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Join us as we welcome Arti Walker-Peddakotla and Aaron Hughes in conversation with Bill Ayers as they discuss the long history of GIs rebelling against US militarism and fascism. Viewed through an abolitionist framework, this discussion will highlight the legacy and revolutionary power of GI resistance against the backdrop of military mobilizations to violently suppress people’s movements.

Arti Walker-Peddakotla (she/they) is a William H. Hastie Fellow at University of Wisconsin Law, a 2022 Soros Justice Fellow, and former Oak Park Village Trustee. As a local elected official, and cofounder of community organizing group Freedom to Thrive Oak Park, Arti organized abolitionist efforts in Oak Park, IL to fight against the use of carceral technology, defund the police, and remove police from schools. As a law student at Loyola University of Chicago School of Law Arti co-created the LAW156: Abolition and Movement Lawyering course. Arti serves as Board Chair of AboutFace: Veterans Against the War, is an advisory board member of Lucy Parsons Labs, serves on the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance C4 board, and serves on the Public Safety Steering Committee for Local Progress, where she previously was a board member.

Aaron Hughes is an artist, curator, organizer, and anti-war veteran. He works collaboratively in diverse spaces and media to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, deconstruct and transform systems of oppression, and seek liberation. Hughes works with a range of art and activist projects including About Face: Veterans Against the War, emerging Veteran Art Movement, Justseeds Artist Cooperative, and Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.

Bill Ayers is the author, most recently, of When Freedom is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer, is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired) and a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Bank Street College of Education, Bennington College, and Teachers College, Columbia University. He is an engaged scholar and a peace and social justice activist who has written extensively about social justice and freedom, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. He is a former vice-president of the curriculum division of the American Educational Research Association, and a former member of the executive committee of the Faculty Senate at UIC.