Recent Free Public Talks
Video Archive
2024 (March-December)

October 23, 7:30 pm

Anti-Apartheid Organizing Then and Now

With the explosion of campus-based organizing and occupations against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, we juxtapose historic anti-Apartheid organizing with the current events. With deep knowledge about the historic efforts to overthrow South African Apartheid in the 1980s, Dr. Peter Cole, author of Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area, teams up with local scholar and activist Eddie Yuen, Visiting Professor in the Anthropology and Social Change department at the California Institute of Integral Studies (a student at UC Berkeley during the original movement, and who knows the decades-long history of alter-globalization and radical movements better than most), and the Arab Resource Organizing Committee’s own Lara Kiswani, a key organizer in the Bay Area’s robust efforts to block the Gaza genocide and to fight for Palestinian liberation, to present an historically informed look at the dynamics of current protest and politics. Co-sponsored by Left in the Bay.

Video here.

October 16, 7:30 pm

Rebel Airwaves: Looking back at 75 years of KPFA

In 1949, a group of pacifists launched America’s first listener-supported radio station. Despite government repression, infighting, and countless financial crises, KPFA has managed to survive 75 years. Join Liam O’Donoghue, host of the East Bay Yesterday podcast, as he explores stories of the people who helped the station achieve this remarkable milestone.

Video here.

October 9, 7:30 pm

The First Post-Pandemic Political Era: After WWI

American Midnight author Adam Hochschild and Building the Population Bomb author Dr. Emily Merchant (UC Davis) A critical reappraisal of the first post-pandemic political era after WWI, with its brutal authoritarian assault on civil liberties, and overt racism bolstered by the pseudo-scientific Eugenics movement (that continues to lurk in today's AI, Hi-Tech "TESCREAL" madness), and the white supremacist hysteria about a “foreign population bomb.” This history rhymes a month before the 2024 election with the racist anti-immigrant bombast of the Republican campaign.

Video here.

September 25, 7:30 pm

Art & Politics: Will Maynez Interprets Diego Rivera

Even if you don't know Will Maynez, you may know his work about Diego Rivera's Pan American Unity mural (1940). Over 600,000 people saw it while it was on display at SFMOMA from June 2021 to January 2024. Over the two decades prior, while housed in City College's Diego Rivera Theatre, Will collected mural stories and discovered an unknown episode of composer George Gershwin going to Mexico, where he got slightly politically radicalized by the artists he met. Will has written a play about a real-life party thrown for Gershwin and relates how the play came to be and shares selections from the work.

This is part of a series of solo artists giving a behind-the-scenes and indepth look at what inspires them in the interrelationship between art and politics.

Video here.

September 11, 7:30 pm

Muni Labor & Muni Love

Writer Lia Smith and illustrator Keith Scott Ferris of Muni Is My Ride: Portraits of Muni in Words & Images, a collection of 22 Muni Operator interviews and beautiful art, bring together SFMTA personnel to share thoughts on the labor contributions of operators, mechanics, cleaners and how Muni workers add to the City’s labor history. An amazing chance to listen to folks who keep our public transit system moving (Muni operator Brendan), extremely less conflict-ridden (MTAP or Muni Transit Assistants Program reps Daisy and Sharia), and clean (transit car cleaner Carmine). Lia Smith and Keith Scott Ferris took us beyond their book, ''Muni is My Ride'', to showcase the hidden ways these hardworking folks shape the City. We even enjoyed a trivia quiz including Keith’s sketches from the book and Muni parlance.

Video here.

Friday, July 5, 7:30 pm

90th Anniversary of Big Strike

at 518 Valencia Street

Ninety years ago, San Francisco's class relations were transformed by the General Strike. This commemorative event will take place on July 5th, the actual anniversary of “Bloody Thursday” (this year it's on Friday), when police shot more than five dozen and killed two strikers, catalyzing a spontaneous work stoppage that paralyzed most of the Bay Area for almost two weeks (the "official" General Strike only lasted 4 days). Learn how the ’34 strike echoes through history and how the arc of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union represents a quintessential example of 20th century labor history. Automation, multi-tiered workforces, government co-optation, and solidarity among waterfront workers continue to shape our world today, whether port workers, UPS and Amazon delivery people, or the rest of us in between and at either end of this complex system. Shaping San Francisco's Chris Carlsson; Joel Shor, former sailor and current ILWU Local 10 member; labor educator Gifford Hartman; IBU member Jack Calvin. Co-hosted by Left by the Bay.

Video here.

Wednesday, May 22, 7:30 pm

Rainbow Grocery Cooperative

at 518 Valencia Street

RAINBOW GROCERY Cooperative, a long-time supporter of Shaping San Francisco’s Public programming, will be our featured guests. Rainbow has been a steady presence in San Francisco’s Mission District for almost a half century. Come meet current staffers, learn about the post-pandemic issues facing the store, hear about the advantages of cooperative self-management, and bring your questions about food politics, grocery price inflation, flood recovery, and whatever else you’ve been wondering about.

Video here.

Wednesday, May 8, 7:30 pm

Art & Politics: Hughen/Starkweather

at 518 Valencia

"Conversations, interviews, and deep research are a significant piece of their process for every project they take on. Feeling a “responsibility to educate the viewer, to give them a window in,” they have, over the course of the last decade, developed a nuanced strategy for avoiding what many artists fail to acknowledge as a problem: leaving their audiences out in the cold. . .When the colors and shapes of a nonrepresentational work of art rearrange themselves into remembrance or recognition, magic happens. Hughen/Starkweather describe this as “closing the space between abstraction and language.” Excerpt from Selene Foster article on Hughen/Starkweather's Adjacent Shores, April 2016.

Video here.

Wednesday, April 24, 7:30 pm

History of Monopoly/Game Night!

at 518 Valencia

David Giesen brings his extraordinary collection of original 1907 Monopoly game artifacts to anchor his presentation of the fascinating political history of the game, with roots in the anti-monopoly politics championed by Henry George in the 19th century. Following the presentation we will have a GAME NIGHT! San Francisco Trivia, Yahtzee, Monopoly, Cuban dominoes, bring your own! BYOB too!

Video here.

Wednesday, April 10, 7:30 pm

Life and Death in a Great American City

at 518 Valencia

Cities grow, cities change. Some businesses and institutions thrive, while others die off and are replaced. In this joint presentation of words and images, Lorri Ungaretti (Vanished San Francisco), and Alec Scott (Oldest San Francisco) speak to the history of our great, sometimes troubled city, what's been lost over the years, what's stuck around. Expect the discussion to range widely, from science to religion, from food to drink, from sports to shopping, from sex to death.

Video here.

Tuesday, March 26, 6:30-8:30 pm

Cultivating Food Resilience and
Combating Global Challenges

at 518 Valencia, Talk and Conversation with Punk Gardener Eric Lenoir – co-presented by Villa Albertine

Meet Punk Gardener Eric Lenoir and other figures in the urban agriculture and local rewilding community for a discussion on territorial food resilience, combating biodiversity collapse, and addressing global warming effects.

Video here.