Audio Interference

"To be healthy, or even to be seen as someone who deserves care, you have to look a very specific way, and those are ways that are often privileged in our society, so white, able-bodied, thin, rich...we believe that every person gets to have bodily autonomy and define for themselves: what does healing look like for me right now? what does health mean for me?"

In this episode of Audio Interference, we are speaking with folks from Harriet’s Apothecary, an intergenerational, gender nonconforming collective of healers, artists, health professionals, magicians and activists who are expanding the way we understand health. Speakers Adaku Utah, Naimah Efia Johnson and Beatrice Anderson talk about the legacy of healing, the connection between health and abolitionism, and the community healing spaces they create for people who identify as black, indigenous and people of color.

To learn more about Harriet's Apothecary, visit their website at www.harrietsapothecary.com. There you can find their oracle deck project, "365 days of affirming black life and amplifying black love": www.harrietsapothecary.com/new-blog

The music in this episode include "We are the Ones" by Sweet Honey in the Rock and "Funkadelic" by CSC Funk Band.

Produced by Interference Archive.

This week we're talking to Sascha Altman DuBrul, the co-founder of the Icarus Project, a radical peer-to-peer mental health support group, about mad pride and radical mental health. The organization started in 2003 when DuBrul and a few friends started traveling the country and talking to people who had been diagnosed as bipolar or schizophrenic but rejected the dominant models of treatment. The Icarus Project is active nationally and at the local level:

National Chapter: theicarusproject.net

NYC Chapter: www.nycicarus.org

You can read work published by DuBrul and other members of the Icarus Project at Interference Archive. Some titles include:

Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness

Harm Reduction Guide to Coming off Psychiatric Drugs

Madness & Oppression: A Mad Maps Guide

(Images on our blog at: http://interferencearchive.org/audio-interference-38-sascha-altman-dubrul/)

DuBrul has written recently about spirituality and mental health on his website Maps to the Other Side: http://www.mapstotheotherside.net/

Music:

"Outside the Terminal" by Blue Dot Sessions

"500 Channels" by Choking Victim from No Gods/No Managers (1999)

"What Does Anybody Know About Anything" by Chris Zabriskie

"I Don't See the Branches I See the Leaves" by Chris Zabriskie

Produced by Interference Archive.

"Even if it seems like i doesn't directly relate to food, it does. Food relates to housing, to life, to water, to land." - Qiana Mickie

This episode includes an interview with Qiana Mickie, Executive Director of Just Food (www.justfood.org), about the challenges of working toward fairer food access in New York and the relationships between food justice and other social movements. We also talk to Jen Hoyer and Maggie Schreiner, curators of Fair Food Nation, Interference Archive's recent exhibition at the Ace Hotel.

Music: "One," by Red Coat Charmers, and "Feet You're Standing On," by Rough Housers.

Produced by Interference Archive.

$pread magazine was an award winning publication produced by and for sex workers from 2005-2011. In 2015, The Feminist Press at CUNY published an anthology of some of its best material. In this week’s episode, we’ll hear from two of its editors, Eliyanna Kaiser and Rachel Aimee, as they discuss the history of the magazine, the evolving depiction of sex workers in mass media, and what the future may hold for the sex workers’ rights movement.

Advocacy and organizing groups for sex workers and their allies:

Sex Workers Project, part of the Urban Justice Center - http://sexworkersproject.org

Red Umbrella Project - http://redumbrellaproject.org

SWOP - Sex Workers Outreach Project, A national network with links to regional chapters - http://www.new.swopusa.org

Music: “All Will See,” “Traces,” and “Whispers” by Hyson. “Great is the Contessa” by Blue Dot Sessions.

Produced by Interference Archive.

Interference Archive’s summer 2017 exhibition Take Back the Fight: Resisting Sexual Violence from the Ground Up--a collaboration with Lesbian Herstory Archives--focuses on organized responses to gender and sexual violence, highlighting the ways individuals and communities have developed creative and powerful grassroots and non-institutional justice and healing practices. In this episode of Audio Interference, we talk to the organizers of the exhibition: Lani Hanna, Melissa Forbis, Rachel Corbman, Monica Johnson, and Louise Barry.

Take Back the Fight is on view now at Interference Archive, and will be up through October 29. The music and spoken word pieces featured in this episode are from the album Free to Fight, which is part of the archive’s collection and is also included in the exhibition. Free to Fight was produced by Candy Ass Records in 1995. Songs include: 151, "Real Defense;" Mizzery, "Sleepin' Wit' The Enemy;" Excuse Seventeen, "Forever Fired;" Fifth Column, "Don't."

Produced by Interference Archive.

Interference Archive has been hosting a series of Propaganda Parties: events where we distribute free materials like posters and stickers, created by contemporary artists in response to current struggles.

On March 5, we hosted an event called “Building Resistance.” Radio Free Gowanus, our neighborhood pirate radio station, broadcast live throughout the afternoon. In this episode, we’re sharing some of the highlights from the event, as Mike Clemow talks to our community about what it means to build resistance.

This episode includes excerpts from interviews with: Womens March Action Club, Roxanne & Andrea, Raven Cras, Ola Ronke, Justin & Nicole, Amy Khoshbin, and Nora Almeida. To learn more about some of the projects mentioned in this episode, check out the Free Black Womens Library (thefreeblackwomanslibrary.tumblr.com/), the Center for Anti-Violence Education (caeny.org/), or Self-Care After A Fuhk Boi (www.selfcareafb.com). The full interviews can be heard at www.radiofreegowanus.org.

All the songs in this episode were included on a playlist created by Eric Kjensrud for our previous exhibition, Finally Got the News. Songs include: Allen Toussaint, "Victims of the Darkness;" Earth, Wind & Fire, "C'mon Children;" The Staple Singers, "I'll Take You There;" Bob Marley & The Wailers, "Get Up, Stand Up;" Curtis Mayfield, "Right On For the Darkness;" The Honeydrippers, "Impeach the President."

Produced by Interference Archive.

"What we're doing with Kichwa Hatari is we're activating people first, because the language won't rescue itself. We have to rely on people to rescue a language." -Charlie Uruchima

In this episode, we’re looking at language diversity in New York City. We will talk to folks whose work supports the speakers of minority languages, and discuss the importance of language as a source of cultural empowerment and as tool for community organizing.

In the first segment, we speak with Charlie Uruchima, one of the founders of Kichwa Hatari, the very first Kichwa radio program in the US. To learn more about Kichwa Hatari, visit their website: www.kichwahatari.org. The radio program airs every Friday evening from 6-8 pm EST on the station Radio El Tambo: www.radioeltambostereo.com.

In the second segment of this episode, we speak with Ross Perlin, writer, linguist and Assistant Director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a nonprofit organization that works with immigrant and refugee populations in NYC to help maintain their languages. To learn more about The Endangered Language Alliance, visit their website: www.elalliance.org

Check out our blog for more information about languages in NYC, including a language map of Queens: www.interferencearchive.org/category/blog

Songs included in this episode (in order):

"Tarpuricusum Sarata" by Luzmila Carpio

"Identidad" by Los Nin

Produced by Interference Archive.

"We did not go in there with the notion that we have all the answers to lead the working class, that we are the revolutionary leadership...the people who already understood the workplace, who understood the industry, who understood the union and its history were very often the rank and file workers who had been there for a long time." - Dan La Botz

In this episode, we compare labor conditions and labor organizing in 1970s America and contemporary UK. Charlie Morgan interviewed Dan La Botz and Jamie Woodcock.

Dan LaBotz was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union and is the author of many books on labor politics including Made in Indonesia: Indonesian Workers Since Suharto (South End Press, 2001), Cesar Chavez and La Causa (Pearson Longman, 2006), and What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis (Brill, 2016). For twenty years he was the editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis and is a co-editor of New Politics.

Jamie Woodcock completed his PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently a fellow at LSE. His research interests include: digital labor, technology, management, critical theory, and the sociology of work. Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres is published by Pluto Press.

Music: “Octagon Pt.2” by Polyrhythmics, courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Produced by Interference Archive.

"There were people in the buildings who modeled themselves after homesteaders and very much wanted to become homeowners, wanted the approval of the city, wanted to act respectable--and there were other people who were doing this as a critique of private property. There were people who were fixing up their space as if it was going to be their family home for generations, and there were people who just needed a temporary place to stay and were making the best of it." - Amy Starecheski

Louise Barry interviews Amy Starecheski, author of Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, about the process of transforming Lower East Side squats into limited-equity low-income co-ops, and the conflicts and challenges generated by this process. Amy's book is an oral history of squatting on the Lower East Side, and this episode includes excerpts from her interviews. The squatters whose voices are included in this podcast are: Famous Chrome, Maria DeDominicis, Rolando Politi, Fly, Chris Flambeaux, Nigel Clayton, David Boyle, Arrow, Geoff Dann, and Maggie Wrigley.

Music: "Dance 2000!", by Kil Kare.

Produced by Interference Archive.

More information about Amy's book, Ours to Lose, can be found here: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo24550813.html

To learn more about the history of squatting on the Lower East Side, check out the list of resources on our blog: http://interferencearchive.org/audio-interference-31-squatting-on-the-lower-east-side/

"People have knowledge, and they can put together stations that'll blow the doors off a government station...you get set up in the Amazon in Brazil, and you set up twenty dollars worth of equipment, you can blow a thousand miles out because there's nothing to interfere with that signal." - Rob Robinson

Charlie Morgan talks to Rob Robinson, housing activist and former co-host of "Global Movements, Urban Struggles" on WBAI.

Music: "Quasi Motion," by Kevin MacLeod, courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Produced by Interference Archive.