AirGo

Check out this sneak peek of Quantum Entanglements, a new podcast coming soon from AIrGo and Respair Production & Media!

Over the four decades since the US Steel South Works steel mill shut its doors on the South Side of Chicago, the land it sat on has remained undeveloped as the surrounding communities heal from the physical, environmental, economic, and social wounds left behind by this industrial behemoth.

Now, a coalition of public and private power players from all levels of government and different sectors of industry is preparing to break ground on a "Quantum Campus"–a multi-billion dollar sprawling facility of next-generation technology and surveillance that could both release poisonous contamination and dismantle digital privacy around the globe.

As the next industrial revolution descends on a community still reeling from the destruction of deindustrialization, we talk with organizers and neighbors living alongside the site about how they're building power, demanding answers, making sense of the area’s history, and fighting for the ability to determine the future of their neighborhoods, livelihoods, and relationships to the land on which they live.

AirGo is back, and we're kicking off our 2025 season by welcoming our pal Asha Ransby-Sporn back to the stu. Asha recently published an essay entitled "In the Face of Overwhelm," which serves as a sobering and pointed analysis of how we as a liberatory movement can make sense of and move through the inundation of structural dismantling and violence that the Trump/Musk conglomerate is reigning down on us everyday. We talk about what we can learn from our opposition, the value of studying those we disagree with, the complicated role of a movement home, and much more.

SHOW NOTES
Read the piece, copublished by In These Times and The Triibe - https://inthesetimes.com/article/billionaire-takeover-fight-overwhelm

Sign up for Hazel's Seeds, our new EJ listening club launching April 8, 2025! - https://www.respairmedia.com/help-this-garden-grow

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio

Find One Million Experiments on tour! - www.respairmedia.com/events 

Bring us to your community by hitting us up - [email protected]

CREDITS
Hosts & Exec. Producers - Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger 
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles
Associate Producer - Rocío Santos

Respair is kicking off the year by sharing a new project that we're proud to partner with and share with you! Welcome to Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities, a series of narrative essays that reflect on emergent themes from conversations with Detroit-based organizers and futurists committed to abolition of police and prisons.

This is Episode 1, entitled Alienation from Ourselves, Each Other, and Our Needs. Joined by a chorus of voices and visionaries, Detroit-based artist Lauren Williams invites us to consider roadmaps to futures we hope for, through a focus on the everyday & the contradictions of neoliberal philosophy. Should everything really be for sale, will the market protect the worthy?

First, a foundation: How do our ways of working separate us from our power and possibility? What exactly is neoliberalism, how did it become the dominant social and economic logic of U.S. civil society? What does any of this have to do with abolition?

To answer that last question first, it comes down to criminalization and control. Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy and civic fights about water access serve as examples of how accepting a logic of separation weakens our ability to challenge social problems that affect people in very connected ways. Williams illuminates the short path from privatization to deprivation, before limning the difference between the state’s compulsion to watch & the human need to be seen.

The series is presented in partnership with Making Room for Abolition, a body of work that imagines a world without police and prisons by making speculative worlds through the lens of a home. It was dreamed up, written and produced by Lauren Williams; essays were co-produced by Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Featured guests include Nick Buckingham, Curtis Renee, Tawana Petty, PG Watkins, Angel McKissic, Monica Lewis-Patrick, Nate Mullen, Sirrita Darby, Kim Sherrobi, Monique Thompson, and Myrtle Thompson-Curtis. Voice actors who read various excerpts from references are credited on each episode. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

Full time-stamped transcripts are available at www.makingroom.online/essays. This show is presented in partnership with Respair Production & Media.

Respair is kicking off the year by sharing a new project that we're proud to partner with and share with you! Welcome to Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities, a series of narrative essays that reflect on emergent themes from conversations with Detroit-based organizers and futurists committed to abolition of police and prisons. Interweaving research with brief dispatches from speculative abolitionist futures, each episode draws together the voices of people working toward food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice, and Black liberation to connect thematic currents surrounding the abolition of police and prisons. In each episode, we look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons, and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you’ll hear us explore abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.

The series is presented in partnership with Making Room for Abolition, a body of work that imagines a world without police and prisons by making speculative worlds through the lens of a home. It was dreamed up, written and produced by Lauren Williams; essays were co-produced by Ayinde Jean-Baptiste; and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Featured guests include Nick Buckingham, Curtis Renee, Tawana Petty, PG Watkins, Angel McKissic, Monica Lewis-Patrick, Nate Mullen, Sirrita Darby, Kim Sherrobi, Monique Thompson, and Myrtle Thompson-Curtis. Voice actors who read various excerpts from references are credited on each episode. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

Full time-stamped transcripts are available at www.makingroom.online/essays. This show is presented in partnership with Respair Production & Media.

We get topical with our last episode of the year. Dame and Kiss welcome a couple other members of the Respair squad.

The crew talks about a lil’ Luigi Mangione gossip, the inspiring abolitionist projects we’ve seen on the road this year, how Trump’s election win has impacted us all, and much much more.

SHOW NOTES

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio

Find One Million Experiments on tour! - www.respairmedia.com/events

Bring us to your community by hitting us up - [email protected]

CREDITS

Hosts & Exec. Producers - Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger

Associate Producer - Rocío Santos

Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles

We're excited to bring you this convo from this year's Socialism Conference, held in September 2024 here in Chicago! The last few years of political turmoil have unearthed the longstanding lack of public trust in the news media. As journalists who work in, outside and against legacy media, we had the opportunity to be in convo with some brilliant peers about the long and deep legacy of movement journalism that expands transformative, abolitionist, and antiracist movement building through truthful reporting. The session was captained by friend of the pod Lewis Wallace, whose book The View from Somewhere is a must-read about how the myth of journalistic objectivity harms journalists and community. We also were in convo with Clarissa Brooks, who is Editor-in-Chief of The Forge; and Ryan Sorrell, Founder & Publisher of the Kansas City Defender. Get in tune!

SHOW NOTES

Learn about Lewis Raven Wallace - https://www.lewispants.com/about

Dig into The Forge - https://forgeorganizing.org/

Peep the KC Defender - https://kansascitydefender.com/

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio

Find One Million Experiments on tour! - www.respairmedia.com/events

Bring us to your community by hitting us up - [email protected]

CREDITS

Hosts & Exec. Producers - Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger

Associate Producer - Rocío Santos

Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles

This week we're digging in the AirGo crates and revisiting one of the most impactful moments in modern social movement history–the encampment at Standing Rock in 2016. Kiss and a cohort of other Chicago folks brought supplies from Freedom Square in November, and had the privilege to spend a few days there. Upon their return, Kiss sat down with Kristiana Colon, who had been with him on the trip, to talk about the experience. The episode also features selections from the podcast Voices of Standing Rock, reproduced with the creator's permission.

SHOW NOTES:

Listen to all of Voices of Standing Rock: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/voices-of-standing-rock/id1173368814

Get connected to Oceti Sakowin, a group that formed during the encampment and has led the fight for indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice: www.facebook.com/OcetiSakowinCamp

On this episode, the guys turn to legendary historian Rashid Khalidi to help parse and understand how we got here–a moment fourteen months into the escalation of genocidal violence perpetrated on the people and land of Palestine. The author of many books, including most recently The Hundred Years' War On Palestine, Prof. Khalidi talks about how he moves between the mind and body while witnessing and fighting against the destruction of his people, what he's learned from those who have engaged with his work, and how we must understand this escalation in the context of colonial violence and anticolonial struggle.

SHOW NOTES

Read The Hundred Years' War On Palestine - https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627798556/thehundredyearswaronpalestine

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio

Find One Million Experiments on tour! - www.respairmedia.com/events

Bring us to your community by hitting us up - [email protected]

CREDITS

Hosts & Exec. Producers - Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger

Associate Producer - Rocío Santos

Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles

In the fraught last week before the 2024 election, the guys search for some nuance with Maurice Mitchell, the National Director of the Working Families Party. A nationally-recognized social movement strategist, visionary leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and community organizer, Maurice breaks down the vision and approach of WFP’s strategy to electoral organizing and helps us parse the value and limitations of elections as a component of transformative change. We also learn that he is the cousin of the legendary MF DOOM–just a lil fun fact for y’all!

SHOW NOTES

Learn more about the WFP - https://workingfamilies.org/

Find your polling place in Chicago - https://chicagoelections.gov/voting/your-voter-information

Check out the Injustice Watch Judicial Guide - https://interactives.injusticewatch.org/judicial-election-guide/2024-general/en/

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio

Find One Million Experiments on tour! - www.respairmedia.com/events

Bring us to your community by hitting us up - [email protected]

CREDITS

Hosts & Exec. Producers - Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger

Associate Producer - Rocío Santos

Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles

The guys welcome Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, a brilliant philosopher and movement thought leader, to the pod. Táíwò is the author of Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture, two staples of the emergent abolitionist canon that have helped shape emergent movement ideology over the last decade. He talks with Dame and Kiss about who we mean when we say "elite," how the debate around identity politics obscures the ways power is being consolidated against us, and how we all are constantly philosophizing in our work as changemakers and living, breathing humans.

SHOW NOTES

Get his books - http://www.olufemiotaiwo.com/

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio

Find One Million Experiments on tour! - www.respairmedia.com/events

Bring us to your community by hitting us up - [email protected]

CREDITS

Hosts & Exec. Producers - Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger

Associate Producer - Rocío Santos

Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles