Join Joan C. Williams—award-winning scholar of social inequality and Distinguished Professor of Law (Emerita) at UC San Francisco—for a discussion about her new book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Get Them Back. Her latest book is an urgent wake-up call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the US. Williams says that the single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic - lies in changing the class dynamics driving American politics.

The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals, and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories —from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response, to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response — Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions that disadvantage the working-class! Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy, a politician or a social justice activist in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goaL.

CAMBRIDGE FORUM is partnering with Harvard Book Store and GBH Forum Network to record this event for free public enjoyment and distribution.

Described as having "something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams is an award-winning scholar of social inequality. Williams is the author of White Working Class, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic andThe New Republic. She is Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair (emerita) at University of California College of the Law San Francisco.

Join the Boston Public Library in person or over Zoom Webinar as acclaimed drag queen, author, and artist Sasha Velour gives the May Lowell Lecture, The Revolutionary Art of Drag.
Sasha Velour will be in conversation with local performing artist and theater company director Giselle Byrd.

After the main program, there will be a book signing with local independent bookstore partner, Trident Booksellers & Café.

Sasha Velour (she/they) is a Winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race and Co-Host of HBO's We're Here. Velour is one of the foremost experts on drag, known for her impeccable style, thought-provoking multimedia performances, and radical genderfluid approach.

Carbon gets a bad rap these days, according to author and environmentalist Paul Hawken, who urges us to widen our perception and response to the climate crisis.  Too often carbon is maligned as the “driver” of climate change and blamed for the possible demise of civilization.  However, this narrative is erroneous and misleading. 

Carbon is an intriguing element; the only one that animates the entire living world.  Manifesting in coal and diamonds, it displays a host of different properties because of its ability to bond easily. One vital example is carbon-dioxide, which allows plants to photosynthesize. Though carbon comprises a tiny fraction of Earth’s composition, our planet is lifeless without it. 

Paul Hawken, veteran environmentalist and author, looks at the flow of life through the lens of carbon. Embracing a panoramic view of carbon’s omnipresence, he explores how this ubiquitous and essential element extends into every aperture of existence and shapes the entire fabric of life. Hawken charts a course across our planetary history, guiding us into the realms of plants, animals, insects, fungi, food, and farms to offer a new narrative for embracing carbon’s life-giving power and its possibilities for the future of human endeavor.

Hawken’s latest book, Carbon: The Book of Life illuminates the subtle connections between carbon and our collective human experience and suggests we see nature, carbon, and ourselves as exquisitely intertwined -inseparably connected.

Ron Mitchell, Editor and Publisher of The Bay State Banner, welcomes Kimberly Lyle, CEO of Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation (DBEDC); Michael Kane, the Director of the Mass Alliance of ‘HUD Tenants (MAHT) and a long-time activist for affordable housing and tenants rights; and Luc Schuster, the Executive Director of Boston Indicators, a research center at the Boston Foundation.

Join us at the GBH Studio in Boston for this community conversation. Recorded in the GBH Studio at the Boston Public Library, GBH Amplifies events feature a rotating cast of well-known hosts from local media, community organizations, and more.



GBH Amplifies is a community-building initiative funded by the Barr Foundation and supported by the GBH Forum Network, funded by the Lowell Institute.



Forum Network events are free and available to the public, but you must register for access.

Ron Mitchell, Editor and Publisher of The Bay State Banner, holds a conversation about the current condition of our education system with Massachusetts Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler, Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper, and Roxbury Community College President, Jonathan K. Jefferson.

Join us at the GBH Studio in Boston for this community conversation. Recorded in front of the cafe audience at the Newsfeed Cafe in the Boston Public Library, GBH Amplifies events feature a rotating cast of well-known hosts from local media, community organizations, and more.

GBH Amplifies is a community-building initiative funded by the Barr Foundation and supported by the GBH Forum Network, funded by the Lowell Institute.

Forum Network events are free and available to the public, but you must register for access.

Jesse Hagopian is an award-winning educator and a leading voice on issues of educational equity, the school-to-prison-pipeline, standardized testing, the Black Lives Matter at School movement, and social justice unionism. He is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, an author, public speaker, organizer, and Ethnic Studies teacher at Seattle’s Garfield High School – the site of the historic teacher boycott of the MAP test in 2013.

Professor Gerald Denis, a molecular oncologist at Boston Medical Center, investigates a range of cancers and their causes. Some of his important studies include prostate cancer and breast cancer, which are increasing today. He focuses on relationships between specific factors such as metabolic conditions (e.g., obesity and diabetes) and certain types of cancer.

In this presentation, Dr. Denis explains how cancer research works, the international influence of American cancer research, and how the recent federal (NIH) defunding sets back the progress in cancer treatment at a time when cancers are increasing. 

President Trump has spent years demonizing the press, popularizing the concept of “fake news” and branding journalists the “enemy of the people”. But targeting the free press is only one of the democratic institutions that Trump has gone after since taking office for his second term.

The Trump administration’s flagrant disregard for civil rights has manifest itself in the deportation, arrest and imprisonment of immigrants, foreign students and random tourists in detainment facilities “illegally”, according to Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch. Those who oppose Trump are liable to become the next subject of attack, and this includes the lawyers who have challenged his actions in court. Trump also views academic centers of learning as a threat because they encourage independent and critical thinking; he has already punished Ivy league universities like Columbia and Harvard under the guise of anti-semitism, and now has turned his sights on institutions like the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum network, with plans to reshape it, and eliminate “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”.

Cambridge Forum considers how far ordinary Americans are willing to go, to acquiesce or protest these developments in Demonizing the Truth. The guest speakers are David Enrich, business investigations editor for NYT and author of a new book 'MURDERING THE TRUTH: Fear, the First Amendment, & A Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.'

Berna Leon, a Spanish teaching assistant at Harvard's School of Government wrote an op-ed for The Guardian entitled “This Op-Ed could lead me to being deported from the U.S.”

Jesse Hagopian is a Seattle educator, the director of the Zinn Education Project’s Teaching for Black Lives Campaign, and the author of the book TEACH TRUTH: THE ATTACK ON CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ANTIRACIST EDUCATION.