Will Brehm 1:58
Colette Cann and Eric DeMeulenaere, welcome to FreshEd.

Colette Cann 2:01
Hi, Will. Thank you so much for having us. Usually before we start interviews and talks, we like to open with both a land acknowledgement and a Black Lives Matter acknowledgement. Particularly in this moment, when anti-Black racism is so visible and white supremacy is running rampant in new ways, we feel like it’s important to do these acknowledgments at the start. And so, I want to just take a moment for those outside of the US where land acknowledgment is perhaps not as relevant or doesn’t feel as relevant. A land acknowledgement and a Black Lives Matter acknowledgement acknowledges what Eve Tuck calls the twin tools of white supremacy, right? That settler colonialism and anti-Black racism generated profit and created this oppressive system of making land and people into property. And so, I’m going to read a quote by her from Biting the University that Feeds Us, “In the United States and other slave states, the remaking of land and property was and is accompanied by the remaking of African persons into property, into chattel. This can be connected to neoliberalism’s ideation of the flexible landless workforce. The remaking of Indigenous land and Black bodies into property is necessary for white settlement of other people’s land. In settler colonialism, Indigenous erasure and anti-Blackness are endemic. This is why indigenous trans and cis women in Canada are asking #AmInext?, while organizers in the United States have to remind us again and again to #SayHerName to bring attention to Black women killed by police, often in custody. Black and Brown trans women have been murdered at devastating rates. The violence is all connected, and Indigenous theorizations of settler colonialism and Black theorizations of anti-Blackness flay open those networks of connections.” And so, we do like to acknowledge that at the opening of our work, in particular, because we’re focused on what is activist academia? What could that look like, right? What it could look like is addressing anti-Blackness, addressing settler colonialism, addressing racism more broadly. And I think it’s also important to say Eve and Wayne Yang also talked about how we want to make sure these aren’t performative. So, while here, it’s a statement. It should also be lived and brought forth into the world through activism. While we offer this land acknowledgement and Black Lives Matter acknowledgement from the both of us, I’m going to speak it. And so, I’m going to speak it from my location as a Black-identified mother-scholar. This acknowledgement was inspired by Rhonda Magee and “RAPtivist” Aisha Fukushima, so thank you to the two of them for inspiring this acknowledgement. “I honor the land that I occupy and the lands I’ve occupied in the past. I acknowledge that those lands have nourished me, provided me safety and life even when I was not, and especially when I was not mindful of those lands as stolen and unceded. I honor the life that I live and dedicate myself to living and enjoy for it’s a gift from my ancestors whose lives were stolen, whose work was exploited, and whose family systematically and purposefully dismantled. I promise to work to make sure that past, present, and future Black lives are seen and honored as lives that matter, including my own. So, we invite you here at the beginning of this podcast to take a moment to feel the land beneath your feet. So much has happened on this land that has been centered in violence and injustice, but also to in love and joy. We can hold this hypocrisy through awareness, dedication to land and racial justice, and a commitment to joy as justice.

Eric DeMeulenaere 5:41
Thanks, Colette, and thank you so much Will, I’m excited to be here with you. I just wanted to acknowledge as well that I occupy Nipmuc land here in Western Massachusetts and recognize with Collette that acknowledgement is one thing and being critically aware is important, but it’s not enough. And so, we have to go beyond acknowledgement and recognize that there’s actions that we can be doing to create greater justice.

Will Brehm 6:04
Well, thank you both for starting that way. That’s a really nice, beautiful way to start, really. Talking about activist academics, like your book does, this is such a great way to start. And I guess, to really begin to understand the book and some of the big ideas in it, I think we have to understand the two of you. You two play such a prominent role throughout the book. And it really is this beautiful testament to your own friendship. So, I mean, how did the two of you actually meet in the beginning?

Eric DeMeulenaere 6:43
Thanks for that. Colette and I met in grad school. I think I was one year ahead of Colette and if I remember correct, I think we were in a class the first year you were there with Judith Warren Little about high schools. Is that the first class we sort of had together?

Colette Cann 7:03
I think so. I think so.

Eric DeMeulenaere 7:05
Yeah. And so, I remember being in that. And we talked a little bit about in one of the chapters in the book, because we talked about a research project that you were doing in that class. And I remember you presenting it, and then when we talk about it later, and sort of your reflections on it, I remember we sort of talked about sort of what we didn’t say, and sort of the ways that when we were in grad school, even we were being performative, and not readily acknowledging how confused and how much of a struggle some of the work we were doing. And I think part of our work and journey since then has been really to be honest with each other and help each other sort of unpack all it is we don’t know, right? And so, I think we got a lot closer when we were co-teaching a class called education 190, what was it called? Current Issues in Education, something like that, which is really a kind of a course that was designed to be about critical pedagogies and sort of thinking deeply about education in really critical ways. And so, we got to co-teach that and I think I learned a lot from Colette there. And that was sort of a fun experience to sort of get together with some amazing folks who are doing amazing teaching, and I could learn so much from them. And then Colette, of course, as Colette always does, takes things that are pre-existing, and then like moves into the next level. So, she created like ED 190 part two, and taking all these students into like a project you were working on at the time. What was that, making waves or something like that? So, yeah, there was a lot of time there. But you know, there was a lot of like other times, we were good friends, she’s my daughter’s godmother. And so, we’ve been through a lot. And that was like what 1998 when we first met?
Colette Cann 9:02
Mm Hmmm.

Eric DeMeulenaere 9:03
It’s been a minute.

Will Brehm 9:05
That’s why it was so beautiful to sort of read your book and see your relationship is so true. And sort of reflecting on those past experiences together, you sort of began to reveal some of the structures -in our education systems, in our university systems, as we’re talking about that- do sort of blinker us to particular ways of seeing the world and behaving and as you said earlier, performativity and not recognizing that messiness. So, I guess the question I have is, are there other forms of oppression that you see that the university is sort of reproducing or creating in the world?

Colette Cann 9:49
Yeah. First of all, now, I’m already going to be on a tangent, so bear with me here. But I remember presenting our research that was assigned in that class. And I regret presenting it in that way. It was such a sanitized version of it. It was presenting it in exactly the way that I saw research presented in journals and whatnot. And it was so like kind of didn’t at all get at the messiness behind the scenes of doing research. Because research is about relationships, and relationships are messy. And when I would go into the teachers after school classroom, the room was literally a hot mess, because it had been a full day and the teacher was exhausted, and I was exhausted, and the kiddos were exhausted, like everybody was exhausted. And yet, none of that really comes out in the piece. And the reason I regret it so much, is because when I’m working with doctoral students now, and they are dreaming up their research, and they’re putting in their IRB for approval, or they’re putting together their proposals, it’s harder for them to write because they’re trying to write like that, right, and are thinking, I’m doing something wrong, because of the messiness that I’m experienced. I must be doing something wrong, rather than research is messy. And I remember reading, Michelle Fine talks about the research that she did with imprisoned women, what that drive home meant, right? Like, being able to leave a space, and the messiness of the women with whom she was doing the research. I think it was a PAR research project. How they didn’t have access to their own files, they couldn’t use certain writing implements, they couldn’t read each other’s work. Like there were all these barriers to it. And that was one of the best pieces I’ve literally ever read in academia because it got to the truthfulness of relationships, and how challenging research is in all the right ways when you acknowledge those moments, right? And so anyways, it’s funny that you mentioned that at the beginning because as soon as he said it, I was like, I wish I had done it in a million different ways.

Eric DeMeulenaere 12:09
But that’s what we did in the book, right? Because we talk about that very scene in the book. And, right, part of the book was pulling back that the curtain, right, and letting people behind and saying like this knowledge construction work that we present in these pristine, kind of finalized products, is not the way knowledge is actually built. And it never goes that way. And we don’t even front that, right. And so, I appreciate the people who are willing -I mean, just all of us. We live in a world where our resumes have to be like these perfection things. And we don’t talk about mistakes and failure, which are actually some of the most profound ways we learn and grow. And so, there’s something completely messed up in the way our world -I mean, I just think about my daughter applying to college now. And like how crazy you have to present yourself as if you’re like this perfect human being that does everything. And I just think we are raised and trained into that reality. And we lived in that class. It takes a lot to get to a place where you don’t feel the need to sort of present yourself in this sort of sanitized, perfected way.

Colette Cann 13:19
You know, one of the things that I am going to remember for the rest of my professional life is having a conversation -I’m an admin, right now- having a conversation about how we might be able to create space for staff to work from home at least one or two days a week. This is pre pandemic, and there was so much conversation about, well, we have to make sure they’re working. I mean, I wasn’t saying this, but the conversation was, how do we make sure they’re working? Maybe we text them every 10 minutes or is this the best way to make sure that they’re going to be productive, and there was very much of a surveillance kind of piece to it that feels oppressive, and I didn’t enjoy participating in that conversation. And then, of course, now we’re all sheltered in place. And that conversation is off the table. And as I’m talking to folks who are on our team, a lot of the conversation is about how they’re working too much. They’re working more than they were when we were in person. Conversation takes longer, communicating via email takes longer, you’re working from home and the realities of some folks who are parenting at the same time, like all the things that we were worried about before, you know, well, not “we” but people were worried about before, were really not concerns at all. And I think about the ways that like we’ve internalized that and for folks who are familiar with Tema Okun’s work in white supremacist culture, the internalization of that culture of needing to work yourself to death or like you work yourself to create more profit, whatever profit means in the academy in ways that we don’t really care about people. And I see people internalizing that. Working longer hours because it takes longer to do the work remotely, rather than saying, I’m working remotely. And I’m going to do what I can and also really take care. Or, that video that went viral where somebody was being interviewed, this was pre-pandemic, and his children come into the room, and you see him kind of pushing them out. And the mother comes diving into the room to grab the kids and crawls back in to close the door. And as I’m seeing people on Zoom -I’m on Zoom so often- there are people feeling bad and guilty about kids coming in to ask questions and apologizing. “I’m so sorry, hold on one second.” And I try not to do it myself. And every so often I do. What is that? To me because I’m doing my work in the university, that is a part of the oppression that I see inside of universities. That way of trying to get people to do work in a very particular way. So, either around what their labor looks like, but then also the definition of that labor and what that labor needs to look like in terms of what is valid research? What is valid teaching? What is valid service? That it has to be so narrowly defined, but it’s narrowly defined in a way that replicates itself and keeps the same people on the outside of that, and the same people in those seats of power. And I guess I want to say in this moment, that it’s all over the university. It is not just in the classroom; it is not just the oppression of faculty because certainly we have to recognize that they have more institutional power. It’s not just the oppression of students, but it’s also the oppression of staff, which I think is highlighted in particular in this moment.

Will Brehm 16:45
And so, I guess that does raise really interesting question of -the three of us work in different institutions. And as Colette said, it’s from top to bottom. And as Eric said, we are sort of contributing, in ways, to the dehumanization through these practices and so there’s a tension there. So, how might we actually go about disrupting some of this oppression that you’ve begun to outline?

Eric DeMeulenaere 17:11
And I would just also say that universities are particular places, but there are some microcosms of a larger society, right? I teach in all my intro education courses, the basic Bowles and Gintis correspondence principle, like universities are implicated in -you know, their main function cut for all schools, all the way through university is to sort people into an economy, right? And it’s become even more. I try to explain to my students that when I started at UC Berkeley, like I watched the tuition increase but University of California system used to be free in the 60s and 70s. And now it’s like become super expensive. And so, it’s no longer seen as a public good. And even when it was seen as a public good, it was still sort of reinforcing all the systems of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism that already exists. And so, we have to like own what that means. What does it mean when I actually am grading students and sorting them? And how am I implicated in that? And how do I navigate what that means? And how does all of that dehumanize them, dehumanize me, dehumanize all of us that are part of this system? And if we don’t always live in tension with those realities then we’re failing to recognize how these systems of oppression manifest, right? Because they do. They manifest every day in our schools.

Colette Cann 18:36
I don’t really want to add too much. Because I think, Eric, you just kind of beautifully answered that. The one piece I think I would just want to speak just a teeny bit to is, I think that the process is as important as the outcome. And kind of when we’re talking about disrupting oppression, it’s about exactly what Eric just said, and it’s about how we do it, how we go about being in right relationship with other people. And I want to highlight the work of Shift consulting, three women of color who spoke at the Youth Summit in the fall. And they talked about this new framework that they’re proposing to counter white supremacist culture in our institutions in terms of like how we do that work, and they label it Community Care Values. And so, you know, pieces of that I heard echoing in what Eric said, as I just want to highlight the work that these young folks are doing. One is like to normalize failure. What does it mean to normalize failure? Eric said, some of our greatest learning happens in that place. And yet, students are afraid to make mistakes, like they’re terrified that that’s not going to get them into college. It’s not going to get them into graduate school, if they’re not presenting this kind of perfect image of self and their work. Another that that’s a part of these Community Care Values is “small is all” right? Rather than trying to do this big project that’s really about bringing attention to yourself, which is really about poverty pimping communities, right? That universities say, “We’re doing this big initiative with the local folks,” whatever that looks like. What if you did your own self work? What if you work with your faculty to not perpetuate racism in their own classrooms? So, I love that piece. And then the third that I’ll mentioned, and there’s a number of them that are a part of their Community Care Values, is working in community with others, which is that last piece that Eric mentioned. But academia is really about individualism. It’s about solo authored pieces, or who’s first author on a piece. It’s about the faculty member at the front of the classroom lecturing out, like offering out but not actually even being in community with the people who are in the classroom. Particularly when you’re doing your research, it’s about the researcher coming up with a set of questions that they then go in and ask these questions. And when people veer off of the protocol, how do you bring them back to the protocol but it’s really about that kind of individualization of that labor so that you can give credit. And so, I guess, the piece I’d want to add here is that disrupting that oppression, I don’t certainly pretend to have any answers to it. But I really appreciated how Shift consulting kind of created this different vision as I think Adrienne Maree Brown does. There’s so many really incredible public intellectuals who are offering us opportunities to think about how we do our work in less oppressive if not non-oppressive ways. And so, I wanted to add that.

Will Brehm 21:29
It’s a great idea, this idea of the activist academic and sort of working to disrupt and unsettle a lot of these oppressive structures and seeing it as structural is so important. And I guess I wonder why is it so important to be an activist academic in our current historical moment? I mean, is there something about the time in which we live today that sort of requires activist academics?

Eric DeMeulenaere 22:01
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I think just as we started with sort of the acknowledgement of land and Black Lives Matter, that one of the things we do in universities is we recognize systems of oppression. We serve a critical function to recognize the way systems of oppression work, but we can’t stay there. And I think one of the things I actually have worked with a group of faculty recently to create a new major in our university called Community, Youth and Education Studies but really it was created because a lot of students came to Clark University, where I teach, because we have this motto that says challenge convention, change the world. And we get all these idealized “save the world” kind of students who come and then they get here, and they find that there’s a lot of courses where they can be critical. In fact, they get so critical of how anything anyone’s ever done to create liberation has actually been oppressive. So, they get paralyzed, and they stop. And some of them just get like, I can’t, whatever I do is going to be messed up. And I’m like, okay, yes, that’s true. And then what? Because not doing anything is worse. And so, you got to really think through carefully, but you also have to figure out ways to create change in the world, not in some sort of idealized way but really thinking about it. I think one of the things that has been missing for me in a lot of the work that I see this really critical is this sense of visioning. Like what is a collective vision? What is the world that we’re trying to go towards? I think when I first started reading, like Paulo Freire’s work on problem posing, I initially said like what are the challenges? What are the systems of oppression that I need to challenge in my society? But I think as I read it more, I think what he’s getting there, at least my re-visioning of it is that we’re actually thinking about where are we trying to go? What’s the world that I want to live in? And then what are the obstacles in the way that I need to like remove? And how do I think about that? And how do I set myself, my students, on a path to sort of tackle some of those? And then at the same time, I think the other thing we have to do, and this is stuff I’ve borrowed from Adrienne Maree Brown’s work and sort of like, how do we build -in the smaller spaces that we have- those utopian visions that may be more distant at a bigger scale, but at least can we build it in my department or in this program? And what would that look like? And how do I start to move forward in those ways? Because what I’ve come to see is we can’t envision something without sort of seeing it. And I think that’s also why the arts become important in sort of helping us to imagine and see. And I think the other thing is we need to shift away from this sort of individualized visioning and individualized critique, but actually, how do we start to do this work collectively, and with others across a lot of differences?

Will Brehm 24:49
So, you know, listening to what Eric has just said about why we need to do this, why we need to be activist academics now and particularly now. What does that actually look like in our teaching practice, which is such an important part of being a university worker, being a professor in colleges and universities.

Colette Cann 25:10
You know, when we wrote about it, at clearly pre-pandemic, we were really focused on thinking about pedagogy in terms of how do we shift students thinking about what it means to learn? And what is important to learn? And kind of how do we focus on our learning for the purpose of justice? How do we focus on creating content that feels responsive to the issues in the world and in the lives of our students? And how do we take their identities and the identities of our communities, our universities to heart. And I think though, in this pandemic mode, I just want to put more emphasis on the process of learning and what that means to teach in a way that feels activist, that is creating more just spaces in our classrooms, as well as just opportunities for people to be doing work in the world.

I was at a meeting where a colleague was worried that students are not working as hard as students did pre-pandemic on their academics that we are making so much space for them to respond to the emergencies that are erupting in their lives, that post-pandemic, they might not be prepared for the so-called regular rigors of academia, which to me imply that we’re somehow training or creating a new group of academics who are going to be less rigorous in their work. They’re not going to be quite as qualified as everyone else. And I remember, just as I was sitting there, kind of thinking how I wanted to respond in that moment, I felt like why, if our goal is to create the same kind of dominant form of academic that historically we always have, and historically white institutions, that perhaps that’s something that would be of a concern to him. On the other hand, we are, I think, if we’re doing our job right, this is an opportunity for us to do teaching differently. And that to appreciate something different about the academics who are being created out of this moment. Two colleagues of mine, Melissa Canlas and Emma Fuentes came up with, after doing some research on how other folks were doing this, what they call the “Humanizing A.” That we recognize in every moment that what we’re not going to do is prioritize those students who are not parenting at home, who have kept their jobs through this pandemic, whose work can continue to be done at home, and the ways that that might show up in producing a different kind of work in class than those who are parenting at home, who are reading aloud to their kids, and they’re reading the theory we’re assigning in class because they’re trying to do two things at once. Let me read you a little bit about from Freire as we go to bed, or they’re trying to listen to their book on tape while they’re washing their dishes, right. There’s so much in that. And I was teaching a class and I showed a video and one of the folks in the class was like, “Oh, my goodness, my daughter’s teacher showed that same video,” it was Chimamanda Adichie’s the danger of a single narrative. And I was like, now y’all can talk. Now you can, like have a conversation, your child is no less an academic than you are. And so, it could be like a really fruitful conversation. There’s so many opportunities in this moment, right. And ways in which people have different ways of connecting and empathy raising and building of loving relationships in ways that we didn’t before. When folks left the house, they left their kids at home, they left their partners at home and they showed up at this space for two hours or however long the class is and there was this kind of disconnect, even from family life and from the paid work that you do. And so, I guess what I want to say in this moment is that an activist academic approach to pedagogy might be just humanizing our work and recognizing the ways in which this moment, I believe deeply, is going to produce better academics, people who really are connected with their work and with the importance of relationship building in that work. So, I guess I want to challenge folks who are worried about even at the K-12 level, at the elementary and high school level, like, “Oh, my goodness, kids are going to come back with lost learning.” I just can’t imagine why that, first of all, is a belief people have, and why that would be our number one concern in this moment. And so, what would activism just an education look like? And so, I want to just highlight one organization, the Abolitionist Teaching Network that has been hosting a number of webinars and one I’m really excited to go to this week is on homeschooling as kind of an abolitionist approach for Black parents. Like, in this moment, I had a choice to send my daughter back to school in this kind of, it wasn’t really an education that was worth fighting for period anyways. And I was like, you know what, for her to be home and me to just -and she’s older, I would not have been able to do this in the same way if she was two, but as a teenager- I could construct a curriculum for her that feels important at this time, right. And to take a moment to move back a little bit and not -I compare the work she’s doing to the work that my nephew is doing. And his school is incredible. They’re doing amazing, the curriculum is amazing. And yet, he’s online for like eight hours a day. And then he has another four hours of homework which requires him to still be on screen time. I don’t think that that is -that’s not life giving. I don’t know why that is the response in this moment. And so, I guess I would challenge folks to really think about what does it mean to have an activist approach to pedagogy, whether in the academy or in other educational institution? What does that mean right now?

Eric DeMeulenaere 31:10
Yeah. I mean I think: a) we need them always, in all times. But I think there is something particular. I mean, I’m reminded of Grace Lee Boggs sort of reference always to have us pay attention to what time it is on the world clock, right. And where are we in the world? And I think obviously, given the multiple crises confronting our globe currently, right. So, we have the COVID pandemic, that’s resulted in an economic insecurity for many. But that’s also connected to global economic inequities that have been exacerbated more and more systematically. And then we have a greater, I think, awareness and consciousness around the systems and forces of white supremacy currently. And so, I think that reality, and all of these kind of pandemics or viruses, if you will, are confronting us. But we also and I think this is really particular is that there’s been a systematic attack on knowledge and ideas, and sort of an undermining of the value of knowledge. If we look back in the 60s and 70s, people went to universities to try to figure things out. And we can critique and unpack what was going on in those sort of efforts and there’s problematic things that were presented, but there wasn’t this sort of attack on universities as a space that is at least striving to understand things better. But since then, and there’s been a systematic way. I mean, you can look at sort of the history of the Koch brothers founding all of these think tanks. And so, the rise of think tanks to actually offer a counter narrative, and actually undermine sort of the legitimacy of knowledge constructed in universities has happened at the same time. And I live in education, where how to do things better in schools is not rocket science. There are schools out there doing it, it’s been studied, there are things that can be done that can work in better ways. And yet over and over again, we are implementing policies that ignore that knowledge, right. And so, we can no longer as academics assume that just by figuring something out and offering it to the world that will actually result in some kind of change, right. And so, we have to be engaged in and I would argue, I mean, and I think there’s different ways of creating social change. But we have to be engaged in actively creating social change and using knowledge for that. And I think, as Colette was saying earlier, there’s sort of a way that we have to think about how knowledge gets constructed, and who we’re working with. And who’s asking the questions because the way the traditional academic works is, I have this niche of knowledge that I’m supposed to be an expert in. But if you’re actually working with people, and valuing the questions they’re asking and the knowledges they need, then what you’re focusing on will depend on the community you’re in. And so, you may not have a singular trajectory line of research that you would claim, right? And so, we have to rethink even the systems and structures that support kind of doing this collective knowledge building and imagining, if you will.

Colette Cann 34:33
You know, one thing -so, we teach these community classes about race and racism to parents and educators and just like other anti-racism training courses organizations, participation in these classes requests to take these classes increased more than tenfold, right, during this time. And I think during this time, parents are at home with their kids and they’re having conversations with friends on the phone and on Zoom and kids are overhearing it and kids are being surrounded by media where race is centered in these conversations and they have questions, and parents in this moment are like, “I don’t know how to answer these questions.” And so, they’re taking these classes to figure out what is race? I’ve never actually really thought about that. And they’re having conversations with their kids. How is that bad? I can’t wrap my head around. And of course, I’m not saying that in no way is the pandemic a good thing, but I am saying those that it’s creating these moments that instead of regretting those educational moments, what if we double down on those educational moments? What if we supported parents in those educational moments? What if we didn’t still try and squeeze all the labor out of them possible to make sure they’re still working that eight-hour day and said, okay, what if we pay twice as much, and we let them parent their kids, or let them educate their kids, or have conversations with their kids? And also, at this time, parents are, they have a little bit more time to take these classes and it’s an opportunity for them to reflect and do some self-work that they’ve been needing to do. And so, I think, instead of forcing that old model, as Eric is talking about, if we were actually lean into, okay, well, here is our reality, it might actually make possible some other conversations that we’ve been desperately needing to have and not able to prioritize.

Will Brehm 36:22
And it really seems like that’s precisely why activist academics are needed in this particular moment. It is a huge opportunity. Colette Cann and Eric DeMeulenaere, thank you so much for joining FreshEd today. It really was a pleasure to talk.

Colette Cann 36:37
Thank you so much.

Eric DeMeulenaere 36:39
Thank you so much. What an honor to be with you.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Related Guest Publications/Projects

The activist academic: Engaged scholarship for resistance, hope and social change

Activist educational research

Forged in the crucibles of difference: Building discordant communities

Mentioned Resources

Decolonization is not a metaphor – Tuck and Yang

Activist scholarship – Emma Fuentes and Koiraia-Azad

Leadership means moving a community forward: Asian American Community College Students And Critical Leadership Praxis – Melissa Canlas

Intimate details: Participatory action research in prison – Michelle Fine

White supremacy culture – Tema Okun

Schooling in capitalist America revisited – Bowles and Gintis 

Pedagogy of the oppressed – Freire

The danger of a single narrative – Chimamanda Adichie

Adrianne Maree Brown

Community Care Values – Shift Consulting 

Abolitionists Teaching Network

Revolution and evolution in the twentieth century – James and Grace Lee Boggs

The inner work of racial justice – Rhonda Magee

Pandemic – Aisha Fukushima 

The Koch network’s integrated strategy for social transformation 

Related Resources

Racial equity tools

Humanizing academia

Dismantling racisms

Activist education

Activist pedagogy

Resisting neoliberalism from within the academy: Subversion through an activist pedagogy

Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities

Normalizing failure: How we can learn to accept a daily, universal experience

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com