The Associated Students of College of the Redwoods will present a series of visiting speakers in December on the topic of resistance movements around the world.

The first talk is titled Defend The Rojava Revolution with visiting speaker Debbie Bookchin on Thursday December 12th at 4pm in the CR Administration of Justice building, room 108, on the CR Eureka Main Campus. Debbie Bookchin, recently returned from the autonomous Kurdish-led region known as Rojava, will talk about the history of Rojava, why it is critical to defend this feminist, ecological, democratic project from the ongoing onslaught by Turkey and its jihadi allies and the Syrian regime. Bookchin will discuss how ideas of social ecology have influenced the Kurdish freedom movement and why Rojava project is relevant today.

Debbie Bookchin is a long time journalist and author who has won awards for her news feature and investigative reporting. She has reported and written for a number of publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and The Nation. She served for three years as Bernie Sanders’ press secretary when he was first elected to Congress from Vermont. She is the daughter of two activist parents. Her father is the philosopher and social theorist Murray Bookchin who is credited with originating the critical theory known as social ecology which had a major impact on the New Left of the 1960s, the Alter-Globalization movement, and more recently the Kurdish autonomy movement with its anti-capitalist, reconstructive, ecological and communalist vision of social organization. Her mother, Beatrice Bookchin, worked alongside her father for more than 50 years contributing to the development of his ideas and running twice in Burlington City Council elections on a radical, municipalist platform that proposed grassroots democracy, ecological stewardship and a moral economy as part of a project to develop a countervailing power to that of the nation-state. Many of the ideas that have animated the Kurdish autonomy movement, can be found in Bookchin's latest book of essays: The Next Revolution Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy, which Debbie coedited.