Nothing Never Happens

When does a university cease to serve a public good? What would it look like for universities to work toward justice and solidarity with the cities they call home? In the second episode of this two-part series, historian and critic Davarian Baldwin gives us more tools for understanding the dynamics of race and capital structuring urban higher education in the United States--from campus police forces, to university medical complexes, to the low-wage labor on which they depend. We then turn to the community movements and pedagogical interventions that are envisioning, and enacting, alternative visions of city learning and urban life.

What do you get when you cross a school, a real estate tycoon, a hedge fund, a regional medical complex, a massive transit system, a private police force, a low-wage employer, and tax-exemption? Answer: an urban university. In this two-part series, accomplished historian and cultural critic Davarian Baldwin breaks down the relations of pillage, dispossession, and private profit that are increasingly prominent in the U.S. higher education landscape.

What do we need to learn to save the planet? Tina and Lucia discuss climate crisis, ecopedagogy, and liberatory teaching about environmental justice with critical pedagogue Greg Misiaszek.

What happens when Theater of the Oppressed meets the prison industrial complex? Wende Ballew, Executive Director of Reforming Arts, shares their work to bring arts-centered liberal education to women who must make their lives in and through contexts of state carceral control. We discuss how Wende came to this work, institutional tightropes they walk, and what intentional space for creativity and critique can make possible (hint: a lot, but this isn't an it-gets-better story).

Our June 2021 episode features two accomplished leaders in the movement to decolonize higher education. Graduates Leah Trotman and Catherine Morkel share their work to establish a more anti-racist, decolonial liberal arts curriculum at Agnes Scott College,. We analyze institutional responses to student leaders who demand that institutions make good on their surface commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

https://nothingneverhappens.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NNH-5-7-2021-redo-1.mp3

Leah Trotman, ASC 2021

Click above for SGA Resolution!

Leah Trotman, ASC 2021

Our guests authored, with colleagues Elizabeth Dudley and Alexis Mack, a valuable example of the necessary thinking about the importance of decolonizing the curriculum.

Leah Trotman is 2021 Student Government Association President at Agnes Scott College and a senior International Relations major. She is also both a Truman and a Marshall Scholar, with public health research experience at the CDC and in her home island, the U.S. Virgin Islands. Catherine Morkel is the 2021 SGA Vice President. She is a senior Chemistry major and peer leader on campus.

Some would say that a podcast with college students is somewhere down the intellectual hierarchy chain from the top Freirean and radical pedagogy scholars—and if this is you, we suggest re-reading Freire. He reminds us: “Liberatory education is fundamentally a situation where the teacher and the students both have to be learners, both have to be cognitive subjects, in spite of being different. This, for me, is the first test of liberating education, for teachers and students both to be critical agents in the act of knowing.”

What Leah and Catherine are up against, of course, is a neoliberal, capitalist institution, a panopticon of power relations, if you will. And they are up against an institution they care deeply about in our critical assessment. Any one listening to this podcast who has been or is a student activist can attest to the obstacles the dominant structure places in the path of systemic change.

The post No Tokens: Students Decolonizing the Curriculum appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

Our April 2021 guest is Jodi Melamed, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette University. We spill tea on gestures of liberation that are not liberative, institutional multiculturalisms, and practices of anti-racist pedagogy.

About our guest:

Jodi Melamed is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette University. Her first book Represent and Destroy is a devastating analysis of how powerful liberal and neoliberal institutions have responded to the demands of radical anti-racist movements. In this work, Jodi coins the phrase “official anti-racism” to describe the pedagogies of racial knowledge that not only foreclose materialist account of racial justice, but augment forms of racist violence now signified through optics of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism. Her current project, Dispossession By Administration, builds on this analysis by reflecting on how apparently neutral bureaucratic language paves the way for racist capitalist violence. You can find her presenting a portion of it here.

Music:

Closing music: “And We Out” by Akrasis: Max Bowen (raps/guitar) and Mark McKee (beats/trumpet), 2013. Available on Bandcamp.

This month we welcome Prof. Felicia Rose Chavez, award-winning educator and author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. We dig into the history of writing programs, a vision of decolonized writing classrooms, intersections of activism and teaching, specific pedagogical strategies, and more.

https://nothingneverhappens.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/NNH-03-172021.mp3

About Our Guest

Felicia Rose Chavez has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. In addition to authoring The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Prof. Chavez is the co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT (with Willie Perdomo and Jose Olivarez). Currently, she is the Bronfman Creativity & Innovation Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College, teaching courses in Creative Nonfiction, The Inspiration Lab, Digital Storytelling, and The Podcast, where students develop an audio essay around their writing and voice. Chavez has served as Program Director at Young Chicago Authors, taught at the University of Iowa (where she received, and survived and transformed, her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing), the University of New Mexico, and now Colorado College, winning multiple teaching awards.

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop combines elements of memoir and critique to reveal the burden of the traditional canon and educational system on students, especially students of marginalized groups. Chavez also explores ways to design more inclusive, democratic, and decolonized writing workshops—and classroom communities. For any teachers committed to deconstructing traditional white supremacist, patriarchal models of power and voice in the classroom, this book is foundational. For the traditionalists holding fast to a decaying hierarchical system, this book is necessary.

The post Product to Process: The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

Our February 2021 episode features Theresa Ronquillio and Tikka Sears, who joined us for a conversation about using Theater of the Oppressed across pedagogical medium. They offer insights on fostering embodied practice, social change, and community building in virtual spaces.

https://nothingneverhappens.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/15-01-2021-NNH.mp3

Through these theater pedagogies, Tikka and Theresa welcome participants to bring their whole selves into the learning process. Both make real Augusto Boal’s dictum, “The theater itself is not revolutionary: it a rehearsal for the revolution.”

Tikka Sears is a theater director and performing artist in Seattle and is the Artistic Director and founder of the Memory War Theater and Theater for Change (formerly the Interactive Theater as Pedagogy Project). She was a Fulbright-Artist-in-Residence in Indonesia for two years.

Dr. Ronquillo holds a doctorate in Social Work and is the founder of Embody Change. She is affiliate faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Inclusive Excellence program that is “rooted at the intersection of arts, anti-oppression and multi-level change.” She is a theatre of the oppressed facilitator and practitioner of the liberatory arts. A second-generation Filipina-American, Theresa describes herself with these words: “I am a storyteller. I enjoy telling stories about my complex identities and intersectionalities—shaped by space, place, and time.” She instigated and led the workshop, “Shifting Stories through Theater of the Oppressed,” last December at the Richmond (VA) Story House.

Beyond the podcast, Tikka and Theresa work with diverse academic departments, using theater to disrupt oppressions and imagine transformative possibilities for learning (for a great example, see this interactive workshop they held last year). Last August, Tina attended their virtual workshop on Theater of the Oppressed in online courses, and she immediately hoped they would agree to come on the podcast. We were so happy that they said yes!

The post Acting Out: Embodied Pedagogy, Online and Off appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

We are ringing in 2021 in style with a podcast featuring Eleni Schirmer, a scholar of labor, social movements, and the political economy of education.  We talk about the debt crisis in higher education as it affects not only students but institutions; the history of teacher unions; how to bring democratic practices from the street and the organizing committee to everyday classroom pedagogy.

https://nothingneverhappens.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/NNH-13-01-2021-Shirmer.mp3

A PhD candidate in the Department of Education Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently a research associate with the Penn State Center for Global Workers’ Rights, Eleni has won numerous awards for her teaching and research. She’s written for Boston Review, The New Yorker, Dissent, and the Nation — the latter of which published her game-changing article on the debt crisis in universities. Eleni’s book manuscript in process concerns the long history of social justice teacher unionism in Milwaukee. 

She organizes around all of these issues, including a stint as the co-president of the Teaching Assistants’ Association, which is the nation’s oldest graduate employee union

Outro music by Akrasis — “And We Out” from the album Children Singing in Hell. Check out their stuff at https://akrasis.bandcamp.com/

Max Bowen (raps) and Mark McKee (beats)

The post Flipping the Covenant: Debt, Labor, Public Education appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

The post Dismantling Oppression: A Conversation with Maha Bali, Part 2 appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.