Our virtual Summer Picnic Series continues on Tuesday, August 18 with Sherrin Frances. She will talk about her new book, Libraries amid Protest: Books, Organizing, and Global Activism. Since 2011, social movements around the world, from Occupy Wall Street in New York, to Nuit Debout in Paris, to Gezi Park in Istanbul, have built temporary libraries within their protests. While these libraries typically last only a few weeks at a time and all have ultimately been dismantled or destroyed, each has managed to collect, catalog, and circulate books, serving a need not being met elsewhere. Libraries amid Protest unpacks how these protest libraries—labor-intensive, temporary installations in parks and city squares, poorly protected from the weather, at odds with security forces—continue to arise. In telling the stories of these surprising and inspiring spaces through interviews and other research, Sherrin Frances confronts the complex history of American public libraries. She argues that protest libraries function as the spaces of opportunity and resistance promised, but not delivered, by American public libraries. Frances is an associate professor of English as Saginaw Valley State University.

Please register by 4:00pm on August 18. A $5 donation to FOTR is requested, as we continue to raise money to save the Stone House. However, we recognize that finances are tight these days for many reasons, so the donation is not required.

If you do not have a PayPal account, or if the $5 is a hardship right now, please email us directly, info@friendsofroethke.org, and we will manually register you. A Zoom link will be provided to all registrants before the start of the event.

To read more about Frances or to order a copy of the book, please visit her website at https://sherrinfrances.com/. We hope you can join us!