AirGo

What do you do when you see something happening that you know to be wrong? When its something seemingly intractable and massive that will negatively impact you and your neighbors? If you're Dixon Romeo, you start organizing. Dixon is the Executive Director of Southside Together, a new organization building power by organizing Black, poor, and working-class community members in Woodlawn, South Shore, Greater Grand Crossing, Park Manor and all adjacent neighborhoods, to secure economic stability and advance human rights.

Dixon returns to AirGo to talk about how the new organization was birthed from two brilliant organizations merging together, give updates on some of their biggest fights, and break down the emergent campaign around the proposed "quantum campus" on the contaminated US Steel South Works site. A great way to learn about the city from the ground up!

SHOW NOTES
Plug in with Southside Together - https://www.southsidetogether.org/

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
Editor - Cin Pimentel
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio
bsky.app/profile/respairmedia.bsky.social

Find us live! - 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 Producers - Cin Pimentel & Rocío Santos
Video Post-Production Producer - Troi Valles
Lead Editor - Troi Valles
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

On this episode the guys connect the global dots with Alex of Dissenters, a national organization of young people leading the fight to reclaim our resources from the war industry, reinvest in life-giving institutions, and repair collaborative relationships with the earth and people around the world. As co-director of the organization, Alex has helped guide chapters on campuses across the country as they respond to and fight against militarism, genocide, and colonialism. They join the show to talk about their pathway to the work, how the lens of opposing militarism is helpful in this moment of overwhelm, and the value of some quality sabbatical time as well.

SHOW NOTES
Learn about and join Dissenters - https://wearedissenters.org/

Sign up for Hazel's Seeds - 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
Associate Producer - Rocío Santos
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio
bsky.app/profile/respairmedia.bsky.social

Find us live! - 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 Producers - Cin Pimentel & Rocío Santos
Video Post-Production Producer - Troi Valles
Lead Editor - Troi Valles
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

Dame and Kiss have the honor and pleasure to talk with Stanley Howard, a survivor of torture at the hands of the Chicago Police Department and a brilliant force for justice in the struggles for both torture reparations and the abolition of the death penalty in IL. As a self-taught jailhouse lawyer Stanley created the Death Row 10, a group of torture survivors on death row who began the collective push for both their freedom and the end of state-sanctioned murder. Since getting out a little over a year ago, Stanley has been actively advocating for and supporting people on the inside through his work with the Uptown People's Law Center. Come learn from Stanley with us–this is a special one!

SHOW NOTES
Buy Stanley's book "Tortured by Blue" - https://www.semcoop.com/tortured-blue

Sign up for Hazel's Seeds - 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
Associate Producer - Rocío Santos
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio
bsky.app/profile/respairmedia.bsky.social

Find us live! - 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 Producers - Cin Pimentel & Rocío Santos
Video Post-Production Producer - Troi Valles
Lead Editor - Troi Valles
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

The guys get to chop it up with legendary comedian, author, producer, and commentator W. Kamau Bell on this episode! A renowned standup and TV creator, Kamau has been guiding USians through the nuances, dark corners, and contradictions of our relationship with racial difference and power. For seven seasons, he was the host and executive producer of the five-time Emmy Award-winning CNN docuseries United Shades of America, and won a Peabody Award for his Showtime docuseries We Need To Talk About Cosby. He's back on the road doing standup across the country, including in Chicago on April 25 and 26, and he took some time to talk with the guys about the relationship between standup and regressive politics, how he found his voice on stage, and much more. 

SHOW NOTES
Buy tickets to see Kamau at the Den Theatre in Chicago 4/25-4/26 - https://thedentheatre.com/performances/2025/4/25/w-kamau-bell-the-den-theatre-comedy-club

Follow him - https://www.instagram.com/wkamaubell

Sign up for Hazel's Seeds - 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
Associate Producer - Rocío Santos
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio
bsky.app/profile/respairmedia.bsky.social

Find us live! - 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 Producers - Cin Pimentel & Rocío Santos
Video Post-Production Producer - Troi Valles
Lead Editor - Troi Valles
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

How do our models of care and freedom inform, contradict, or help us understand what it means to raise young people? How does the experience of caring for young people fundamentally shift what we mean by abolition? You might be thinking "damn, those are good-ass questions–hopefully someone has compiled a beautiful anthology of writers and organizers reflecting on this!" If so, Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson have got you covered. Both longtime abolitionist organizers, media-makers, and writers, they are the co-editors of We Grow the World Together, a new anthology exploring the intersections between caregiving and abolition. Featuring essays from a squad of brilliance including Beth Richie, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Dylan Rodriguez, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and many more, the book is available now from Haymarket Books. Maya and Kim join the show to talk about the project expanded their understanding of care, the ways nurturing should be at the center of our politic, and much more. 

SHOW NOTES
Buy We Grow the World Together - https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2446-we-grow-the-world-together

Listen to Beyond Prisons - https://www.beyond-prisons.com/

Check out Truthout - https://truthout.org/

Sign up for Hazel's Seeds - 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
Associate Producer - Rocío Santos
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio
bsky.app/profile/respairmedia.bsky.social

Find us live! - 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 Producers - Cin Pimentel & Rocío Santos
Video Post-Production Producer - Troi Valles
Lead Editor - Troi Valles
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

On this episode we popped over to the crib of AirGo fam Trina Reynolds-Tyler, who was last on the show back in 2019 (https://airgoradio.com/airgo/2019/4/25/episode-185-trina-reynolds-tyler). Over these past six years she has continued to be a vibrant, impactful force for justice and liberation in the city–from her work contributing the People's Grab'n'Go during the pandemic to her PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING project "Missing in Chicago," a seven-part investigative series from the Invisible Institute and City Bureau that reveals how Chicago police have routinely violated state law and police procedure, delaying and mishandling missing person cases. The report revealed a racial bias that disproportionately impacts Black women and girls, and how poor police data is making the problem harder to solve. Trina talks with Dame and Kiss about the project's unexpected teachings, what the recognition has made possible for her in her work, and what unanswered questions are driving her curiosity these days.

SHOW NOTES
Check out Missing in Chicago by Trina and Sarah Conway of City Bureau - https://chicagomissingpersons.com/

Peep Beneath the Surface, the overall data science project that investigates the intersections of gender-based violence and policing - https://www.btsurface.com/

Sign up for Hazel's Seeds - 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
Associate Producer - Rocío Santos
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio
bsky.app/profile/respairmedia.bsky.social

Find us live! - 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 Producers - Cin Pimentel & Rocío Santos
Video Post-Production Producer - Troi Valles
Lead Editor - Troi Valles
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

What happens when an international order comes to an end? What gets built in its shadow? This week's guest, Adom Getachew, digs deep with us into the attempts at worldmaking that were led by anticolonial leaders in the mid-20th century, who fought for different visions of liberation as they fought to dismantle Europe's colonial empires on the African continent and across the Caribbean. We break down what we can learn from these attempts at worldmaking, the range of different possibilities that were on the table, and how we might hold their determination to upend structural power in our work today from within the heart of 21st century empire.

SHOW NOTES
Buy Adom's book "Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination" - https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179155/worldmaking-after-empire

Check out "Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica" at the Art Institute of Chicago until 3/30/25 - https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/10157/project-a-black-planet-the-art-and-culture-of-panafrica

Sign up for Hazel's Seeds - 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
Associate Producer - Rocío Santos
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio
bsky.app/profile/respairmedia.bsky.social

Find us live! - 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 Producers - Cin Pimentel & Rocío Santos
Video Post-Production Producer - Troi Valles
Lead Editor - Troi Valles
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

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

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio
bsky.app/profile/respairmedia.bsky.social

Find us live! - 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 Producers - Cin Pimentel & Rocío Santos
Video Post-Production Producer - Troi Valles
Lead Editor - Troi Valles
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

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.

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio
bsky.app/profile/respairmedia.bsky.social

Find us live! - 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 Producers - Cin Pimentel & Rocío Santos
Video Post-Production Producer - Troi Valles
Lead Editor - Troi Valles
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker

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.

Follow AirGo - instagram.com/airgoradio
bsky.app/profile/respairmedia.bsky.social

Find us live! - 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 Producers - Cin Pimentel & Rocío Santos
Video Post-Production Producer - Troi Valles
Lead Editor - Troi Valles
Digital Media Producer - Troi Valles
Engagement Producer - Rivka Yeker