CONFERENCE KICK-OFF | FRIDAY, APRIL 21 | 7:00 - 9:00 PM

Barbara Madeloni
Planting a Left Pole, Inspiring a Left Vision
​Barbara Madeloni is the President of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. She has been a progressive leader in the statewide movement against school privatization, fighting for the schools our youth and communities deserve

Eugene Puryear
Capitalism and Incarceration

Eugene Puryear is a Washington, D.C.-based activist. As a high school student in Charlottesville, Va, Eugene organized a walkout when the war in Iraq began in 2003, and helped to organize a number of the large-scale demonstrations that took place against the continuing U.S. war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a key leader In the struggle to free the Jena Six in 2007, was a founder of the anti-gentrification group Justice First as well as the Jobs Not Jails coalition, DC Ferguson Movement and Stop Police Terror Project-D.C.

Puryear is also the author of the book Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America. In addition Puryear was the 2008 and 2016 Vice-Presidential candidate for the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

OPENING PLENARY | SATURDAY, APRIL 22 | 10:15 - 11:15 AM

Fred Magdoff, University of Vermont
Creating An Ecosocialist Society: Learning from Nature
Fred Magdoff is Emeritus Professor of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont. His interests range from soil science to agriculture and food to the environment to the US economy. His research at UVM was on ecologically sound ways to improve soil fertility, especially focusing on the critical role of soil organic matter.

He is the co-author of the third edition of Building Crops For Better Soil: Sustainable Soil Management (2010) and What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (2011), as well as a number of other books on agriculture and on the US economy. He has also written numerous articles on environmental issues, including on ecological agriculture, production and use of biofuels, ecological civilization, population and global resource depletion, and the environmental and social problems of capitalist agriculture.
Sherri Mitchell, Indigenous and Human Rights Activist
Cultivating True Warriors
Sherri Mitchell is a member of the Penobscot Indian Nation. She received her Juris Doctorate and a certificate in Indigenous People’s Law and Policy from the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law.

Sherri was a longtime advisor to the American Indian Institute’s Healing the Future Program and currently serves as an advisor to the Indigenous Elders and Medicine People’s Council of North and South America.

She is the Director of the Land Peace Foundation and the co-host of "Love (and revolution) Radio". Her new book Sacred Instructions; The Heart of Spirit Based Change will be in print in September of 2017.

CLOSING PLENARY | SATURDAY, APRIL 22 | 4:00 - 5:00PM

Vijay Prashad
Imperialism and the Global Commodity Chain

​Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, commentator and a Marxist intellectual. He is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College. Prashad is the author of seventeen books. In 2012, he published five books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press) and Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (The New Press). Two of his most well-known books, Karma of Brown Folk (2000) and Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting (2002), were chosen by the Village Voice as books of the year.