Avsnitt
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What role did education play in the US civil rights movement? What did it look like for anti-racist organizers to build radical schooling and organizing spaces that could evade the harsh surveillance lights of white supremacy and Jim Crow? What lessons can we learn from them today?
Our March 2025 episode features journalist Elaine Weiss, who speaks about her new book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement, published by Simon and Schuster this month.
Spell Freedom traces the educational program that was the underpinning of the civil rights movement and voter registration drives. The Citizenship Schools originated from workshops in the summer of 1954 at the Highlander Center, a labor and social justice training center, located on a mountain in Monteagle, TN, just after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The heart of the book is Elaine’s vivid retelling the stories of the four main leaders of the citizenship school movement, Septima Clark, Bernice Robinson, Esau Jenkins, and one of the founders of the Highlander Center, Myles Horton. She traces the path from this mountain center to Charleston and the sea islands of South Carolina, all framed by the segregated and racist South and the leaders who rose up to organize and resist Jim Crow and create a new South.
As is often said in southern movement building (from the World Social Forum in 2006), “another South is possible; another South is necessary,” and Spell Freedom connects the histories and voices of the movements that continue to be necessary today.
Episode Credits:
Co-hosts and co-producers: Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin
Editing and Production Manager: Aliyah Harris
Intro Music: Lance Haugen and the Flying Penguins
Outro Music: "Plato's Republic" by Akrasis
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How has the intersection between religious and racial politics shaped the landscape of public education in the United States? How have communities, both past and present, historically resisted covert and overt white Christian supremacy in public education? What lessons can radical pedagogues draw from these movements today?
Our September 2024 episode features Dr. Leslie Ribovich, a scholar of American religion, religion, and education. Her book, Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools (NYU Press, 2024), is illuminating reading for anyone seeking to understand the entangled histories — and surprising consequences and reverberations — of the simultaneous legal desegregation and legal secularization of public school classrooms. From the moral codes underwriting racist school discipline policies, to presumptive Protestant norms governing moral education programs, to grassroots community movements to build more equitable and just public education systems, Without a Prayer offers key context to understanding contemporary battles over the future of public education policy. Read an excerpt here.
Leslie Ribovich is currently the Director of the Greenberg Center for Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where she is also an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Law and Public Policy. She is working on a second project about forms of moral and character education in modern U.S. history.
CREDITS
Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether
Editor, Audio Engineer, and composer of outro music: Aliyah Harris
Summer 2024 Intern: Ella Stuccio
Theme music by Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying Penguins
Support us on Patreon!
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Sometimes theories of critical pedagogy can be quite abstract. What does it look like to front concrete practices in our approaches to this tradition? How do those practices change in the context of community colleges? What can radical community college educators teach us about radical teaching and learning broadly?
Our July 2024 episode features three community college educators who co-edited the recent edited collection Humanizing Collectivist Critical Pedagogy: Teaching the Humanities in Community College and Beyond (Peter Lang 2024). This book is a must-read for teachers curious about the practical applications of critical pedagogy for crafting syllabi, building more democratic classroom structures, creating socially engaged classrooms, and fighting for more just and equitable educational systems.
Sujung Kim is an interdisciplinary scholar of critical pedagogy of higher education who is currently a research associate with the Futures Initiative and Humanities Alliance at CUNY Graduate Center. Leigh Garrison-Fetcher is a linguistics professor in the Education and Language Acquisition Department at LaGuardia Community College. Kaysi Holman is the Director of People and Culture at the California-based educational equity nonprofit 10,000 Degrees. Sujung, Leigh, and Kaysi met in the context of their shared work with the Mellon-funded CUNY Humanities Alliance—of which Kaysi was a key creator and leader—where they worked graduate teachers and faculty on creating social justice oriented classrooms.
CREDITS
Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether
Editor and Audio Engineer: Aliyah Harris
Summer 2024 Intern: Ella Stuccio
Theme music by Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying Penguins
Outro Music: “hemlock hed” by Akrasis
Support us on Patreon!
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Feminist Theater of the Oppressed: What is it? How can its philosophies and methods transform our approaches to critical pedagogy? How does Feminist Theater of the Oppressed help us reflect on improvisation, experimentation, and power in our teaching and organizing contexts?
Our June 2024 guest, Bárbara Santos, takes up these questions as a portal into discussion of how power shapes (and can be transformed in) our pedagogies. Barbára is an actress, performer, writer, and organizer. She is the artistic director and co-founder of KURINGA - Space for Theater of the Oppressed in Berlin, Germany. She is Founder of the Ma(g)dalena International Network, a collaborative of practitioners of Feminist Theater of the Oppressed based in Europe, Latin America, and Africa.
Bárbara’s work as a director, performer, organizer, and writer has been instrumental in disseminating Theater of the Oppressed globally, and elevating feminist critiques and methods within its praxis. Her books include Roots and Wings of Theater of the Oppressed (Portuguese 2016, Spanish 2017, Italian 2018, English 2019); Aesthetic Paths: Original Approaches on Theater of the Oppressed (Portuguese, 2018; English and Spanish forthcoming); and Theater of the Oppressed: Feminist Aesthetics for Political Poetics (Portuguese, 2019; English, 2023).
The tree of Theater of the Oppressed—images, movement, sounds, words, play—comes to life throughout Barbára’s work and, in the process, honors women’s lives through dialogue and political action.
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CREDITS:
Co-hosts: Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin
Audio Production and Music: Aliyah Harris
Intro Music: Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying Penguins
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What is anarchist pedagogy? What does it have to do with so-called “alternative” schools, where mainstream educational systems often send students they have expelled, suspended, or otherwise excluded? How can working at the intersection of anarchist pedagogical philosophy and marginalized educational spaces open up new layers for how we rearrange power and accountability in learning spaces?
This episode—which features teacher, educational reform leader, and principal Rodney Powell—dives into all of these questions and more.
The term “anarchist pedagogies” is not the first thing that comes to mind when we hear that someone is a high school principal. And yet this is exactly the combination at the center of this episode. Rodney Powell exposes preconceptions not only about this administrative role, but also about what “anarchy” can mean in theory and practice. Powell is the founder of EdArchy.org, described as “a youth development program committed to providing young people with the resources to imagine and create their own community-focused, authentic learning experiences.” He has his feet in two worlds: the traditional school where he pushes, when possible, for more democratic relations with his teaching staff through resistance and revolution (not reform), and the EdArchy program. Given the strictures of traditional educational systems, Powell has imagined this other space to subvert the dominant educational paradigms, where students can practice the student-centered and consented, co-designed, mutually-empowering, dream-incubating, and community-connected learning possibilities of education.
Over his twenty-four years in education, Rodney Powell has led school systems in Baltimore, Hartford, and in his current role as a principal in Danbury Public Schools in Connecticut. A 2023-24 member of the Nelle Mae Foundation Speakers Bureau on racial equity in public education, he is also pursuing his doctorate at Northeastern University. There, as in all his other work, his research focuses on partnering with youth toward greater agency, consent, and justice in learning.
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What does critical pedagogy offer when it comes to texts entangled with histories of oppression and disenfranchisement? How might we approach these texts so as to ask new questions and bring out different stories?
In this episode, we discuss these questions with three scholars from the Institute for Signifying Scriptures. These scholars discuss how the normative ways of studying "sacred texts" -- from "religious" texts like the Bible to "secular" texts like the US Constitution -- as historical artifacts with defined origins tends to reproduce colonial logics and exclude the voices of those on the margins of class and social power. They also share methods for engaging sacred texts in ways that challenge those power dynamics and foster critical imagination.
Dr. Vincent Wimbush is Director of the ISS and past president of of the Society for Biblical Literature. He is a prolific writer, whose works include White Men's Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (2012) and Black Flesh Matters: Essays on Ranagate Interpretation (2022). He was on the filmmaking team that produced the award-winning documentary Finding God in the City of Angels (2021).
Dr. Jacqueline Hidalgo is a Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego. She is the author of Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement (2016).
Dr. Richard Newton is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures (2020).
The next meeting of the Institute for Sacred Scriptures will be held in Atlanta, GA, April 11-13, 2024. The theme for the 2024 Meeting is Marronage: A Special Meeting in Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the ISS and the 25th Anniversary of African Americans and the Bible.
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What does it mean to “teach in and for freedom”?
What does it look like to create liberatory spaces centered around the lives and needs of faculty and students of color?
How do we sustain and defend such feminist and anti-racist teaching against threats of institutional cooptation, censure, and exploitation?
To ring out 2023, we welcome Professor Lorgia García-Peña to discuss these topics and so much more. Dr. García-Peña is currently a Professor of Latinx Studies at the Efron Center for the Study of America and the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She has authored three books, all of which have won multiple awards. These include: The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Duke 2016), Translating Blacknesss: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke 2022), and Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color (Haymarket 2022).
A co-founder of Freedom University and a leader of the movement to create an Ethnic Studies concentration at Harvard, Dr. García-Peña's labors to create more equitable, empowering institutional spaces for students and faculty of color is well-known. Community as Rebellion, which reflects on many of these projects, has been praised by Angela Davis as a “life-saving and life-affirming text” that charts a “fearless strategy” for “how our institutions might be reimagined beyond the strongholds of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.” These strategies—and the stories, experiences, and analyses that have fueled them—are at the heart of our conversation in this episode.
Credits:
Co-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin + Lucia Hulsether
Audio editing + outro music by Aliyah Harris
Intro music by Lance Hogan, performed by Aviva and the Flying Penguins.
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Many of us think of public libraries primarily as places to read and check out books—but this is only the beginning of their role in our communities. What else do libraries do? What roles do libraries and librarians play in broader movements for social democracy and educational access? How can we collectively defend our libraries from right-wing attacks on their vital work?
Our November 2023 episode features one activist librarian, Oscar Gittemeier, about his journey into library work, his vision of the social justice focus of libraries, and the challenges in these politically-polarized times. Oscar is the Program Manager of Innovation and Engagement at the City of San Diego Public Library. Before turning to his vocation of Library and Information Studies (with a certificate in Leadership and Management), his background was in Sociology and Women’s Studies.
Oscar brings an intersectional sensitivity to his outreach work to bring libraries to the community: for example, through surveying people in detention centers and providing them with library cards upon release, creating a fundraiser calendar in Fulton County, GA libraries (“Libraries Are Such A Drag”) for a scholarship fund, and in general rethinking the space and function of libraries to meet community needs. He takes us through complex issues of providing access to all, along with other challenges and opportunities that public libraries are facing today. Oscar sends us out with encouragement to plug into a local “Friends of the Public Library” chapter, so that we can ensure the important work libraries do to create a more just world.
Credits:
Co-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether
Audio editing + outro music by Aliyah Harris
Intro music by Lance Hogan, performed by Aviva and the Flying Penguins
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What might educators learn from practitioners of conflict mediation and transformative justice? What does it look like to enact “beloved community” in our classrooms, organizations, and movements? What should teachers and learners do to better align our ideals of justice and equity with our day-to-day practices?
Peace educator and nonviolence practitioner Kazu Haga joins us to reflect on these questions and more. The author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm (2020), Kazu has spent 20+ training communities in practices of conflict reconciliation, harm reduction, and nonviolent action. As the founder of the East Point Peace Academy, and now as a core member of the Ahimsa Collective and the Embodiment Project, he has taught restorative practices to high schools and youth groups, prisons and jails, and numerous activist and social movement organizations around the world. He is the recipient of several awards, including a Martin Luther King, Jr. Award from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Gil Lopez Award for Peacemaking. His next book, Fierce Vulnerability: Direct Action that Heals and Transforms, will be published in August 2024.
Credits:
Co-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether
Audio editor: Aliyah Harris
Intro music by Lance Hogan, performed by Aviva and the Flying Penguins
Outro music by Akrasis
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What does transformative justice look like in practice? What does it mean to teach transformative justice, so that we destroy the cops in our heads and hearts, and begin to build something new?
In this episode, Mia Mingus -- visionary movement builder, transformative justice organizer, and human rights + disability justice educator -- dives into these questions and more. We discuss the educational experiences that inspired Mia to her current work, Transformative Justice (TJ) frameworks for community accountability and creative intervention, pedagogies of workshopping, and Pod Mapping as a tool for organizing and movement building.
More about our guest:
Mia Mingus is a co-founder of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective: Building Transformative Justice Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (BATJC) and the founder and leader of SOIL: A Transformative Justice Project.
Mia inspires us to consider words like dignity, love, compassion, care, and justice in ways that address harm and violence and also bring concrete repair and change. For Mia, the opening question of transformative justice is: “What are the conditions that allowed for that violence or that harm to be able to take place in the first place?” The focus is on dismantling oppressive systems and building new, liberatory structures. This justice work is done in intersectional and interdependent community.
“Magnificence comes out of our struggle,” she writes. We think that Mia and the worlds she is building are magnificent, and we encourage you to check out her many published writings, many of which are collected on her blog Leaving Evidence.
Credits:
Co-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether
Audio editor: Aliyah Harris
Intro music by Lance Hogan, performed by Aviva and the Flying Penguins
Outro music by Akrasis
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Is universal design even possible? What does harm reduction look like in a classroom or on a syllabus? What role have university centers for teaching and learning played in supporting radical pedagogy--and when and where have they interrupted projects of liberation? We address these questions in the second part of our series with Sarah Silverman.
Sarah E. Silverman, feminist instructional designer and disability studies scholar, breaks down these questions and their reverberant implications. Dr. Silverman is a leading voice in the multi-front movement to resist remote proctoring and educational surveillance technologies, as well as to promote authentic assessment and universal design for learning (UDL). A generous critic and prolific writer—especially on her extraordinarily useful blog—Dr. Silverman was until very recently based at the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. Currently, she is working as an independent scholar and lecturer. She holds a PhD in Entomology and Demography from the University of California, Davis.
This is the second part of a two-part series:
Part 1 maps the terrain of academic surveillance tech and introduces universal design as a specifically feminist approach to pedagogy, with concrete examples from Sarah's own practice.Part 2 digs deeper into these issues, as we discuss principles of the “non-abusive syllabus," classroom practices of harm reduction, and the ambivalent institutional role of university centers for teaching and learning.Credits: Outro Music by Akrasis (Max Bowen, raps; Mark McKee, beats); audio editing by Aliyah Harris; production by Lucia Hulsether + Tina Pippin.
Support us on Patreon!
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How can we prioritize multiplicity and accessibility when designing learning activities? What does an “inclusive” pedagogy entail? Can design ever be universal? And how can teachers and learners make the most of digital tools while also resisting the creep of academic surveillance technologies into our classrooms, homes, and bodies?
Sarah E. Silverman, feminist instructional designer and disability studies scholar, breaks down these questions and their reverberant implications. Dr. Silverman is a leading voice in the multi-front movement to resist remote proctoring and educational surveillance technologies, as well as to promote authentic assessment and universal design for learning (UDL). A generous critic and prolific writer—especially on her extraordinarily useful blog—Dr. Silverman is currently based at the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She holds a PhD in Entomology and Demography from the University of California, Davis.
Our conversation is divided into two parts.
Part 1 maps the terrain of academic surveillance tech and introduces universal design as a specifically feminist approach to pedagogy, with concrete examples from Sarah's own practice.Part 2 (coming soon!) digs deeper into these issues, as we discuss principles of the “non-abusive syllabus," classroom practices of harm reduction, and the ambivalent institutional role of university centers for teaching and learning.Credits: Outro Music by Akrasis (Max Bowen, raps; Mark McKee, beats); audio editing by Aliyah Harris; production by Lucia Hulsether + Tina Pippin.
Support us on Patreon!
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What becomes possible when we anchor our pedagogical praxes in frameworks of reproductive justice and intersectional feminist care? What coalitions grow? What visions are revealed, and what worlds emerge?
Teacher, organizer, storyteller, and freedom-fighter Loretta Ross shares her wisdom on these questions and so much more. Topics include: attacks on reproductive autonomy, to politicized teaching in a democratic classroom, to the history of Black women's organizing, to creative and effective protest tactics, to the "rotating international favorites" served at the West Point Military Academy dinner club.
Loretta Ross is a movement visionary recently recognized as a Class of 2022 MacArthur Genius Fellow. After working at the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta, she went on to found and then become the National Coordinator of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. She has taught very widely, in and out of the university, as Founder of the National Center for Human Rights Education, as Program Director of the National Black Women's Health Project, and now as the Associate Professor in the Program on Women and Gender at Smith College.
She is a prolific author, whose authored and co-authored works include Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (2017), Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique (2017), and Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice (2004). Her forthcoming book, Calling In the Calling Out Culture, will be out in 2023.
Credits: Outro Music by Akrasis (Max Bowen, raps; Mark McKee, beats); audio editing by Aliyah Harris; production by Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin.
Support us on Patreon!
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How can we ground our classrooms in praxes of environmental justice? How can teachers and learners build ethical connections to local communities mobilizing against climate emergency and structural abandonment?
Scholar-activist Ellen Spears joins us to discuss these questions and more. Prof. Spears is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. She is a prolific author, whose most recent books include the award-winning Baptized in PCBs: Race, Religion, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (2014) and Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945 (2019). She was part of the Task Force on History, Slavery, and Civil Rights at the UA-Tuscaloosa. Her courses range from comparative ecologies, to environmental ethics and policy, to environment and film.
Co-Hosts: Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin
Music by Akrasis
Image by LL Sammons via Unsplash
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As calls to decolonize education multiply across contexts and institutions, we must push this issue beyond optics and return to the question: what does commitment to decolonization demand? What risks and struggles? What experiments and solidarities?
Leigh Patel guides us as we embark on a deep dive into these urgent questions as they ramify across scales. Refusing to partition study from struggle, Patel exposes the settler colonial processes that continue to shape higher education, even as she lifts up radical projects of education otherwise.
Leigh Patel is Professor of Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy in the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. Her most recent book is No Study without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education.
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Amid the newest wave of attacks on public education and inclusive learning, there are stories of hope and resistance. In this episode we talk with a high school social studies teacher at the front of the fight for antiracist, liberatory K-12 classrooms. Anthony Downer teaches Africana Studies, social studies, and civics at Frederick Douglass High School in the Atlanta Public School system. We talk to Anthony about how he and his students are working together to create a trauma-informed, healing-centric classroom.
More about our guest: Anthony Downer teaches Africana Studies, social studies, and civics at Frederick Douglass High School in the Atlanta Public School system. He attended public schools in Gwinett County, Georgia, attained a BA in Political Science at the University of Chicago and a Master's of Art in Teaching in social studies education at Georgia State University.
Anthony is a co-founder and vice president of Georgia Educators for Equity and Justice, the founder and Vice President of the Liberation Learning Lab, and the host of his podcast “Wat Dat Wednesday: Conversations on Education and Liberation” on Educational Entities. Find it on Youtube and Instagram Live: @thenawfstar.
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The common workplace issues of low pay, toxic environment, understaffing, corporate greed, wage theft, union busting, and high turnover also exist in institutions of higher education. Undergraduate students typically earn low wages at campus jobs. In this podcast we explore the concept that students are workers, due just wages and benefits and voice. Beginning in 2016, undergraduate students at Grinnell College in Iowa have worked to form the first union of undergraduate student workers, the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers (UGSDW). Union leaders, senior Keir Hichens and sophomore Malcolm Galpern Levin, are with us to give us the history of the movement, along with details of their organizing strategies. The union’s description is as “the only independent undergraduate labor union in the country, UGSDW fights for fair pay and benefits for workers at UGSDW.” Keir and Malcolm describe the context, the organizing process, the setbacks, the networks and coalitions, the victories, and the future expansion of the union. Students at Grinnell are discovering what collective power can do. As they work for transparency and accountability from their supervisors and the administration, they also address issues of food insecurity on campus. Keir and Malcolm provide insights on the value of undergraduate labor organizing to their own lives, to campus culture, and to the labor movement broadly.
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What happens to grassroots movements when they get access to normative power? How does one resist capture? What traditions, theories, and cautionary tales should we reference?
Professor and critic Roderick Ferguson, author of We Demand: The University and Student Protests, among many other works on social movements and the politics of institutional dissent, joins us to discuss these themes, and much more, in our May 2022 episode.
This interview is for all who know that tough moral or political bind: between intellection and administration; between creative risk and bureaucratic necessity; between holding a radical critique of power and resisting cooptation in everyday life.
Credits
Music by Aviva and the Flying Penguins, Paul Myhrie, Aliyah Harris, and Akrasis (aka Mark McKee + Max Bowen)
Logo design by Emily Vinick
Co-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether
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Get ready for a master class in Theater of the Oppressed! This month we welcome playwright, director, and author Adrian Jackson. Adrian is best known his role as the founder and longtime artistic director London-based theater and arts company Cardboard Citizens, which is dedicated to working with and for people who have experienced homelessness and poverty. Come for the raucous theater games, stay for the organic wisdom and transformative potential that they unlock.
Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether
Outro music by Akrasis (Max Bowen raps; Mark McKee beats)
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How should we collectively defend classrooms from the neoliberal assault on democratic praxis and critical pedagogies? What histories, traditions, and alliances should shape our tactics?
Renowned critical pedagogue and prolific theorist Ira Shor, Professor Emeritus at CUNY Graduate Center, joins us to discuss these questions--and to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Nothing Never Happens.
Ira Shor has produced several foundational works in the practice of critical pedagogy. Some of his books include Culture Wars, Critical Education and Everyday Life, Empowering Education, When Students Have Power, and, with Paulo Freire, A Pedagogy for Liberation. Ira has supported this podcast since he agreed to be our first-ever guest back in March 2017.
Music by Aviva and the Flying Penguins, Paul Myhrie, Aliyah Harris, and Akrasis (aka Mark McKee + Max Bowen).
Logo design by Emily Vinick.
Co-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether.
- Visa fler
