About


The We Know How To Party is a consciousness and culture project curated by Annie Xibos Spencer, PhD.



Annie Spencer, PhD, is an embodied researcher who has dedicated the past twenty years to the analysis of economics' death drive. At the core is a belief in collective liberation and charting paths to other possible worlds. With lived experience in capitalism's operating rooms, Annie’s work combines an academic background in human geography and abolitionist theory (at the CUNY Graduate Center) with on-the-ground harm reduction, mutual aid, and economic solidarity organizing. The focus is always big-picture questions of struggle, survival, relational healing, liberation and the quest for human flourishing. Annie writes for those who have a hard time imagining alternatives, whether because they are shy or heartbroken.

As a traveling host, Annie is currently building a movement of researchers — drafted both from educational institutions and from the frontlines of direct action — who steal the best analytical and research tools from academia and distribute and apply them in the commons. Annie's new book How To Break an Addiction: A Method-in-a-Manifesto for Quitting Capitalism (Common Notions, 2024) uses the US opioid epidemic as a prism through which to view capitalism's ill fit for life on Earth and models a relational style of research, inquiry and practice that can be replicated to grow new webs of meaning, visioning, and acting in common.

They are currently working on several new projects and books, including the umbrella organization for their rogue researchers' movement called The We Know How To Party, which plays with questions of geographical scale, consciousness and culture to imagine "a global party for pro-Earth Earthlings."

Courses taught:

University of Southern Maine 2018-2019, 2016-2017 - Department of Social Sciences Bates College 2016 - Department of American and African American Studies Hunter College CUNY 2011-2015 [BACK]