This is our 100th episode of Block & Build! We wanted to do something unique to mark this milestone. We jokingly discussed doing a musical episode. While we don’t have the time or the money to write 55 minutes of original songs about the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act once and for all and what we’re going to do about it, we thought we’d take some time to share some of our favorite movement music with you.

In this episode Convergence Managing Editor Akin Olla and Senior Multimedia Producer Josh Elstro join to discuss some of our favorite movement music. They also delve into the broader state of movement music and counterculture as they see it in the big tech streaming landscape.

Every song discussed, along with other favorites from the Convergence team, are available to listen to as a YouTube playlist we've built for listeners.

In the fall of 2023 a woman entered a bar and asked if they could put on the final regular season game of the WNBA’s New York Liberty. The bartender told her “I don’t think anyone here wants to see that.” She used that frustration to start organizing. Three years later, it feels like women’s sports are everywhere, especially (but certainly not exclusively) women’s basketball. The WNBA has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years and this spring, the WNBA and the players’ union agreed to a monumental collective bargaining agreement that is a major step towards equitable pay with the men’s league players.

Central to this success is the work of fan organizing like this week’s guests. From 23,000 fans signing a petition demanding better play for WNBA players to an in-game protest of thousands of fans chanting “PAY THE PLAYERS” at a Unrivaled league game in Brooklyn this winter, fans have been showing up for the athletes (and workers) they follow and cheer on, on the court and at the bargaining table.

This was the result of her work building Women’s Sports Rally, an organization for women’s sports fans to collectively build authentic, powerful women’s sports communities and align as active allies rather than just consumers of the sports they love. They are committed to actions that help to fairly and inclusively distribute the social, financial, and cultural benefits that come with the growth of women’s sports.

Our guests this week are the very woman who was told off by that bartender three years ago and the founder of Women’s Sports Rally, Caroline FitzGerald and digital communications and campaign strategist Kathy Plate. Kathy has worked on organizing sports fans as a political and cultural constituency which began in her previous work with Ultraviolet, a feminist organizing coalition representing all women, in all arenas – including sports and culture.

@Womenssportsrally on Instagram.

This week we are building April's Attention Economy Navigator, our guide to what you should be paying more attention to, and what you can probably pay less attention to. And why those stories might not be what you’d assume.

Joining to help build this month's Attention Economy Navigator in real time are host of There are No Girls on the Internet, Bridget Todd (her new audiobook Love at First Prompt is available July 14th from Simon & Schuster) and Editor-in-Chief at Truthout, Negin Owliaei.

You can also watch the panel plot these stories in real time on YouTube, or read the article version on the Convergence website.

Stories referenced in this episode:

Over the past few years, a series of popular uprisings across the world have been described by mainstream media as “Gen-Z Uprisings” – movements led by young people and described in western media as generally being against government corruption. These movements have been most notably visible in our own media due to their use of technology, including platforms like Discord and TikTok, and internationally consistent adoption of pop culture symbolism, like the flag of the “straw hat pirates,” a black flag depicting a grinning jolly roger wearing a straw hat. The flag is the banner of the protagonists of the long-running hit anime series One Piece whose adventures often find them coming to the defense of marginalized communities around their world.

But these movements didn’t come out of nowhere (or the internet for that matter). Understanding their origins – and the elections that have resulted from their successes – can shed light both onto the international struggle against authoritarianism and the challenges we face building an alternative. In this episode we are looking at two countries, Nepal and Bangladesh, where popular uprisings in the summer of 2024 and fall of 2025 have led to elections this year. 

In this episode, we are joined by two US based organizers, Sharmin Hossain and Samir Shrestha, whose work as part of South Asian diasporas has rooted them in movement work here in the US while maintaining relationships and solidarity abroad.

Sharmin Hossain is a Bangladeshi Muslim organizer from Queens, New York, who is currently the Organizing Director for 18 Million Rising.

Samir Shrestha belongs to the indigenous Newari tribe of Nepal, where he was born. He has spent the last 18 years involved in movement work here in the US.

On March 28th, Indivisible Project, one of the two primary organizations behind the No Kings protests, held its third such event. Along with their partners, the 50501 Movement, an estimated 8 million people were mobilized and took to the streets across the country at over 3,300 different sites. Last month's event is now the largest single day political protest in American history.

Last week Cayden spoke with co-founder and co-executive director of the Indivisible Project, Leah Greenberg, just a few days after the March 28th day of protest. In our conversation we considered the impact of mobilizing so many people, and what the mainstream media reports that focus only on the marches miss in the year-round work of Indivisible and other organizations developing everyday people into leaders. We also contend with the challenges posed by media, funding, and more as we seek to convert that energy into a larger, better-organized movement.

Examples like Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City Mayoral race last year or Brandon Johnson becoming mayor of Chicago a few years earlier, are some of the highest profile examples of progressive movement candidates winning local office. They’ve demonstrated that movements can win as well as how challenges can arise when working to place a single elected official into a local seat amidst a sea of colleagues to their political right. Meanwhile, left leaning electeds often immediately face criticism about their commitments to the movement organizers and the communities who helped put them in office the day their tenure in office begins.

This week we are building March's Attention Economy Navigator, our guide to what you should be paying more attention to, and what you can probably pay less attention to. And why those stories might not be what you’d assume.

Joining to help build this month's Attention Economy Navigator in real time are founder of Creator Congress, Rynn Reed and National Press Secretary for the Working Families Party, Ravi Mangla. Together, they co-publish the Substack newsletter, Signal Break, which is all about agitating, disrupting, and challenging the prevailing orthodoxy around how we communicate and charting a new way forward.

You can also watch the panel plot these stories in real time on YouTube, or read the article version on the Convergence website.

Stories we referenced in this episode:

Social movements are often centered around the law: who it protects and who it does not. And as you heard in this week's headlines, we also find ourselves in an era of increasing weaponized “lawfare” by MAGA and its allies. On top of the "antifa" domestic terror case in Texas, there have been other recent attempts by the federal government to criminalize dissent, from the RICO cases against Atlanta’s Stop Cop City movement, to more recent charges against protestors in Minnesota this winter. Legal representation for these cases and others is necessary as the systems of power which marginalize these communities in the first place seek to criminalize our work toward liberation.

This is the work of “movement lawyering.” Movement lawyering is when attorneys and other legal professionals align their work with the values and politics of movements for liberation. Our guests this week recently published a guide and handbook for legal professionals and organizers alike. We were recently joined by the coauthors and coeditors of Lawyering for Liberation: A Tool Box for Movement Lawyers. They are movement attorney Ameca Reali and Associate Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law, Marbré Stahly-Butts.

We discuss the work lawyers need to do to bring their work and values into alignment with liberation movements, as well as how organizers can think about how to work closely with legal professionals who share their goals.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to Convergence’s Bookshop. Ten percent of purchases made through our bookshop directly support our movement media work.

Tabletop games like Magic the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, and many more have long been a natural community building space for those of us who have felt culturally marginalized. But as fandom has expanded, so has the ability of neoliberal capital to commodify and profit from just about any niche “nerd” interest you can think of. A massive tabletop industry has grown which requires a growing customer-facing workforce.

In the past decade both Magic and D&D have come under ownership, and begun generating massive profits for, the multi-billion dollar toy and entertainment publisher Hasbro. A cottage industry of tabletop game stores to support these games, products, and their fans has also risen. But these businesses are more than just stores; they are community spaces new and dedicated gamers depend on for play space, social support, and more. This necessitates a staff skilled in customer service, deep game knowledge, and even childcare for school students attending aftercare programs.

As this business grew, workers at a collection of game stores in New York City unionized as Tabletop Workers United in 2023. Throughout their long journey to a contract last spring, they were supported by a partner organization of volunteers known as the Tabletop Solidarity Committee; a group of dedicated customers who love the stores and their workers as community resources and want to see the employees who run the spaces supported by their employers.

Our guests this week are two members of that Tabletop Solidarity Committee out of NYC, Gabor Fu and Sam LeDoux. They’ll tell the story of how their organizing supported the workers’ journey to a contract and why these game stores are such valuable community and organizing spaces.

It is deeply unsettling how quickly mainstream media headlines and narratives moved on from Trump and DHS’s so-called "Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota. The removal of Greg Bovino and the “drawdown” was a concerted attempt to force public attention to move along, in spite of the fact that there are still a disproportionate number of agents on the ground in the state. 

This operation yielded two highly visible, extrajudicial murders of peaceful American protestors by the state. No one was held accountable. Communities are still grieving the loss of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as the kidnapping and disappearance of thousands of their neighbors by DHS. The operation brought the country perhaps the closest it has come to civil war since the last one ended. However, the administration has tried to leverage the nature of the attention economy to force us to dust off our feet and move on like it never happened.

Internally at Convergence, we think deeply about the importance of slow media, as well as preserving historic and institutional memory, as a counterweight to the hypernormalization of dizzying MAGA brand fascism. The administration pushes to normalize the violence being visited upon communities all over the country. We continue to see stories of abuse and overreach from DHS which aren’t making it “above the fold” in the mainstream press.

So we’re going back to Minnesota as the subject of this episode, because Minnesota still has lessons for us. I was joined last week by longtime Minnesota organizer and former Executive Director of Faith In Minnesota Action PAC, Doran Schrantz. We discussed what she and her neighbors experienced and continue to experience from Trump’s DHS invasion in their state, including some crucial warnings and lessons for us all.