Geoengineering is defined as some emerging technologies that could manipulate the environment and partially offset some of the impacts of climate change. Seems like the perfect solution for a consumerist society that lives on instant gratification and can’t stop polluting even at the risk of our futures, right? Well, let’s slow down. Today we’ll discuss the dangers of geoengineering and the ethics of the fact that these new technologies are being tested on Indigenous lands.

GUESTS:

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For Black Maternal Health Week, we celebrate the important work that Black midwives do in their communities. In this week’s show, we’ll hear a conversation about how one woman followed her calling to midwifery in a story brought to us by the podcast Re:Work from the UCLA Labor Center.

GUEST:

Kimberly Durdin, licensed midwife and co-founder of Kindred Space LA and the Birthing People Foundation.

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Caste — one of the oldest systems of exclusion in the world — is thriving. Despite the ban on Untouchability 70 years ago, caste impacts 1.9 billion people in the world. Every 15 minutes, a crime is perpetrated against a Dalit person. The average age of death for Dalit women is just 39. And the wreckages of caste are replicated here in the US, too — erupting online with rape and death threats, showing up at work, and forcing countless Dalits to live in fear of being outed.

Dalit American activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan puts forth a call to awaken and act — not just for readers in South Asia, but all around the world. She ties Dalit oppression to fights for liberation among Black, Indigenous, Latinx, femme, and Queer communities, examining caste from a feminist, abolitionist, and Dalit Buddhist perspective and laying bare the grief, trauma, rage, and stolen futures enacted by Brahminical social structures on the caste-oppressed. Incisive and urgent, her book The Trauma of Caste is an activating beacon of healing and liberation, written by one of the world’s most needed voices in the fight to end caste apartheid.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan is the author of The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition. She is a Dali- American artist, organizer, technologist, and theorist and the Executive Director of Equality Labs.

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On this week’s episode, we speak with Bay Area based comedian Karinda Dobbins about the release of her debut comedy album, Black & Blue. In Black & Blue, Karinda shares personal stories, finding humor in the most ordinary moments of her daily life, including her girlfriend’s arbitrary policy on household pests, the changes hipsters have brought to Oakland, and a Black woman’s unique packing list for hiking.

The post Catching up with Comedy Queen Karinda Dobbins (encore) appeared first on KPFA.

During his first term, Trump stacked the Supreme Court with hard right judges, creating a 6-3 split that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a stunning ruling in which a human right which was previously granted by law was taken away from the public. This time Trump faces even less resistance and could remake the Supreme Court once again.

Elie Mystal, justice correspondent and columnist for The Nation magazine, joins us to talk about the Supreme Court — not only what the democrats could have done under Biden to fix the third branch of government so that we wouldn’t now be in such a politically vulnerable position but also what we can expect in terms of possible new Supreme Court nominations and what they could mean for our remaining rights.

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Dr. Flemmie Kittrell was a Black home economist whose research in the field of early childhood education shaped the way we think about child development today. She became the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in nutrition and contributed immensely to programs like Head Start — even though her name is often left out of the history.

We hear more about her life and work in a story from the podcast “Lost Women of Science,” hosted by Carol Sutton Lewis and Danya AbdelHameid.

GUESTS:

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Today’s episodes of Making Contact and Pushing Limits are preempted by special programming for KPFA’s 2025 Winter Fund Drive.

Paul Reitter and Paul North discuss their translation of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx.

To support KPFA’s mission, please donate here or call (800) 439-5732.

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Today’s episodes of Making Contact and Pushing Limits are preempted by special programming for KPFA’s 2025 Winter Fund Drive.

For four days in September of 1971, prisoners revolted, taking over the institution that incarcerated them in upstate New York. By the time the dust settled in Attica, 33 prisoners and 10 guards or staff had been killed – notably all but one guard and three prisoners were killed by law enforcement gunfire when the state violently retook control of the prison. While the Attica rebellion has become fairly widely known, our guest has written a powerful book that reframes that rebellion not as a singular uprising, but as one important piece that contextualizes a series of rebellions by prisoners, engaging in tactics that include counter-violence, against the violence of the white supremacist capitalist framing of our society itself, asserting that US prisons are literal sites of war. Our guest is Orisanmi Burton, a Professor of Anthropology at American University, who describes this framing in his book as the Long Attica Revolt, or in description, “revolutionary struggle for decolonization and abolition at the site of the US prison”. His book is called Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Prisoners in, at least New York, Florida, Michigan, and California, have been banned from reading it under fears that it may itself incite rebellion. That’s a claim that our guest today rejects.

FUND DRIVE SPECIAL – Pledge $120 and receive Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton. Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons—not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.

To support KPFA’s mission, please donate here or call (800) 439-5732.

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Today’s episodes of Making Contact and Pushing Limits are preempted by special programming for KPFA’s 2025 Winter Fund Drive: David Walker, award-winning comic book writer, filmmaker, journalist, and educator, joins Brian Edwards-Tiekert to discuss Walker’s book The Life of Frederick Douglass: A Graphic Narrative of a Slave’s Journey from Bondage to Freedom.

To support our mission, please donate here or call (800) 439-5732.

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The military exposed thousands of servicemen to radioactivity when it called them to participate in nuclear weapons tests, including Operation Teapot in 1955. One was Eldridge Jones, who later deployed to exercises in the Bay Area to try to clean up radioactive substances, directed by the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory.

In episode 2 of “Exposed,” from our friends at San Francisco Public Press, we explore a little-known chapter in San Francisco’s nuclear era: human experiments carried out to assess the health effects of radiation. Scientists from the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, located at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, designed and executed at least 24 experiments that involved gathering data from humans — in some cases, injecting test subjects with radioisotopes or having them ingest fluids laced with trace amounts of radioactive materials. Even football players from the San Francisco 49ers were enrolled as test subjects in these so-called tracer studies.

We hear from military veterans who were sent on a mysterious mission to spread radioactive substances onto rooftops at an Army base near Pittsburg, California, for an experiment the radiation lab played a role in designing. Some recount experiences of witnessing nuclear bomb blasts in the Nevada desert. We also examine a national pattern of human radiation experiments revealed by Eileen Welsome, the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, who shined a light on similar practices conducted by government facilities, hospitals, and other institutions.

Featuring:

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