Short Radical Books to Fan the Flames of Discontent

Titles

007 – PIRATE CARE: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak – 2025

006 – TO SEE IN THE DARK: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 by Nicholas Mirzoeff – 2025

005 – ON CUDDLING: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace by Phanuel Antwi – 2023

004 – PALM OIL: The Grease of Empire by Max Haiven – 2022

003 – WE ARE ‘NATURE’ DEFENDING ITSELF: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones by Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan – 2021

002 – THE HOLOGRAM: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future by Cassie Thornton – 2020

001 – PANDEMONIUM: Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve by Angela Mitropoulos – 2020

Short Radical Books to Fan the Flames of Discontent

A collaboration between Pluto Press and The ReImagining Value Action Lab,VAGABONDS strives to publish an eclectic mix of long revolutionary essays and experimental works at the intersection of radical action, interventionist art, and critical inquiry.

Radical ~ Rigorous ~ Resonant

Anti-colonial, queer, feminist, and militating for collective action and radical joy (including the joy of reading), VAGABONDS aims to publish some of the best and most important writing for the struggles of tomorrow in short, accessible, and passionate form. They are peer-reviewed using a generative and open model.

Contact

mhaiven at lakeheadu dot ca

Proposals

For information on the series and how pitch a title, please click here.

Series Editor

Max Haiven

Max Haiven

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His recent books include Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements.

Editorial Advisory Board

Phanuel Antwi, Isa Fremeaux, Stefano Harney, Marc Herbst, Brian Holmes, Jay Jordan, Eunsong Kim, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Alana Lentin, Eli Meyerhoff, Dylan AT Miner, Nick Mirzoeff, Massimiliano Mao Mollona, Jerome Roos, Ezra Winton.

Pluto Press

Pluto Press is a anti-capitalist, internationalist and politically independent radical political publishing house with offices in London and New York. It was founded in 1969 and focuses on making timely interventions in contemporary struggles.

RiVAL

The ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) is a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice, and decolonization based in Anishinaabe territories on the Northern shore of Gitchiigumi (Thunder Bay, Canada) and active online and around the world. It is directed by Max Haiven.

Authors

Phanuel Antwi

Phanuel Antwi

Author of On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace

Phanuel Antwi is Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies. He is an artist, teacher and organiser concerned with race, poetics, movements, intimacy and struggle. He works with text, dance, film and photography to intervene in artistic, academic and public spaces. He is a curator, activist and associate professor at the University of British Columbia.

Valeria Graziano

Valeria Graziano

Co-author of Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity

Valeria Graziano is a cultural theorist and organizer. Along with Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak she is the convenor of the Pirate Care Syllabus project. She has contributed to a number of collectives, including Precarious Workers Brigade, the Radical Education Forum, Boycott Workfare and the Women Strike UK. She is the co-author of Rebelling with Care: Exploring Open Technologies for Commoning Healthcare and she lives in Rijeka, Croatia.

Tomislav Medak

Tomislav Medak

Co-author of Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity

Tomislav Medak is a commons and disability activist and an independent researcher with a focus on technology, environmental crisis and degrowth transition. He’s a member of the green-left party Možemo! (HR). With Marcell Mars and a community of friends in Zagreb he founded Multimedia Institute/MAMA, since 2000 a hub for cultural and political organizing. Together they have co-edited Public Library and Guerrilla Open Access. He lives in Zagreb. Croatia.

Max Haiven

Max Haiven

Author of Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire and editor of VAGABONDS.

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His recent books include Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements.

Nicholas Mirzoeff

Nicholas Mirzoeff

Author of To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor and chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. His other books include How to See the World (2015), The Right to Look (2011), White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (2023) and An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999, 2009, 2023). A frequent blogger and writer, his work has appeared in The Nation, Hyperallergic, Frieze, the New York Times, andthe Guardian.

Marcell Mars

Marcell Mars

Co-author of Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity

Marcell Mars is an advanced internet user. With Tomislav Medak he founded a shadow library Memory of the World, He develops and maintains software infrastructure to support custodians of (universal access to) knowledge. His research Ruling Class Studies, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy, examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. Marcell lives in Rijeka, Croatia.

Angela Mitropoulos

Angela Mitropoulos

Author of Pandemonium: Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve

Angela Mitropoulos is a theorist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. Among other writings which track shifting boundaries and movements in the history of philosophy, science, aesthetics, politics and economics, she is the author of Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (2012).

Jay Jordan & Isa Fremeax

Jay Jordan & Isa Fremeax

Authors of We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones

Isabelle Fremeaux is an educator and action researcher. She was formerly Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College London.Jay Jordan is an art activist and author, co-founder of Reclaim the Streets and The Clandestine Insurgent Clown Army. Together they co-facilitate the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.

Cassie Thornton

Cassie Thornton

Author of The Hologram: Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future

Cassie Thornton is an artist, writer and organizer who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. In her recent work she explores the struggle of reorganizing and using privilege in the apocalypse. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). She is currently a co-organizer of a bar that is an undercover clinic in Berlin.

Illustrator and Publicist

Witch