PODCAST · education
Nothing Never Happens
by Nothing Never Happens
Nothing Never Happens is a journey into cutting-edge pedagogical theory and praxis, where co-hosts Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether connect with leading voices in radical teaching and learning. We engage a range of approaches — including but not limited to democratic, feminist, queer, decolonial, and abolitionist models.
Episodes
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Love Us Back: Queer Commitment After Institutional Betrayal
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...
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Banking Methods: Education Finance for Radical Teachers
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...
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Literacy and Liberation: Radical Schooling in the Black Freedom Movement
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...
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Beyond/Against/Within Education: Radical Pedagogy as Radical Study
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...
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Practicing Pedagogies of Resistance and Liberation: The Critical Study of Zionism
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…
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No Separation: Religion, Race, and Moral Education in US Public Schools
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...
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Humanizing Critical Pedagogy: The Promise of Community Colleges
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…
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Roots, Branches, Wings: On Feminist Theater of the Oppressed
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,...
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Feed the People! From Alternative Schools to Anarchist Pedagogies
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...
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Playing with Texts: Pedagogies of Scripture
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...
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Revolutionary Blueprints: The Question of Palestine is a Question of Pedagogy (RE-RELEASE)
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...
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Community as Rebellion: A Conversation with Lorgia García-Peña
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...
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Libraries Are Magical: On Public Space, Democracy, and Free Access to Information
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...
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Healing Resistance: Pedagogies of Nonviolence with Kazu Haga
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...
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Building the Soil: Transformative Justice Pedagogy with Mia Mingus
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...
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The Actuality of Revolution: Marxist Education and the Commons
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…
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Burn It Down: Accessible Learning or Academic Surveillance? (Part 2)
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...
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Light It Up: Accessible Learning or Academic Surveillance? (Part 1)
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…
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“You Are Not the Chain of Freedom”: A Conversation with Loretta Ross
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...
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Southern Spaces, Southern Changes: Educating for Environmental Justice
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.…
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No Study Without Struggle: A Conversation with Leigh Patel
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…
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Resistance Pedagogy: Truth, Healing, and Justice in Atlanta Public Schools
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,...
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Structures of Solidarity: Undergraduate Student Workers Unite!
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...
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Work the Contradictions! On Institutional Power and Minority Difference
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…
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Rehearsing for Reality: Theater as Catalyst for Social Change
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...
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DEFEND THE CLASSROOM! Building Power with Ira Shor
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…
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Liberatory Methods: On Teaching from the Knowledge in the Room
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,...
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Dreaming New Dreams: Pedagogies of Mind and Heart
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...
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Land Grab U: Colonial Debts of the Settler University
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...
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Revolutionary Blueprints: The Question of Palestine Is a Question of Pedagogy
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...
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Plunder.edu: Urban Universities Take the City (pt. 2)
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…
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Pillage.edu: Urban Universities Take the City (pt. 1)
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...
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Planetary Citizenship: Learning for Climate Justice
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.
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Livable Lives: Arts Education in the Prison Industrial Complex
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...
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No Tokens: Students Decolonizing the Curriculum
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...
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Ordinary Violence: Higher Education's Racial Capitalism
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...
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Product to Process: The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop
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…
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Acting Out: Embodied Pedagogy, Online and Off
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....
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Flipping the Covenant: Debt, Labor, Public Education
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...
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Dismantling Oppression: A Conversation with Maha Bali, Part 2
The post Dismantling Oppression: A Conversation with Maha Bali, Part 2 appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.
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Nurturing Student Agency: A Conversation with Maha Bali
Our December 2020 podcast features Professor Maha Bali, Associate Professor of Practice at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Part 1: On Nurturing Student Agency Part 2: On Dismantling Oppression Dr. Bali is the author of many articles and blogs that push the boundaries of pedagogical…
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Learning Should Be Sweet: Jan Willis on Engaged Buddhist Pedagogy
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...
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Never Alone: Building Movements with Project South
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...
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Trust the Students: Critical Pedagogy for Hybrid Teaching, Act 2.
The post Trust the Students: Critical Pedagogy for Hybrid Teaching, Act 2. appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.
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No Tricks: Critical Pedagogy for Hybrid Teaching
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...
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Out on the Line, Act 2: Between Charter Unions and Charter Abolition
The post Out on the Line, Act 2: Between Charter Unions and Charter Abolition appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.
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#COLA Now: A Conversation with UCSC Wildcat Strikers
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...
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Stories for Better Futures: A Conversation with Kevin Gannon, Act 2
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…
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Hope in Pandemic Times: A Conversation with Kevin Gannon, Act 1
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...
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Of Decolonization and Its Metaphors: A Conversation with K. Wayne Yang, Act 1
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…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Nothing Never Happens is a journey into cutting-edge pedagogical theory and praxis, where co-hosts Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether connect with leading voices in radical teaching and learning. We engage a range of approaches — including but not limited to democratic, feminist, queer, decolonial, and abolitionist models.
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Nothing Never Happens
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Nothing Never Happens currently has 100 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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Nothing Never Happens is a journey into cutting-edge pedagogical theory and praxis, where co-hosts Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether connect with leading voices in radical teaching and learning. We engage a range of approaches — including but not limited to democratic, feminist, queer, decolonial,...
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