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Dean Spade

Links
Dean Spade's Website Dean Spade on Facebook

Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He is a professor at the Seattle University School of Law.

He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law.

In 2015, Dean released a one-hour video documentary, Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!, which can be watched free online with English captions or subtitles in several languages.

Dean’s book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next)  was published by Verso Press in October 2020.

Dean’s most recent book is Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell, Together.

Dean Spade wearing a cap and glasses smiles broadly in front of a grey wall

Artist Events

2 October 2025, 13:00

Workshop on Mutual Aid with Dean Spade

Dean Spade

In this interactive workshop, Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid, will share key principles, explore common challenges in mutual aid work, and offer tools for working through them.

Still from animated film ‘shit’s totally fucked! What can we do? A mutual aid explainer’ – text and illustrations on paper and wood, that spells out “something really important about all this is that Mutual Aid is not Charity”
9 March 2022

Mutual Aid on the Road to Abolition

Dean Spade Abolitionist Futures

How do we make the connections between the mutual aid practices of our daily lives and anti-capitalist efforts to dismantle wider systems of exploitation?

Mutual Aid
Image says:Don't ask to fight their wars, don't tell them that's what we're for.
23 October 2016
Tramway

Against Inclusion

Dean Spade Eric A Stanley Mujeres Creando

What does it mean to resist seeking assimilation or inclusion within, or let our demands be co-opted by the very systems we seek to dismantle?

Episode 8: Refuse Powers’ Grasp
Text super-imposed on two people
21 October 2016
Tramway

Queer Liberation: No Prisons, No Borders

Dean Spade Hope Dector Tourmaline

A crash-course in pre-figurative, radical, queer, anti-racist, anti-police, anti-prison, anti-deportation abolitionist politics and trans-resistance.

Episode 8: Refuse Powers’ Grasp
Four people on stage have a discussion. A screen projects images behind them
21 October 2016
Tramway

Life In Flight From Every Prison

Dean Spade Joshua Allen Tourmaline We Will Rise

Is there a link between the ways we’re caged and exiled by the prison-industrial complex and the ways people’s bodies are violently categorised and segregated by race, class, gender or ability?

Episode 8: Refuse Powers’ Grasp
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