Nothing Never Happens

What pedagogies arise from institutional betrayal? How can we do the work we love in contexts where harassment is endemic and administrative responses to it escalate the problem? What assumptions have normalized the expectation that our institutions cannot be spaces of love?In this episode, we welcome Dr. Jennifer Doyle to discuss all of these issues as they arise in her most recent book, Shadow of My Shadow (Duke University Press, 2024). This remarkable work develops from Doyle's own experience of being stalked by a student and unfurls into a bracing critique of the institutional administration of harassment cases--as well as the attachments that arise in their aftermath. This line of inquiry builds on Doyle's Campus Sex / Campus Security (Semiotexte, 2015), on how the bureaucratic management of sex on college campuses coincides with the militarization of campus police.Jennifer Doyle is a writer, arts and performance curator, sports analyst, and professor of English. She serves on the Board of Directors of Human Resources Los Angeles; her most recent co/curated exhibition is Sciencia Sexualis at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, LA (2024-2025). In addition to the books named above, Jennifer is the author of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2013) and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). She is also the voice behind the beloved soccer blog From a Left Wing (2007-2013) and, now, The Sport Spectacle.Links to recommended stuff!Esme Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf, 2019)Barbara Johnson, "Muteness Envy" in The Barbara Johnson Reader (Duke UP, 2014)Francois Tosquelles, Psychotherapy and Materialism, English translation (ICI Berlin Press, 2024)Camille Robcis, Disalienation (University of Chicago Press 2021)Colm Toibin, The Magician (Scribner, 2022)Alexandra Horowitz, On Looking (Scribner, 2014)Becky Hammon's Crucifix on BlueSkyCaster Semenya, Race to Be Myself (WW Norton, 2025)Episode Credits:Co-hosts and co-producers: Lucia Hulsether and Tina PippinEditing and Production Manager: Aliyah HarrisIntro Music: Lance Haugen and the Flying PenguinsOutro Music: Akrasis

What do advocates for educational justice need to know about school financing? What's the relationship between the critical pedagogy and the budget sheets that get passed around at school board meetings? What kinds of community organizing do we need to change how school financing works?In this episode, we welcome writer and organizer David I. Backer to discuss these questions and more. David is best known for his substack, Schooling in Socialist America, a public project in which he investigates (and educates his readers about) the ins and outs of school finance policy, with an emphasis on the politics of racial capitalism, climate change, and infrastructure. His forthcoming book, As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America's Schools (The New Press, 2025), is a deep dive into these issues--and a positive vision of what can change.David has also published two other books. The first, Elements of Discussion, is a "practical-poetic" reflection emerging from his PhD dissertation on pedagogical theories of discussion. The second, Althusser and Education was praised by a reviewer as “the most comprehensive and nuanced reading of Althusser’s thinking in the English language.”Currently, David is an Associate Professor of Education Policy at Seton Hall University.Links to recommended stuff!WPRB - Princeton Public Radio (great music)China Mieville, The Scar (book)The Debt Collective (organizing collective)Nick Doox, The N-Word of God (book)Democracy Now daily podcastBehind the News with Doug Henwood (podcast)Beef and Dairy Network (podcast)EMEL (musician)Mustafa (musician)Astrid Sonne (musician)Episode Credits:Co-hosts and co-producers: Lucia Hulsether and Tina PippinEditing and Production Manager: Aliyah HarrisIntro Music: Lance Haugen and the Flying PenguinsOutro Music: Akrasis

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 PippinEditing and Production Manager: Aliyah HarrisIntro Music: Lance Haugen and the Flying PenguinsOutro Music: "Plato's Republic" by Akrasis

What is education for? What modes of study become possible beyond the frameworks of formal schools and universities? How does radical studying fit into the work of grassroots liberation work?As we enter the new year, educator, writer, and organizer Eli Meyerhoff brings us back to foundational questions about radical pedagogy. His book Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World rejects narrow, romanticized, disciplinary modes of education. It elaborates the concept of “modes of study” — which cracks open possibilities for how we might learn, teach, transform, and organize together. He is one of the co-collaborators on Abolition University and Cops Off Campus Research Project. Recently Eli has written important critiques of the "Antisemitism 101" trainings held by universities in response to Palestine liberation and anti-Zionist organizers.Currently, Eli currently works at Duke University at the John Hope Franklin Center Humanities Lab. He has previously worked as an adjunct instructor at the University of Minnesota and at Duke. He earned a PhD in Political Science, with a political theory focus, from the University of Minnesota in 2013. Episode Credits:Co-hosts and co-producers: Lucia Hulsether and Tina PippinEditing and Production Manager: Aliyah HarrisIntro Music: Lance Haugen and the Flying PenguinsOutro Music: "Plato's Republic" by Akrasis

This podcast is a dual release between Nothing Never Happens and The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism’s “Unpacking Zionism” podcast.* * * * * How have the norms of mainstream educational institutions shaped how teachers and students can study and talk about Zionism? What does it mean to study Zionism critically? What does the current moment -- fourteen months into an ongoing genocide of Palestinians, when global solidarity movements persist in the face of extreme repression -- require of radical pedagogues? What knowledge, tools, and legacies of struggle should we turn to for guidance?In this dual-release episode, Tina and Lucia interview two founding collective members of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), Dr. Emmaia Gelman and Dr. Yulia Gilich. The Institute examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions within and beyond their direct advocacy for Israel. Our conversation includes the genesis of ICSZ and its interventions into institutional norms around the study of Zionism, the creation of their No IHRA Toolkit (in response to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism), the weaponization of antisemitism through definitions and other repressive means, and examples of creative and critical pedagogies investigating Zionism in higher education classes. More about our guests:Emmaia Gelman has taught at NYU and Sarah Lawrence College. She researches the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as political levers in the realm of hate crimes policy, surveillance, anti-terror measures, and war. Emmaia is at work on a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (1913-1990). She is the co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, and a longtime activist in New York City on Palestine, policing, antiracism, and queer issues. Yulia Gilich is a media artist, theorist, and community organizer. They are a founding collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. They received their PhD in Film & Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz where they are currently a lecturer teaching courses at the intersection of critical race and media studies.CREDITSCo-produced with the "Unpacking Zionism" podcast team -- thanks especially to Emmaia and Yulia for your back-end editing work!Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia HulsetherEditor and audio engineer: Aliyah HarrisSummer 2024 Intern: Ella StuccioTheme music by Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying PenguinsOutro music is "Unnervous" by AkrasisSupport Nothing Never Happens on Patreon!

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.CREDITSCo-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia HulsetherEditor, Audio Engineer, and composer of outro music: Aliyah HarrisSummer 2024 Intern: Ella StuccioTheme music by Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying PenguinsSupport us on Patreon!

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.CREDITSCo-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia HulsetherEditor and Audio Engineer: Aliyah HarrisSummer 2024 Intern: Ella StuccioTheme music by Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying PenguinsOutro Music: “hemlock hed” by AkrasisSupport us on Patreon!

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.* * * * CREDITS:Co-hosts: Lucia Hulsether and Tina PippinAudio Production and Music: Aliyah HarrisIntro Music: Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying Penguins

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.

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.

How can we align our pedagogies with the Palestinian freedom struggle and other anti-colonial movements? How do we tune our minds and imaginations toward just futures--even and especially when facing retaliation for liberationist stances?In light of the reinvigorated global struggle for a free Palestine, and as we witness the state of Israel's ongoing genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, we are re-releasing our January 2021 interview with poet, scholar, teacher, and organizer Dina Omar. Dina, received her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University and who was one of the founders of the national network of Students for Justice in Palestine, speaks to us about the intersection of Palestine liberation and our pedagogical frameworks -- from our decisions about language and representation, to the exhaustion of social suffering paradigms, to the psychological effects of occupation and eliminatory violence. A thesis of this episode is that, whether or not our teaching is “about” Palestine, it cannot be separated from its struggle. This of course in part because of the alignment of many of our institutions of higher education with the Israeli state. But, as Dina explains, it is also because of how a colonial project mediates the language we use to think about, much less talk about, what is happening in Palestine and Israel. This means that, whether or not the history and politics of Palestine comes up explicitly in a lesson plan, the practice of learning to read and learning to identify narrative obfuscation, takes on higher stakes.A list of resources for further learning + organizing:-Palestine and Praxis Statement, referenced in the episode, written in 2021 and co-authored by Dina Omar.-The Palestinian Feminist Collective, a collective of Palestinian/Arab feminists working toward Palestinian liberation. See their site for resources + action toolkits.-Writers Against the War on Gaza, a coalition of culture workers organizing against the war and compiling resources for resistance.-The Dig, a podcast of Jacobin, has published a number of illuminating episodes on the Palestine, Zionism and anti-Zionism, and the larger contexts around the current catastrophe.-The Electronic Intifada is an independent news organization focusing primarily on Palestine.-Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands by Sonia Nimr, recommended by Dina OmarShow Credits:Outro music is "Hemlock" by Akrasis. Find their amazing catalog here. Episode photo by Corleone Brown on Unsplash. Editing and audio production by Aliyah Harris. Production by Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin.

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 HulsetherAudio editing + outro music by Aliyah HarrisIntro music by Lance Hogan, performed by Aviva and the Flying Penguins.

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 HulsetherAudio editing + outro music by Aliyah HarrisIntro music by Lance Hogan, performed by Aviva and the Flying Penguins

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 HulsetherAudio editor: Aliyah HarrisIntro music by Lance Hogan, performed by Aviva and the Flying PenguinsOutro music by Akrasis

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 HulsetherAudio editor: Aliyah HarrisIntro music by Lance Hogan, performed by Aviva and the Flying PenguinsOutro music by Akrasis

What is the role of education within radical and revolutionary movements? Is the classroom a political space? How do traditions of Marxian thought and pedagogy frame those questions?In this episode, Derek R. Ford offers a crash orientation to the terrain of Marxist educational theory and practice, with a focus on its dynamic expressions in resistance movements, organizing campaigns, and more formal schooling contexts. Topics include Marxian traditions of education, dialogical pedagogy, practices of interpretation in a so-called "post-truth" era, and cultivating learning spaces where all people can experience the freedom and invitation to learn, question, explore, and build new ways of living and being.Derek Ford is an organizer, author, and teacher with deep ties to Left movement spaces. Currently an Assistant Professor of Education Studies at DePauw University, their books include Teaching the Actuality of Revolution: Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Sensations of Struggle (2023), Communist Study: Education for the Commons (2022), Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy (2022), Inhuman Educations: Jean-Francois Lyotard, Pedagogy, Thought (2021), and many edited books and articles on eco and urban pedagogies and politics. They are also an editor at Liberation School where they help to create the Reading Capital with Comrades podcast series.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!

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!

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!

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!

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 PippinMusic by AkrasisImage by LL Sammons via Unsplash

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.

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. 

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.

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. CreditsMusic by Aviva and the Flying Penguins, Paul Myhrie, Aliyah Harris, and Akrasis (aka Mark McKee + Max Bowen)Logo design by Emily VinickCo-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether

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 HulsetherOutro music by Akrasis (Max Bowen raps; Mark McKee beats)

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.

What does it look like for pedagogy to begin with the stories, hopes, and critiques that are already present in the classroom? How has this approach to education been practiced in movements for social transformation? What are its demands on teachers and learners?In our January 2022 episode, teacher and author Stephen Preskill joins us to talk these questions and much more. Topics include balancing discrete political paradigms with democratic methods, the difference between integrative democratic practices and one-off pedagogical "tricks," and Preskill's new book Teaching in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center's Vision for Social Justice.

What are the implicit "agreements" structuring our teaching and learning practices? How might we create new agreements for educational justice and collective healing? Professor Emerita Laura Rendón talks college access, contemplative teaching, and practices for survival and connection in our December 2021 episode.Music credit: "Water's Edge" by Aliyah HarrisPhoto credit: @jrkorpa at Unsplash

How is public higher education implicated with settler colonial dispossession and genocide? What are methods to visualize, teach, and encourage continual investigation and intervention into these continually unfolding histories? Project team leaders behind Polk Prize-winning Land Grab University research project and database join us to talk these questions and more in our November 2021 episode of Nothing Never Happens.Speakers: Tristan Ahtone (Kiowa), Margaret Pearce (Citizen Band Potowatomi), Bobby Lee.Hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether

How can we align our pedagogies with the Palestinian freedom struggle and other movements for indigenous liberation? Scholar, teacher, and poet Dina Omar joins us to follow this question into the many others it opens up -- from decisions about language and representation, to the exhaustion of social suffering paradigms, to the psychological effects of occupation and eliminatory violence. We urge listeners to read and adopt the commitments outlined in the open letter "Palestine and Praxis," which our guest co-authored and which is linked below.Open letter: https://palestineandpraxis.weebly.com/Outro music is "Hemlock" by Akrasis. Find their amazing catalog here.Episode photo by Corleone Brown on Unsplash.

When does a university cease to serve a public good? What would it look like for universities to work toward justice and solidarity with the cities they call home? In the second episode of this two-part series, historian and critic Davarian Baldwin gives us more tools for understanding the dynamics of race and capital structuring urban higher education in the United States--from campus police forces, to university medical complexes, to the low-wage labor on which they depend. We then turn to the community movements and pedagogical interventions that are envisioning, and enacting, alternative visions of city learning and urban life.

What do you get when you cross a school, a real estate tycoon, a hedge fund, a regional medical complex, a massive transit system, a private police force, a low-wage employer, and tax-exemption? Answer: an urban university. In this two-part series, accomplished historian and cultural critic Davarian Baldwin breaks down the relations of pillage, dispossession, and private profit that are increasingly prominent in the U.S. higher education landscape.

What do we need to learn to save the planet? Tina and Lucia discuss climate crisis, ecopedagogy, and liberatory teaching about environmental justice with critical pedagogue Greg Misiaszek.

What happens when Theater of the Oppressed meets the prison industrial complex? Wende Ballew, Executive Director of Reforming Arts, shares their work to bring arts-centered liberal education to women who must make their lives in and through contexts of state carceral control. We discuss how Wende came to this work, institutional tightropes they walk, and what intentional space for creativity and critique can make possible (hint: a lot, but this isn't an it-gets-better story).

 Our June 2021 episode features two accomplished leaders in the movement to decolonize higher education. Graduates Leah Trotman and Catherine Morkel share their work to establish a more anti-racist, decolonial liberal arts curriculum at Agnes Scott College,. We analyze institutional responses to student leaders who demand that institutions make good on their surface commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. https://nothingneverhappens.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NNH-5-7-2021-redo-1.mp3 Leah Trotman, ASC 2021 Click above for SGA Resolution!Leah Trotman, ASC 2021More About Our GuestsOur guests authored, with colleagues Elizabeth Dudley and Alexis Mack, a valuable example of the necessary thinking about the importance of decolonizing the curriculum.Leah Trotman is 2021 Student Government Association President at Agnes Scott College and a senior International Relations major. She is also both a Truman and a Marshall Scholar, with public health research experience at the CDC and in her home island, the U.S. Virgin Islands. Catherine Morkel is the 2021 SGA Vice President. She is a senior Chemistry major and peer leader on campus.Some would say that a podcast with college students is somewhere down the intellectual hierarchy chain from the top Freirean and radical pedagogy scholars—and if this is you, we suggest re-reading Freire. He reminds us: “Liberatory education is fundamentally a situation where the teacher and the students both have to be learners, both have to be cognitive subjects, in spite of being different. This, for me, is the first test of liberating education, for teachers and students both to be critical agents in the act of knowing.”What Leah and Catherine are up against, of course, is a neoliberal, capitalist institution, a panopticon of power relations, if you will. And they are up against an institution they care deeply about in our critical assessment. Any one listening to this podcast who has been or is a student activist can attest to the obstacles the dominant structure places in the path of systemic change.The post No Tokens: Students Decolonizing the Curriculum appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

Our April 2021 guest is Jodi Melamed, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette University. We spill tea on gestures of liberation that are not liberative, institutional multiculturalisms, and practices of anti-racist pedagogy.About our guest:Jodi Melamed is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette University. Her first book Represent and Destroy is a devastating analysis of how powerful liberal and neoliberal institutions have responded to the demands of radical anti-racist movements. In this work, Jodi coins the phrase “official anti-racism” to describe the pedagogies of racial knowledge that not only foreclose materialist account of racial justice, but augment forms of racist violence now signified through optics of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism. Her current project, Dispossession By Administration, builds on this analysis by reflecting on how apparently neutral bureaucratic language paves the way for racist capitalist violence. You can find her presenting a portion of it here.Music:Closing music: “And We Out” by Akrasis: Max Bowen (raps/guitar) and Mark McKee (beats/trumpet), 2013. Available on Bandcamp.

This month we welcome Prof. Felicia Rose Chavez, award-winning educator and author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. We dig into the history of writing programs, a vision of decolonized writing classrooms, intersections of activism and teaching, specific pedagogical strategies, and more.https://nothingneverhappens.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/NNH-03-172021.mp3About Our GuestFelicia Rose Chavez has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. In addition to authoring The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Prof. Chavez is the co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT (with Willie Perdomo and Jose Olivarez). Currently, she is the Bronfman Creativity & Innovation Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College, teaching courses in Creative Nonfiction, The Inspiration Lab, Digital Storytelling, and The Podcast, where students develop an audio essay around their writing and voice. Chavez has served as Program Director at Young Chicago Authors, taught at the University of Iowa (where she received, and survived and transformed, her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing), the University of New Mexico, and now Colorado College, winning multiple teaching awards.The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop combines elements of memoir and critique to reveal the burden of the traditional canon and educational system on students, especially students of marginalized groups. Chavez also explores ways to design more inclusive, democratic, and decolonized writing workshops—and classroom communities. For any teachers committed to deconstructing traditional white supremacist, patriarchal models of power and voice in the classroom, this book is foundational. For the traditionalists holding fast to a decaying hierarchical system, this book is necessary. The post Product to Process: The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

Our February 2021 episode features Theresa Ronquillio and Tikka Sears, who joined us for a conversation about using Theater of the Oppressed across pedagogical medium. They offer insights on fostering embodied practice, social change, and community building in virtual spaces.https://nothingneverhappens.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/15-01-2021-NNH.mp3Through these theater pedagogies, Tikka and Theresa welcome participants to bring their whole selves into the learning process. Both make real Augusto Boal’s dictum, “The theater itself is not revolutionary: it a rehearsal for the revolution.” About Our Guests   Tikka Sears is a theater director and performing artist in Seattle and is the Artistic Director and founder of the Memory War Theater and Theater for Change (formerly the Interactive Theater as Pedagogy Project). She was a Fulbright-Artist-in-Residence in Indonesia for two years.  Dr. Ronquillo holds a doctorate in Social Work and is the founder of Embody Change. She is affiliate faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Inclusive Excellence program that is “rooted at the intersection of arts, anti-oppression and multi-level change.” She is a theatre of the oppressed facilitator and practitioner of the liberatory arts. A second-generation Filipina-American, Theresa describes herself with these words: “I am a storyteller. I enjoy telling stories about my complex identities and intersectionalities—shaped by space, place, and time.” She instigated and led the workshop, “Shifting Stories through Theater of the Oppressed,” last December at the Richmond (VA) Story House. Beyond the podcast, Tikka and Theresa work with diverse academic departments, using theater to disrupt oppressions and imagine transformative possibilities for learning (for a great example, see this interactive workshop they held last year). Last August, Tina attended their virtual workshop on Theater of the Oppressed in online courses, and she immediately hoped they would agree to come on the podcast. We were so happy that they said yes! The post Acting Out: Embodied Pedagogy, Online and Off appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

We are ringing in 2021 in style with a podcast featuring Eleni Schirmer, a scholar of labor, social movements, and the political economy of education.  We talk about the debt crisis in higher education as it affects not only students but institutions; the history of teacher unions; how to bring democratic practices from the street and the organizing committee to everyday classroom pedagogy.https://nothingneverhappens.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/NNH-13-01-2021-Shirmer.mp3A PhD candidate in the Department of Education Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently a research associate with the Penn State Center for Global Workers’ Rights, Eleni has won numerous awards for her teaching and research. She’s written for Boston Review, The New Yorker, Dissent, and the Nation — the latter of which published her game-changing article on the debt crisis in universities. Eleni’s book manuscript in process concerns the long history of social justice teacher unionism in Milwaukee. She organizes around all of these issues, including a stint as the co-president of the Teaching Assistants’ Association, which is the nation’s oldest graduate employee union Outro music by Akrasis — “And We Out” from the album Children Singing in Hell. Check out their stuff at https://akrasis.bandcamp.com/Max Bowen (raps) and Mark McKee (beats) The post Flipping the Covenant: Debt, Labor, Public Education appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

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Our December 2020 podcast features Professor Maha Bali, Associate Professor of Practice at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.Part 1: On Nurturing Student AgencyPart 2: On Dismantling OppressionDr. Bali is the author of many articles and blogs that push the boundaries of pedagogical theory and praxis, and in particular online teaching and learning. She is an editor at Hybrid Pedagogy and editorial board member of Teaching in Higher Education, Online Learning Journal, Learning, Media and Technology, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education and the Journal of Pedagogic Development.Lucia and Tina met Maha at the Digital Pedagogy Lab 2020 conference last summer; she served as their former International Director. Check out her blog and also her work at virtuallyconnecting.org and Equity Unbound, both of which she helped to found and facilitate.Closing music: “Plateau’s Republic” by Akrasis: Max Bowen (raps/guitar) and Mark McKee (beats/trumpet), 2013. Available on Bandcamp.The post Nurturing Student Agency: A Conversation with Maha Bali appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

Our November 2020 podcast features Dr. Jan Willis, acclaimed teacher of religion and author of the lauded memoir Dreaming Me: An African American Buddhist Journey. We talk to her about how engaged Buddhism shapes her pedagogy, the models of teaching that have influenced her, what transformative responses to racist violence look like, and much more.https://nothingneverhappens.org/feed/podcast/About Jan WillisJan Willis is the Professor Emerita of Religion at Wesleyan University, where in 2003 she was awarded the Wesleyan University Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching for her “ability to make learning a shared process” and “open [the] eyes [of students] to a culture far different from our own.” And full disclosure: for the past several years Jan has been a colleague of Tina’s as a Visiting Professor at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.Jan grew up during segregation in Docene, Alabama, a coal mining town outside of Birmingham. The black Baptist church, the Civil Rights Movement, the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, along with a supportive family and teachers all formed the backdrop of her early years. Scholarships took her to Cornell University, where she studied philosophy (B.A. and M.A.), and in her junior year and after found her way to India and Nepal, where she met her mentor, Lama Thubten Yeshe. That experience led Jan to continue studies with Lama Yeshe and also earn her doctorate in Indic and Buddhist Studies at Columbia University.Jan has won academic and popular acclaim for her teaching. She was listed by Newsweek and Ebony Magazine and other publications as an influential religious leader. In December 2000 Time Magazine named her one of six “spiritual innovators for the new millennium.” Jan is a renowned teacher of over 40 years of experience. When Tina tells colleagues at other institutions that Jan is teaching at Agnes Scott, they are wildly jealous. At Agnes Scott she has taught “Women and Buddhism,” “Socially Engaged Buddhism,” and “Race and Racism through a Buddhist Lens,” the latter course with an overflowing classroom of students and local community members. Jan continues to teach nationally and internationally at Buddhist retreat centers, including the Garrison Institute, Tibet House U.S., and Spirit Rock in Marin County, where in October 2019 Jan and Angela Davis were in conversation as the keynote event of the gathering of the Buddhist Sangha of Black African Descent.Jan is a prolific writer. Her critically lauded memoir, Dreaming Me: An African American Baptist-Buddhist Journey (New York: Riverhead Books, 2001) to a book of her collected essays, Dharma Matters: Women, Race and Tantra (Wisdom Publications, 2019). In his forward to these essays, Charles Johnson calls Jan “an intellectual and spiritual pioneer.”As Jan quotes the Buddha announcing to his followers, “’Come and see! Do not be led by reports or tradition or hearsay. Be not led by the authority of religious texts, nor by mere logic or inference, nor by considering appearances, nor by delight in speculative opinions, nor by seeming possibilities, nor by the idea, ‘This is our teacher.’” With this pedagogical mantra Jan challenges her students “to come and see” for themselves.The post Learning Should Be Sweet: Jan Willis on Engaged Buddhist Pedagogy appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

Our October 2020 podcast features fearless and visionary co-directors of Project South, Emery Wright and Steph Guillod. Founded in 1986 as the Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide and based in Atlanta, GA, Project South is firmly rooted in the dynamism and creativity of the Black freedom tradition. It is a center for political education, grassroots organizing, legal and rights support, and movement support and solidarity. Steph and Emery tell us about the history of Project South, how they came to their work, and how the work of grassroots education and movement building intersect in the organization. We hear about some of the current areas of focus for Project South, including a youth organizer-training program being held remotely at the time of recording and community-based free COVID-19 testing. From here, we deepen our conversation about methods and theoriest of community organizing and radical pedagogy. We talk about what it means to establish — and to keep — trust in the context of raced, gendered, classed power that cross-cuts movement organizations. The post Never Alone: Building Movements with Project South appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

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Our September podcast features Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris, whose voices in the field of hybrid and digital pedagogy have been beyond clutch for many of us thrown into this field by the pandemic context. In Act 1, we talk to Jesse and Sean about how they came to the work of critical pedagogy, … Continue reading "No Tricks: Critical Pedagogy for Hybrid Teaching"The post No Tricks: Critical Pedagogy for Hybrid Teaching appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

In Act 1 we talk to teacher-organizers Martha Baumgarten and Renee Ridolfi about their pathway to becoming teachers and how they ended up at Acero Charter Schools in Chicago. Commenting on the broad problems with charters and with the broader privatization of education, they reflect on what they have learned about practices of anti-racist solidarity … Continue reading "Out On the Line: On Charter School Unionization and the Chicago Teachers’ Strike"The post Out On the Line: On Charter School Unionization and the Chicago Teachers’ Strike appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

Our July 2020 features the UC Santa Cruz wildcat strikers, who are fighting for a cost of living adjustment (#COLA), and for higher education that is premised not on wealth-hoarding and austerity, but on critical praxis toward transformative justice. The post #COLA Now: A Conversation with UCSC Wildcat Strikers appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

We delve deeper into the status of critical pedagogy in hybrid and online teaching. The transition to remote modalities raises many issues: surveillance of students and teachers, the reproduction of capital for private tech corporations, issues of course adaptation, and the accessibility of online formats. What does a concept like “radical hope” actually mean in … Continue reading "Stories for Better Futures: A Conversation with Kevin Gannon, Act 2"The post Stories for Better Futures: A Conversation with Kevin Gannon, Act 2 appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

Tina and Lucia talk to Kevin Gannon in June 2020, on the heels of a spring term in which we saw a mass pandemic-fueled shift to online teaching. Kevin describes the experiences and histories that led him to the field of critical pedagogy and introduces his hot-off-the-press book Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. He talks us … Continue reading "Hope in Pandemic Times: A Conversation with Kevin Gannon, Act 1"The post Hope in Pandemic Times: A Conversation with Kevin Gannon, Act 1 appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

For our April podcast, Lucia and Tina interview Wayne Yang of UC San Diego. Prof. Yang writes in A Third University is Possible, “To be very clear, I am not advocating for rescuing the university from its own neoliberal desires but rather for assembling decolonizing machines, to plug the university into decolonizing assemblages.” In Act 1, we … Continue reading "Of Decolonization and Its Metaphors: A Conversation with K. Wayne Yang, Act 1"The post Of Decolonization and Its Metaphors: A Conversation with K. Wayne Yang, Act 1 appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.