Forthcoming, ships November 2026

Edited by Carla Orendorff, Anthony Orendorff, Lupita Limon Corrales, Ananya Roy, and Marisa Lemorande
Preface by Robin D. G. Kelley

Urban Studies / Health & Care / Organizing

Written by unhoused people and their allies, We Live in Public is an invitation to revolutionary care in a time of class war.

Los Angeles is one of the richest and most unequal cities in the world, where nine unhoused people die every day. As rent rises, evictions increase, and houselessness grows, the homeless encampment becomes both a symptom of organized abandonment and a site of insurgent knowledge and practice. We Live in Public was conceptualized and written by residents and organizers of one such encampment, Aetna Street, whose experiences offer strategies for solidarity and survival in the face of escalating state violence.

Many people’s worst fear is to be homeless, equating it with social death. But within the encampment, we see people living with wisdom and maps to offer. Throughout this book, Aetna residents and organizers generously share such insights and analysis. We Live in Public insists that these histories provide crucial lessons in modes of collective living and must be at the center of public history and knowledge.

Centering those who care for others on the street, it is an invitation to revolutionary care in the time of war. That war is the more immediate criminalization of homelessness and the longer arc of the unrelenting settlement of the US. We Live in Public is a refusal of such settler-colonial logics in the making of home and place.

Annie Xibos Spencer

Health & Care / Capitalism

What the opioid epidemic teaches us about the addiction at the root of our social life—and how we free ourselves from it.

How To Break An Addiction paints an original and dynamic portrait of the nature of the opioid crisis while offering original commentary on what the crisis portends about the present historical conjuncture. Interrogating long- and short-run, macro and micro, national and global, structural and personal factors, it takes the ongoing US opioid crisis as a jumping off point to illustrate the profound conclusion: capitalism at its core is an addiction.

In a blend of memoir, historical record, original research, and theoretical and cultural analysis, critical geographer and harm reduction activist Annie Spencer argues against a dominant ‘progressive’ presumption of the need to reform (or ‘save’) capitalism, demonstrating instead the imperative to think, organize, and enact new ways of being and provisioning together on a living Earth. 

How To Break An Addiction renders visible the extent to which the world we inhabit today is made by addiction—in capital’s image—and against life and well-being. Spencer calls for redress of the deepening crisis of addiction and the so-called ‘epidemic’ of pain at its root; for a paradigm shift away from the dominant economic logic in favor of new kinds of ecosystemic social practice and provision. We must innovate a new way of being human together in the here and now. Spencer’s first-person narration anchors rigorous and far-reaching research and theory, making for an original and impactful tour through capital’s addiction to crisis and our ability—and need—to break from it.

Sasha Warren

Health & Care

Storming Bedlam reimagines mental health care and its radical possibilities in the context of its global development under capitalism.

We live in a world oversaturated by new mental health programs, methods, and shifts that simply pile up and seem to lead nowhere. Storming Bedlam: Madness, Mental Health, and Revolt  suggests that psychiatry must face its repeated failures in the light of its utopian aspirations. Only by doing so can the intense contradictions that animate the world of mental health care be adequately conceptualized and situated as the basis for a future therapeutic practice.

In a radical rereading of the history, theory, and practice of psychiatry under capitalism that emphasizes the utopian thrust of the psychiatric revolution, Storming Bedlam pushes totalizing and often idealistic visions of mental health care to their limits to chart another path. This is the first global and comparative reflection on radical psychiatric currents that ties them directly to the original founding acts of the field. Here, in an original and compelling account of the field’s radical history, moral treatment is read in the light of the utopian socialist movement, as the French Institutional Psychotherapy of Félix Guattari is put into conversation with Brazilian art therapy of Nise da Silveira, Mexican antipsychiatry’s reflections on violence are compared with Argentinian psychoanalysis and Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial psychiatric practice, and the Italian Democratic Psychiatry movement and Brazilian anti-institutional politics are contrasted with the North American anti-psychiatry currents beginning in the 1960s–70s counterculture, and more.