Block & Build Convergence Magazine

Of course the hot button issue of the day is former President Donald Trump's 34 felony convictions in his hush money trial. We briefly discuss how this impacts us as organizer, but have so much else to report.



Executive Director of Center for Third World Organizing, Chinyere Tutashinda (chinyere@ctwo.org), joins Cayden this episode to discuss the immediate dangers and risks of AI generated social media activism which may have had its first major viral moment with the widely shared "All Eyes on Rafah" graphic you've likely seen. They also explore how organizers and activists think about their work on a longer horizon than the daily news cycle itself.



Later in the episode, reporter for PRISM, Nicole Froio joins to discuss her new exclusive piece Why does Planned Parenthood contract with the arms manufacturer Raytheon? Together they explore the nuanced and complicated reality of a vital health care organization's need to prioritize cyber security and the limited amount of trustworthy market options capable of providing such support.



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This week, Cayden is joined by Executive Director of New Left Accelerator, Deborah Barron and Executive Director of the Center for Empowered Politics, Alex Tom to discuss risk. Any time we perform acts of civil disobedience, we subject ourselves to varying degrees of risk. As we’ve seen in the news lately in campus protests many risk personal arrest. Others, meanwhile, risk loss of funding, jobs, and more. The panel explores how to strategically make assessments of what risks we should take in the face of increasing tendencies of fascist power plays by the MAGA Right. They also take a look at how risk is currently and historically considered in left and progressive movements.



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Today's episode features an interview by Steven Pitts, the former host and creator of our longest running podcast, Black Work Talk. He sat down with Professor of Sociology and Labor at University of Massachusetts - Amherst, Cedric de Leon, to discuss Cedric’s forthcoming book contracted with University of California Press, Freedom Train.



In the book, Cedric centers the monumental contributions of Black workers to desegregating the labor movement and connecting the struggles of organized labor to those of civil society before and during the civil rights era. It excavates the era’s intra-movement conflicts as well as the way that labor leaders and rank and file workers were critical not just in organizing their workplaces but in galvanizing the government to act on crucial pieces of policy, from desegregating the defense industry under the auspices of the New Deal to creating pressure for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s.



You can find an excerpt of the interview already available in print on Convergence's website.



Find more about Cedric's work here.



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This week on the show, Cayden is joined by organizer and former Executive Director of Lavender Phoenix, Sammie Ablaza Wills, discussing outcomes from the past month's student protests. They explore some of the agreements of universities that have agreed to work and negotiate with students. The episode also dives into Sammie's recent article published by Convergence, Right Size Belonging: Six Practices for Organizers; considering how it applies to this new wave of campus organizing. Aside from a glimpse of what right sized belonging in organizations can look like, this episode also engages the importance of finding the right balance of comradely, interpersonal trust, while still maintaining vigilance for outside threats and maintaining proper security for our organizations and movements.



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This week’s show is our first Movement Media Round Table. We intend on this show to occasionally connect listeners with our fellow travelers in the independent, progressive media space to share some of the top stories from their outlets you should be following. For this round table, Cayden is joined by Editor-at-Large of Truthout.org, Maya Schenwar and Editor-in-Chief of PRISM, Lara Witt.



Each of our guests share some of the top stories of the week from their respective publications. We encourage listeners to read the full stories at their sites here:




Pro-Israel Legislators Have Concocted a Dangerous Ruse to Shut Down Nonprofits by Andy Lee Roth at truthout.org



PEN America is both a lifeline and a ‘wasted opportunity’ for some incarcerated writers by Tamar Sarai at prismreports.org




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This week on the show, hosts of the podcast Mystery A.I. Hype Theater 3000, Emily M. Bender (Professor of Linguistics at University of Washington) and Alex Hanna (Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute), join Cayden to help make sense of the inescapable hype of all things “Artificial Intelligence.” What’s being oversold? What are the actual threats? And what exactly are we talking about when we say A.I.? Hype or not, the advancement of technology in the workplace has strong implications for workers which some unions and communities are already organizing to protect themselves against.



Also on the show, Cayden and his guests will look at the ongoing campus protests for divestment from Israel and ceasefire in Gaza.



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