On Wednesday 27th May 2026, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will host a talk & discussion of the edited collection We Will Rise Again – speculative stories on protest, resistance and hope. The event will be held at Redz, 6 Threadneedle St, Stroud – and is free to attend.
We Will Rise Again mixes fiction and non-fiction and explores the value of speculation in informing movements on disability justice, environmentalism, community care and anticolonial resistance. Editors Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older champion realistic, progressive social change using the speculative stories of writers across the world. Authors include NK Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, Alejandro Heredia, Sam J. Miller, Nisi Shawl, and Sabrina Vourvoulias.
Below in our resources section you can find a link to buy the book at a discount, and free text, audio and visual resources. There is also more information about the books and Stroud Radical Reading Group events.
We will meet at Redz Youth Hub, 6 Threadneedle St, GL5 1AF. Entry is free butplease bring some cash if you can afford to donate to cover venue costs.
Anyone interested in the books is welcome – we recommend reading one or other of the books but you don’t need to have read either to join us. You do not need to have attended any of our previous sessions. We do our best to make the sessions welcoming to people who have not been to reading groups or similar settings like university seminars before.
“Each story is grounded within a broader sociopolitical framework using essays and interviews from movement leaders, including adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, charting the future history of protest, revolutions, and resistance with the same zeal for accuracy that speculative writers normally bring to science and technology. Using the vehicle of ambitious storytelling, We Will Rise Again offers effective tools for organizing, an unflinching interrogation of the status quo, and a blueprint for prefiguring a different world.”
Resources
Buy “We Will Rise Again” – £15.29 with discount (RRP £17.99, saving £2.70).To get the discount from The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: Look at your “basket”, and enter the “couponcode” 26stroudradical. Pick up your book from their Nailsworth, Tetbury or Chalford shops, or get books delivered to your door for £3.50 postage.
Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend, though we will make a collection to cover venue hire costs – please bring some cash if you can afford it (a few pounds would be great).
We try to create a comfortable discussion space for everyone, including people who have not been part of a reading group or been to university. We do not want the sessions to feel like school – the idea is that everyone has something to contribute, even if primarily through finding the discussion texts difficult and having questions with other attendees can attempt to answer.
To ensure marginalised people feel welcome, we encourage care and thoughtful contributions that respect people’s identities and lives. We are an LGBTQ+ inclusive and anti-racist space.
Anyone is welcome to listen to the discussion, though we encourage contributions only from those who have read at least some of the book we are discussing.
The venue for this session is Redz Youth Hub, a hub for organising, creativity, and community building. It’s a free space for young people to host their own events, workshops, and meetups. They’ve been hosting sessions by Mutiny: Stroud’s Youth Assembly and The RYSE – the Radical Youth Space for Educations.
Redz is in central Stroud, close to the train station and bus station, with nearby stands to lock bikes, and parking for cars nearby at Fawkes Place or Church St car park. There is step-free access to the ground floor where we will meet. There is a toilet, and some comfortable seating as well as basic folding chairs. Please get in touch if you’d like to get more of an idea of what the sessions are like or if you have any accessibility needs.
There is an opportunity for more informal discussion after the session in the Ale House pub (around the corner) for anyone who wants to continue chatting after 9.30pm.
Our monthly events in spring 2020 will form a series on “Debates around social ecology”. Each of these three events will be held on the last Wednesday of the month, 7.30-9.30pm – online via Zoom. See poster and text below it for more details.
29th April: Ecological Marxism and environmental neo-Malthusianism
While we will focus on the Introductory section, I recommending reading more of the text if you are able to. You down the 10,000 word closing section of the book as an ODT file. This is made up of two essays from Bookchin and Foreman on their reflections on the debate, written one year later (10,000 words). This might be of particular interest.
Our series on Climate and Environmental Crises concludes with Wangari Maathai’s “The Challenge for Africa: a new vision”. We will meet to discuss two chapters from this book at Black Book Cafe on July 17th, 7.30-9.30pm.
Our discussion will focus on Chapters 8 and 12 – available as a pdf download via this link, though you are welcome to read the whole book. Chapter 8 (pages 160-183) is titled “Culture: The Missing Link”, in which Maathai investigates how her “personal recognition of the importance of culture led [her] to create the Civic and Environemental Education seminars as part of the Green Belt Movement’s work” . In Chapter 12 (239-259), “Environment and Development”, Maathai says she “argue[s] for the centrality of the environment in all discussions of, and approaches to, addressing the challenges Africa faces”.
Events are free to attend but we ask for a donation of £2-3 from anyone who can afford it to cover venue costs. Please contact us about any accessibility requirements. We aim to make the sessions a welcoming space for anyone interested in the topic, you do not need to have a university education or have ever been to a reading group before, and we even welcome people who have not read the text but would like to listen! Facebook event – Wangari Maathai: The Challenge for Africa
Information about the book (from the cover of the 2009 William Heinemann edition): “In this urgent yet optimistic new work, Wangari Maathai – winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and founder of the Green Belt Movement – provides a unqiue perspective on the fate of Africa, and offers hope for a new way forward.
The challenges facing Africa are real and vast: terrible conflicts wrack the Darfur region of Sudan, southern Somalia, the Niger delta and eastern Congo; elections have been violently contested in Kenya and Zimbabwe; drought and floods are prevalent in both west and east; and HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis ravage the continent. Natural resources are drying up, and changing rainfall patterns – partly as a result of global warming – directly jeopardise the livelihood of the great majority of Africans who still rely on the land for their survival.
All too often, Africa’s problems are reduced to a series of tableaux vivants connoting dependency, desperation or savagery. What is needed is a different vision – one that comes out of Africa, from an African. Informed by the author’s three decades as an environmental activist and campaigner for democracy, The Challenge for Africa surveys what is really hampering the contintent’s development, and argues that the future of Africa lies not in international aid, but in the hands of Africans themselves.
Written in Wangari Maathai’s searingly decisive yet inspiring voice, and offering nothing less than a manifesto for twenty-first century Africa, The Challenge for Africa celebrates the enduing potential of the human spirit, and reminds us that change is always possible.”
From the publisher’s page about the book: “The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people.
What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial.
The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders.
This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.”
Chapter titles of the sections forming our focus for discussion:
Chapter 1: “A hypothesis as political fiction: the explosion of inequalities and the denial of climate change are one and the same phenomenon.”
Chapter 2: Thanks to America’s abandonment of the climate agreement, we now know clearly what war has been declared
Chapter 3: The question of migrations now concerns everyone, offering a new and very wicked universality: finding oneself deprived of ground
Chapter 4: One must take care not to confuse globalization-plus with globalization-minus
Chapter 5. How the globalist ruling classes have decided to abandon all the burdens of solidarity, little by little
Chapter 20: “A personal defence of the Old Continent”
Our next three events in 2019 form a summer series on Climate and Environmental Crises – see our upcoming events page for more details. We will discuss Down to Earth by Bruno Latour on 15th May, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore on 19th June, and The Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai on 17th July (see below for more details).
Poster for Summer Series on Climate and Environmental Crises
Each event will take place at the Black Book Cafe, Nelson St, Stroud from 7.30-9.30pm. Events are free to attend but we ask for a donation of £2-3 from anyone who can afford it to cover venue costs. Please contact us about any accessibility requirements. A printable pdf of the poster above is available to print, if you would like to help us publicise the events.
Stroud Radical Reading Group meets once a month. Here you can find details of sessions, links, and further information
Stroud Radical Reading Group 