In the Belly of the Beast American Culture & Difference

In this episode, our resident hosts have a lovely in-person conversation with Dr. Tinashe Goronga of EqualHealth’s Campaign Against Racism (http://www.equalhealth.org/campaign-against-racism). Tinashe introduces listeners to a social medicine approach to health and discusses vaccine equity work he is engaged in with a cadre of folx from around the globe. Then, we open into a broader discussion on the structures of global imperialism and how we organize within. Hosts: Ry Siggelkow, Amy Finnegan, Kanishka Chowdhury, and Todd Lawrence.  Intro Music: Lord Jordan X.

In this episode your hosts discuss contemporary anti-racism initiatives in higher education. We reflect on the meaning and usefulness of terms such racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and decolonization, which in recent years have become increasingly mainstream. Hosts: Ry Siggelkow, Amy Finnegan, Kanishka Chowdhury, and Todd Lawrence.  Intro Music: Lord Jordan X.

In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois published his landmark book, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, in which he challenged the then-dominant white historiography of the post-Civil War period In the United States by re-framing abolition in terms of the democratic, anti-racist, and radical egalitarian aspirations and movements of black people to re-envision and re-make the social, political, and economic structures of the nation.
Following Du Bois, Angela Y. Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, among many others, have written about the urgent necessity of 'abolition democracy' as a framework and praxis through which to work for 'non-reformist reforms' on the way toward radically re-making the world. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, people all over the globe have called for 'abolishing' and 'defunding' the police. Reflecting on the work of Du Bois, Davis, and Gilmore, and with our contemporary moment in view, we discuss the question: what does abolition democracy look like as a concrete praxis – not merely about the absence of carceral institutions but about the presence of an entirely new social order?
Hosts: Ry Siggelkow, Amy Finnegan, Kanishka Chowdhury, and Todd Lawrence.  Intro Music: Lord Jordan X.

In this episode we talk with co-host Ry Siggelkow about how he got into theology, what has shaped his thinking, commitments, and ways of acting in the world, as well as his reflections on the themes of apocalyptic theology, faith & praxis, and liberation theologies. Hosts: Ry Siggelkow, Amy Finnegan, Kanishka Chowdhury, and Todd Lawrence.  Intro Music: Lord Jordan X.

In this episode Todd Lawrence interviews Jeanelle Austin, the lead caretaker at George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, MN – a spontaneous memorial, communally constructed on the site of a lynching, an ever-changing space of pain, anger and mourning, but also of protest, resistance, community, love, liberation, and healing. Todd spends time talking with Jeanelle about the transformative power of caretaking, memorialization, and the work of building  communities of love in the struggle for social justice.  

In this episode we discuss Todd's book, When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri, co-authored with Elaine Lawless and published by University Press of Mississippi in 2018. Winner of the 2019 Chicago Folklore Prize, the book examines the story of the people of Pinhook, Missouri who were displaced from their homes in 2011 when the US Army Corps of Engineers activated the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway, which diverted water to save the town of Cairo, Illinois but completely destroyed the African American town of Pinhook.

We talk to Todd about the challenges and dangers of ethnography, his experiences getting to know the people of Pinhook, the power of their faith in God and love for one another and the land, and the way the flooding of Pinhook exemplifies "how racism takes place" (G. Lipsitz). 

Hosts: Ry Siggelkow, Amy Finnegan, Kanishka Chowdhury, and Todd Lawrence.  Intro Music: Lord Jordan X.