Nothing Never Happens Nothing Never Happens

What does transformative justice look like in practice? What does it mean to teach transformative justice, so that we destroy the cops in our heads and hearts, and begin to build something new?
In this episode, Mia Mingus -- visionary movement builder, transformative justice organizer, and human rights + disability justice educator -- dives into these questions and more. We discuss the educational experiences that inspired Mia to her current work, Transformative Justice (TJ) frameworks for community accountability and creative intervention, pedagogies of workshopping, and Pod Mapping as a tool for organizing and movement building.
More about our guest:
Mia Mingus is a co-founder of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective: Building Transformative Justice Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (BATJC) and the founder and leader of SOIL: A Transformative Justice Project.
Mia inspires us to consider words like dignity, love, compassion, care, and justice in ways that address harm and violence and also bring concrete repair and change. For Mia, the opening question of transformative justice is: “What are the conditions that allowed for that violence or that harm to be able to take place in the first place?” The focus is on dismantling oppressive systems and building new, liberatory structures. This justice work is done in intersectional and interdependent community. 
“Magnificence comes out of our struggle,” she writes. We think that Mia and the worlds she is building are magnificent, and we encourage you to check out her many published writings, many of which are collected on her blog Leaving Evidence.
Credits:
Co-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether
Audio editor: Aliyah Harris
Intro music by Lance Hogan, performed by Aviva and the Flying Penguins
Outro music by Akrasis

What is the role of education within radical and revolutionary movements? Is the classroom a political space? How do traditions of Marxian thought and pedagogy frame those questions?
In this episode, Derek R. Ford offers a crash orientation to the terrain of Marxist educational theory and practice, with a focus on its dynamic expressions in resistance movements, organizing campaigns, and more formal schooling contexts. Topics include Marxian traditions of education, dialogical pedagogy, practices of interpretation in a so-called "post-truth" era, and cultivating learning spaces where all people can experience the freedom and invitation to learn, question, explore, and build new ways of living and being.
Derek Ford is an organizer, author, and teacher with deep ties to Left movement spaces. Currently an Assistant Professor of Education Studies at DePauw University, their books include Teaching the Actuality of Revolution: Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Sensations of Struggle (2023), Communist Study: Education for the Commons (2022), Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy (2022), Inhuman Educations: Jean-Francois Lyotard, Pedagogy, Thought (2021), and many edited books and articles on eco and urban pedagogies and politics. They are also an editor at Liberation School where they help to create the Reading Capital with Comrades podcast series.
Credits: Outro Music by Akrasis (Max Bowen, raps; Mark McKee, beats); audio editing by Aliyah Harris; production by Lucia Hulsether + Tina Pippin.
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Is universal design even possible? What does harm reduction look like in a classroom or on a syllabus? What role have university centers for teaching and learning played in supporting radical pedagogy--and when and where have they interrupted projects of liberation? We address these questions in the second part of our series with Sarah Silverman.
Sarah E. Silverman, feminist instructional designer and disability studies scholar, breaks down these questions and their reverberant implications. Dr. Silverman is a leading voice in the multi-front movement to resist remote proctoring and educational surveillance technologies, as well as to promote authentic assessment and universal design for learning (UDL). A generous critic and prolific writer—especially on her extraordinarily useful blog—Dr. Silverman was until very recently based at the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. Currently, she is working as an independent scholar and lecturer. She holds a PhD in Entomology and Demography from the University of California, Davis.
This is the second part of a two-part series:
Part 1 maps the terrain of academic surveillance tech and introduces universal design as a specifically feminist approach to pedagogy, with concrete examples from Sarah's own practice.Part 2 digs deeper into these issues, as we discuss principles of the “non-abusive syllabus," classroom practices of harm reduction, and the ambivalent institutional role of university centers for teaching and learning.
Credits: Outro Music by Akrasis (Max Bowen, raps; Mark McKee, beats); audio editing by Aliyah Harris; production by Lucia Hulsether + Tina Pippin.
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How can we prioritize multiplicity and accessibility when designing learning activities? What does an “inclusive” pedagogy entail? Can design ever be universal? And how can teachers and learners make the most of digital tools while also resisting the creep of academic surveillance technologies into our classrooms, homes, and bodies?
Sarah E. Silverman, feminist instructional designer and disability studies scholar, breaks down these questions and their reverberant implications. Dr. Silverman is a leading voice in the multi-front movement to resist remote proctoring and educational surveillance technologies, as well as to promote authentic assessment and universal design for learning (UDL). A generous critic and prolific writer—especially on her extraordinarily useful blog—Dr. Silverman is currently based at the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She holds a PhD in Entomology and Demography from the University of California, Davis.
Our conversation is divided into two parts.
Part 1 maps the terrain of academic surveillance tech and introduces universal design as a specifically feminist approach to pedagogy, with concrete examples from Sarah's own practice.Part 2 (coming soon!) digs deeper into these issues, as we discuss principles of the “non-abusive syllabus," classroom practices of harm reduction, and the ambivalent institutional role of university centers for teaching and learning.
Credits: Outro Music by Akrasis (Max Bowen, raps; Mark McKee, beats); audio editing by Aliyah Harris; production by Lucia Hulsether + Tina Pippin.
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What becomes possible when we anchor our pedagogical praxes in frameworks of reproductive justice and intersectional feminist care? What coalitions grow? What visions are revealed, and what worlds emerge?
Teacher, organizer, storyteller, and freedom-fighter Loretta Ross shares her wisdom on these questions and so much more. Topics include: attacks on reproductive autonomy, to politicized teaching in a democratic classroom, to the history of Black women's organizing, to creative and effective protest tactics, to the "rotating international favorites" served at the West Point Military Academy dinner club.
Loretta Ross is a movement visionary recently recognized as a Class of 2022 MacArthur Genius Fellow. After working at the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta, she went on to found and then become the National Coordinator of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. She has taught very widely, in and out of the university, as Founder of the National Center for Human Rights Education, as Program Director of the National Black Women's Health Project, and now as the Associate Professor in the Program on Women and Gender at Smith College.
She is a prolific author, whose authored and co-authored works include Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (2017), Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique (2017), and Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice (2004). Her forthcoming book, Calling In the Calling Out Culture, will be out in 2023.
Credits: Outro Music by Akrasis (Max Bowen, raps; Mark McKee, beats); audio editing by Aliyah Harris; production by Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin.
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How can we ground our classrooms in praxes of environmental justice? How can teachers and learners build ethical connections to local communities mobilizing against climate emergency and structural abandonment?
Scholar-activist Ellen Spears joins us to discuss these questions and more. Prof. Spears is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. She is a prolific author, whose most recent books include the award-winning Baptized in PCBs: Race, Religion, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (2014) and Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945 (2019). She was part of the Task Force on History, Slavery, and Civil Rights at the UA-Tuscaloosa. Her courses range from comparative ecologies, to environmental ethics and policy, to environment and film.
Co-Hosts: Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin
Music by Akrasis
Image by LL Sammons via Unsplash