Exit Strategies: Contesting the Future of Capitalism

Jeanelle K. Hope is a lecturer at the University of California Washington Center. Broadly, her research and teaching interests are in post-Civil Rights era African American history, Blacks in the West, Afro-Asian solidarity and radicalism, Black political thought, and social movements. She served as a lead curator for the 2026 Smithsonian exhibition, At the Vanguard: Making and Saving History at HBCUs. Prior to working with museums, Hope spent over 15 years in higher education, having served as the inaugural director and associate professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University, among other appointments. She co-authored The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition (Haymarket Books) and is currently completing her forthcoming book, “A Ministry of Solidarity & Liberation: Rev. Cecil Williams & Janice Mirikitani’s Transformative Activism at Glide Memorial Church,” to be published by the University of Washington Press. Beyond book-length works, Dr. Hope’s research has been published in several academic journals including American Studies Journal, Amerasia, Journal of Political Economy, and Black Camera, and her public scholarship has been featured in Truthout, Essence, Lux Magazine, and African American Policy Forum.

Tristan Hughes (PhD 2025, Princeton) is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia whose research is about  slavery, empire, and capitalism. His work has been published in the European Journal of Political Theory, Studies in American Political Development, and the Journal of Political Ideologies, as well as popular outlets. His book manuscript is tentatively entitled “The Science of Slavery.”

Clara E. Mattei is a professor of economics at the University of Tulsa and the founding president of FREE: Forum for Real Economic Emancipation (freefreeforum.org), where she hosts a weekly FREE podcast. Mattei was previously associate professor at The New School for Social Research’s economics department and has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ. Her research contributes to the analysis and history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making. Her first book, Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press, 2022), has been translated into over a dozen languages. It was named one of the Financial Times’ 10 Best Economics Books of 2022 and was awarded the 2023 Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association, as well as the 2026 Hans Matthöfer Prize in Germany. The book investigates the origins of austerity in the aftermath of the First World War, uncovering its logic as a tool of reaction deployed against alternatives to capitalism. Mattei recently published her trade book, Escape from Capitalism (Allen Lane-Penguin Books, UK and Simon & Schuster, US, 2026), which will soon be translated into multiple languages, including French, German, and Italian. She is currently working on a book project that critically reassesses the golden age of capitalism (1945–75) and its Keynesianism through the lens of austerity capitalism. Her writings have appeared in The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation, and Il Fatto Quotidiano, the Italian national newspaper to which she regularly contributes.