Matt to discuss the network's new book Revolutions of Our Times: An Internationalist Manifesto. https://www.patreon.com/posts/48-revolutions-159661840

We discuss the global uprisings since the Arab Spring leading to new understanding of revolution and internationalism. We talk about the figure of the exile, migrant, refugee, and diaspora translating new conceptions of the local and neighboring - values and ideology - and whether a shared orientation towards revolt can produce new subjective categories of solidarity. We end by hearing a history of The Peoples Want network, its emergence in the Syrian Canteen outside Paris, and the series of international gatherings they've organized since 2019.

READINGS:
--Mujawara: Weaving a Revolutionary Neighbouring Beyond Borders (published May 2026): https://thepeopleswant.org/en/mujawara/mujawara-weaving-a-revolutionary-neighbouring-beyond-borders
--Revolutions of Our Times: An Internationalist Manifesto: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2732-revolutions-of-our-times

Benjamin is a member of the Limousine Mountain Syndicate in Tarnac, France, which is part of The Peoples Want network.

israa' is a Q***r Egyptian Muslim anarchist, co-founder of From the Periphery Media Collective, and an activist scholar working to build a world where many words fit. They are a member of The Peoples Want network.

The Peoples Want is a network comprised of collectives, organisations, places and individuals from across the world working together to build an internationalist practice suited to our times. We share a committment to internationalism from below, focusing on people and movements rather than states. An internationalism that promotes solidarity and mutual aid between those in struggle, at times of crisis or uprising.

Please join the Woodbine Research Group on Sunday June 7th as we present our Roundtable on AI Melancholy. Doors at 6:30p...
05/27/2026

Please join the Woodbine Research Group on Sunday June 7th as we present our Roundtable on AI Melancholy. Doors at 6:30pm, event at 7pm.

Following our previous collective inquiries into both Municipal Socialism and Civil War, this month's facilitated discussion will explore the tech economy's uneven distribution of gains from its recent boom; AI's implementation in ongoing military fronts, including the genocide in Gaza; as well as the social relations AI presupposes and strives to produce. We'll try to respond to recent texts on AI from authors ranging from NYC Comptroller Mark Levine and Pope Leo XIV, to Bernie Sanders and Peter Thiel.

Members of the Woodbine Research Group will open up the event with a series of short presentations, followed by an open discussion. We hope to help formulate a cultural, ethical, and strategic orientation to the changing technological reality. How and where is power held and deployed today? What continuities and fissures with previous forms of governance can we identify? If the technological infrastructures and imaginaries emerging from Silicon Valley have an ever expanding grasp on our material conditions, what forms of organization are required to contend with these new mechanisms of control? What are the stakes, possibilities, and limits of a Neo-Luddism in 2026?

For Part Two of our conversation with Jeremy Gilbert, we discuss his research on hegemony and the evolution of acid comm...
05/24/2026

For Part Two of our conversation with Jeremy Gilbert, we discuss his research on hegemony and the evolution of acid communism. We talk about the turn towards consciousness raising and the need for a Deleuzo-Gramscian synthesis. https://www.patreon.com/posts/47-jeremy-on-2-159132790

READINGS:
--"Why is Keir Starmer so unpopular?" - Jeremy Gilbert, 2025: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/12/why-is-keir-starmer-so-unpopular
--"Techno-feudalism or Platform Capitalism? Conceptualising the Digital Society" - Jeremy Gilbert, 2024: https://uel-repository.worktribe.com/OutputFile/450392
--"My Friend Mark" - Jeremy Gilbert, 2017:https://jeremygilbertwriting.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/my-friend-mark40.pdf

Jeremy Gilbert is an academic, writer, podcaster, activist and DJ based in London, and the current editor of the journal New Formations. His books include Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (Pluto, 2014), Twenty-First Century Socialism (Polity, 2020) and (with Alex Williams) Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (Verso, 2022).

Please join us on Thursday for a discussion with Alyssa Battistoni on her new book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politi...
05/22/2026

Please join us on Thursday for a discussion with Alyssa Battistoni on her new book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. Doors at 6pm, event at 6:30pm.

From the publisher: "Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism - and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light."

SUGGESTED READINGS:
--"How to Understand Nature From a Marxist Perspective" - Alyssa Battistoni & Hugo de Camps Mora, 2026: https://jacobin.com/2026/02/nature-capitalism-marxism-ecology-freedom
--"Situating Freedom" - Alyssa Battistoni, 2025: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii153/articles/alyssa-battistoni-situating-freedom
--"Injury to Buildings and Vegetables" - Alyssa Battistoni, 2025: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/injury-to-buildings-and-vegetables/
--"State, Capital, Nature: State Theory for the Capitalocene" - Alyssa Battistoni, 2023: https://tinyurl.com/mr3pyc2y

Alyssa Battistoni is a political theorist with research interests in environmental and climate politics, feminism, Marxist thought, political economy, and the history of political thought.

Join us next Saturday the 9th for the 53rd edition of Crush, our reading series of poetry, prose, and miscellaneous text...
05/02/2026

Join us next Saturday the 9th for the 53rd edition of Crush, our reading series of poetry, prose, and miscellaneous text hosted by Suzanne Goldenberg. Doors at 6:30, Reading at 7pm. 414 Broadway, 3rd Floor.

May 9th Readers: Leonora Donovan, Jodi Lin, James Loop, Andriniki Mattis

To find in language the textures of our lives and the sensibilities of our world. For the pleasures of the text, for the pleasures of the voice.

Leonora Donovan is a poet, sexual intermediary, and a member of the Creature Comfort Press editorial collective. You can find her work mostly in emails to her friends.

Jodi Lin identifies as a gender expansive poet, filmmaker and a person who hears voices. Taiwanese of the Seediq Tribe, they are currently based in Manhattan. Their writing practice is enriched by the certified peer recovery coaching and support they provide. The Tenderness of Glass is their debut collection from new words (press). The book was written as an offering of a new world to their ancestors.

James Loop is a writer from Central New York and the author of several chapbooks. His work has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Hot Pink, Hyperallergic, Lambda Literary, and Prelude. Audio/visual iterations of poems have been exhibited at Art-o-rama (Marseille), CRAC-Occitanie, Frieze London, and the Material Art Fair (Mexico City). For Belladonna* Collaborative, he’s curated readings at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, Montez Press Radio, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and works as the Publicity Director for World Poetry. Metronome is his first full-length poetry collection.

Andriniki Mattis is a poet and fiction writer. He is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and has received fellowships from Poets House and The Poetry Project. He received his M.A. in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths University of London and a B.A. in Political and Poetic Resistance from Brooklyn College. His writing has appeared in wildness, Indiana Review, Montez Press, and elsewhere. He is the author of Quiet Fires, and the chaplet Living Between the Lines.

For this week's podcast episode Ziad Majed joins Malek and Matt to discuss the aftermath of October 7th in the Middle Ea...
04/30/2026

For this week's podcast episode Ziad Majed joins Malek and Matt to discuss the aftermath of October 7th in the Middle East. https://www.patreon.com/posts/45-ziad-majed-on-156927885

Ziad offers an analysis of the current ceasefires between Israel, Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza, and provides a long historical overview on the regional dynamics and ruptures that got us to this point. We end with a discussion about the gap between grassroots popular mobilization and geopolitical statecraft.

READINGS:
--"When war in the Middle East is told in the language of those who wage it" - Ziad Majed, 2026: https://vendredis-arabes.blogspot.com/2026/04/when-war-in-middle-east-is-told-in.html
--"Since the Second World War, there has never been such a concentration of ruins in one region of the world" - Ziad Majed, 2026: https://vendredis-arabes.blogspot.com/2026/04/ziad-majed-since-second-world-war-there.html

Dr. Ziad Majed is a university professor and researcher. After working with the Lebanese Red Cross, the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies in Beirut, and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Stockholm, he joined the American University of Paris in 2010, where he has since taught Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations. Over the past three decades, Dr. Majed has published extensively on democratic transitions, political systems, elections, civil society, reform, and citizenship in Lebanon, Syria, and the wider Arab region, as well as on the Palestinian question. His recent books include Syrie, la révolution orpheline (Actes Sud, Paris, 2014); Iran and its Four Arab Fronts (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 2017); Dans la tête de Bachar Al-Assad (with Subhi Hadidi and Farouk Mardam-Bey, Actes Sud, Paris, 2018; 2nd ed., 2025); and Le Proche-Orient, miroir du monde (La Découverte, Paris, 2025).

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