September 15, London UK Launch of The World After Amazon

What will the world look like after Amazon?

We asked the corporation’s workers…

With over 1.6-million employees, Amazon is one of the largest ever corporate empires.

But while the company tells a utopian story about its gifts to the world, its workers pay the price, toiling in dystopian conditions of overwork, insecurity and relentless surveillance.

As workers’ movements and community groups around the world rise to challenge Amazon’s power, the nine stories in this book, written by rank-and-file Amazon workers, speculate on what the future holds for people and the planet.

For more information, and to read or listen to the collection, visit: https://afteramazon.world/

Join us on Sunday, September 15 at London’s Pelican House (144 Cambridge Heath Rd, Bethnal Green) for the launch of The World After Amazon. The event is free and open to everyone.

The evening will feature readings from the book with editor Max Haiven and a panel discussion, including:

This event is presented by RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, Red Futures and Notes from Below.

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), 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, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London based in the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work focuses on the uses of the political imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021) and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. She is currently writing her first novel which uses speculation and temporal play to explore three characters interconnected experiences of revolution.

Phil Crockett Thomas writes fiction and poetry, and teaches sociology and criminology at the University of Stirling. Her research focuses on social harm, justice, and creative and collaborative methods. Her fiction has appeared in Granta and on BBC Radio 4. She is the editor of Abolition Science Fiction (2022) a collection of creative writing by activists and scholars involved in the movement for prison abolition in the U.K, and of The Moon Spins the Dead Prison (2022) with Thomas Abercromby and Rosie Roberts.

Associate Professor Sarah E. Truman is a trans-disciplinary scholar in literary education, cultural studies, and the arts, and co-director the Literary Education Lab at University of Melbourne. From 2022-2025, Dr. Truman is an ARC DECRA Fellow, their project ‘Speculative Futures’ focuses on speculative fiction as an interdisciplinary method for thinking about the world and mode of literary engagement in diverse pedagogical settings (high schools, universities, and interdisciplinary scholarship). Truman is also PI on the ARC Linkage Grant ‘Reading Climate’ (2024-2026) which focuses on the relationship between Indigenous climate fictions, literary education, and climate justice. Truman’s other past and ongoing artistic and scholarly collaborations include WalkingLab, a SSHRC-funded international arts collective and Oblique Curiosities, a electro folk group.

Jamie Woodcock is a senior lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London. He is the author of various books, including the recent Star Wars Andor collection. He is an editor of Red Futures, Notes from Below, and Historical Materialism.