We Be Imagining

How do we put the significant changes of the Earth’s atmosphere we’re experiencing now due to anthropogenic or human caused CO2 into context relative to the natural variability our planet has experienced? Rates of mass loss similar to now occurred in the early Holocene Period (~11,500 years ago) but simulations predict the 21st century will far exceed that rate of loss. If we deviate from the business as usual model, commit to low carbon emissions, can we mitigate or reverse sea level rise due to a melting Greenland Ice Sheet?

Assistant Scientist at UCI Department of Earth System Science Joshua Cuzzone joins the WBI show to discuss Rate of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet will exceed Holocene values this century. He co-authored this recently published paper in Nature alongside an interdisciplinary team of paleoclimatologists, glacial geologists and geochemists. Check out this episode to learn about the 5 years they spent examining these questions. We also take an in depth look at the high-resolution Ice Sheet and Sea-level system Model (ISSM) used for simulating rates of GIS mass change from 12,000 years ago to AD 2100.

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Music: Drew Lewis
Show Notes:
Chernobyl: data wars and disaster politics
Recommendations:
The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future by Richard Alley

Please rate, review and write us at [email protected]

How does a child welfare system claiming to help families in need systematically target, punish and separate Black, Hispanic and poor families? Why aren’t we better connecting the dots between police abolition and the need to abolish child services and their implementation of surveillance in the name of *support*? How has the federal Family First Prevention Services Act passed in 2018 changed the priorities and funding for state level child welfare agencies?

Author of Catching a Case: Inequality and Fear in New York City’s Child Welfare System and Anthropology Professor at University of Wisconsin Stout campus, Tina Lee joins the WBI show for our 3rd episode examining the child welfare or family regulation system. We need systems that provide support for families instead of punishing and surveilling them.

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis
Show Notes:
Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse by Richard Wexler
Children as Chattel: Invoking the Thirteenth Amendment to Reform Child Welfare Note 1 Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal 2003
Shattered Bonds The Color Of Child Welfare by Dorothy Roberts
Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts
A Fiji Junket, a Padlocked Office and a Pioneering Nonprofit’s Collapse
An Interview with Richard Wexler, Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
An ‘Exemplary’ Foster Father, a String of Suspicions and Sexual-Abuse Charges (Published 2016)
Elisa W. v. City of New York - Amended Complaint (Class action lawsuit against ACS and OCFS)
THE PARENT LEGISLATIVE ACTION NETWORK HAILS PASSAGE OF HISTORIC CHILD WELFARE REFORM IN THE NEW YORK STATE LEGISLATURE AND URGES THE GOVERNOR TO SIGN THE BILL INTO LAW
Family First Policy Forum Slide Deck (Slide 90 features Virginia Child Welfare Commissioner's slide of kids in large suits counting money)
State-level Data for Understanding Child Welfare in the United States
Data Brief: Child Welfare Investigations and New York City Neighborhoods (2019)
Some Parents Awaiting iPads Got Visit From Child Welfare - THE CITY
Recommendations:
AUTOMATING INEQUALITY How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks
Algorithms of Oppression How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

From poultry plants in the US South pushing low-wage workers to process 175 birds per minute (BPM), to the slow violence of pesticides in Punjab causing premature disability to the European food sovereignty movement challenging strategies of resisting capitalist discipline imported from digital rights activism- scholars, Carrie Freshour, Divya Sharma and Barbara Van Dyck join the WBI show to connect the dots of agroecology across the global south.

How can we trace the lineage of poultry production to the plantation? What do the oral histories of 80 year old farmers in the Punjab region tell us about ecological degradation and the green revolution? How does transforming our relationship to food, land and each other require a transformation of the state? This extended cut episode addresses these questions and more.

Hosts: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel

Guests: University of Washington Assistant Professor of Geography Carrie Freshour, University of Sussex Lecturer in Sustainable Development Divya Sharma and Associate Professor at Coventry University in the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience Barbara Van Dyck

Music: Drew Lewis
Show Notes:Capitalist agriculture and Covid-19: A deadly combination (Interview w/ Rob Wallace)
Racial Capitalism: A Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States - Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, 2020
Divya Sharma - Mobilization for Socio-Ecological Sustainability in post-Green Revolution Punjab
Poultry and Prisons by Carrie Freshour (Monthly Review)
“Ain't No Life For A Mother!” Racial Capitalism And The Crisis Of Social Reproduction by Carrie Freshour
Scholar-activists in an expanding European food sovereignty movement by Barbara Van Dyck
(PDF) Articulating Agrarian Racism: Statistics and Plantationist Empirics by Brian Williams
Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave It.
What is Revolutionary About The Green Revolution?

Recommended Organizations/Movements:
Saturday Free School
Agroecology Now! - Knowledge, Action, Transformation
Mississippi Minority Farmers Alliance
Kheti Virasat Mission
Study and Struggle
Cooperation Jackson
People’s Archive of Rural India

Brooklyn Law Professor Frank Pasquale joins the WBI show to discuss his latest book, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI. What are the challenges and promises of serving on the federal health committee as an expert on the legal frameworks of emerging technologies during 45’s reign? How do we reconcile the need to prioritize human expertise while acknowledging the harm often committed by professionals against marginalized communities? We discuss these question and more on the latest episode of the We Be Imagining Podcast. Please send us your questions and comments at [email protected].
Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis
Recommendations:
Competition is Killing Us; How Big Business is Killing Our Society and Planet- and What To Do About It
Competition Overdose by How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us from Citizen Kings to Market Servants By Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi
LPE Project - The Law and Political Economy Project

What becomes available when Black people come together? How do we understand Mike Brown, a child unjustly slain by the state as a kind of Christ? Poet and Scholar, Joshua Bennett joins the WBI show to discuss operating out of an archive of air, the shape of Black ideas, Black exuberance and joy. We chop it up about the praxis of police abolition, the choreography of anti-colonial navigation in the academy, the indebtedness of America to Black folks and the the debt owed by America to Black folks. Read Owed, the second book released by Bennett this year and check out this episode. His many references are in the show notes.

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis
Links to the episode:
Still Life With First Best Friend
Against Consuming Images of the Brutalized, Dead, and Dying
Being Properly Once Myself
Sobbing School
How It Feels to Be Colored Me, by Zora Neale Hurston
Owed to Eminem by June Jordan
Legendary Nikki Giovanni Speaks on her "Thug Life" Tattoo + New Book "Chasing Utopia"
CHANGE: A World Without Prisons - Ruth Wilson Gilmore in Conversation with Mariame Kaba
NAACP | NAACP History: Lift Every Voice and Sing
The Mis-Education of the Negro
In the Break — by Fred Moten
Gwendolyn Brooks | Primer for Blacks

Episode Transcript

How does legislation touted as protecting children from sex trafficking actually harm consenusal sex workers
and serve as a trojan horse attacking encryption and privacy rights of our broader society? What does it mean to do racial justice as a dominatrix? We discuss these questions as well as uplift the work of organizations led by and for sex workers around unionization and digital rights.

Selena the Stripper and the Goddess Cori, hosts of Heaux in the Kneaux podcast join the WBI show to discuss
the 2018 Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) as well as their 2020 descendant, the Earn It Act. This is the kick off to our second season where we look forward to inviting hosts of our favorite podcasts onto We Be Imagining to diversify the conversations around privacy, surveillance and digital rights beyond academics.

Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Music: Drew Lewis

Links to the Episode:
Hacking and Hustling
Soldiers of Pole: A Stripper Union Movement - Learn About Your Rights
Strippers Are Workers With the Power to Unionize
Strippers And Giggers: Unionize Now | by Antonia Crane | PULPMAG
L.A.'s Exotic Dancers Are Launching a Labor Movement
SWOP USA
Analysis | Has the sex-trafficking law eliminated 90 percent of sex-trafficking ads?
FOSTA-SESTA anti-sex-trafficking law has been a failure: opinion
Analysis | The Four-Pinocchio claim that ‘on average, girls first become victims of sex trafficking at 13 years old’
Warren, Sanders back bill that could uncover violence against sex workers

Follow on IG:
#stripperstrike (@pdxstripperstrike)
EastLondonStrippersCollective (@ethicalstripper)
Hacking//Hustling (@hackinghustling)

For more information, navigate to https://americanassembly.org/wbipodcast

Multimedia artist and scholar whose work enacts Blackness as the imaginative capacity to desire and enact something else and otherwise, Treva Ellison joins the WBI show in conversation with Romi Morrison. Romi is an interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher working across new media, Black feminist praxis, and cultural geography.

Together we think out loud about the epistemic assumptions embedded in sociotechnical systems that aim to calculate Black life, how Blackness is so much more than being a subject of violence.

For further show notes and information please navigate to https://americanassembly.org

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at MCLA, Mohamad Junaid and Lafayette College Assistant Professor, Hafsa Kanjwal join the WBI show to discuss the the acceleration of the settler colonial project in Kashmir and the continued fight for Azadi or self-determination. The Indian BJP government’s recent passage of the domicile law in Jammu and Kashmir is a move towards ethnically cleansing the occupied territory. Last November, Indian Consul General in New York, Sandeep Chakravorty advocated for this law in order to introduce “Israeli model” settlements into Kashmir.

“I don’t keep calm, I’m continuously in outrage, I don’t have any spiritual solace, I don’t have any calm, everyday is like a new mourning.” Junaid shares- yet finds hope in Kashmiri writers, activists and artists a generation removed from state sanctioned illiteracy now documenting the desire and struggle for national liberation to the rest of the world.

“Bollywood is India’s kind of wet dream...Initially kind of creating this desire for the beautiful landscape without any regard for the local ‘ignorant people they needed to modernize’”- Kanjwal provocatively comments, drawing out the sophisticated ways in which Hindu nationalist culture legitimizes the state sanctioned erasure and potentially the extermination of the Kashmiri people.

For full show notes and cited works, please navigate to The American Assembly