Episodes
Saturday Jun 27, 2020
Saturday Jun 27, 2020
Shelter & Solidarity show 4, a two-part episode, addresses higher education and also the organizing for May Day in a time of global pandemic and economic depression. In the first part, Joe Ramsey interviews Anna Kornbluh, Ben Manski, Barbara Madeloni, and Chris Newfield. Together they address the paradoxes of increased militancy and reduced organizational capacity. Framing the conversation is the notion of the “shock doctrine.” In this context, they provide insights into the formation of demands and its relationship to organizing. These are treated in a nuanced way and reflect different emphases and starting points for organizers. Their dialogue segues seamlessly into a broader conversation in the second part, “Organizing for May Day,” in which they are joined by Adam Kaszynski and Jonathan Feinberg. In discussing their organizing, Kaszynski and Feinberg, ground preparations for May Day in terms of the shop floor experiences of IUE-CWA Local 201 and in the immigrant and working-class communities of Lynn Massachusetts.
Friday Jun 26, 2020
Friday Jun 26, 2020
This episode is a panel discussion of the contradictions of anti-racist work in the University, with a particular focus on race, class, and contingency. The panel addresses the place institutions of higher education occupy in our racialized class society, assesses the official “anti-racist” strategies universities promote, and highlights the anti-racist work of on- and off-campus activism within the context of austerity, corporatization, and adjunctification.
Panelists include Southern California and community college-based adjunct union organizer Bobbi-Lee Smart (as co-host), as well as Philadelphia-based rank-and-file faculty and community organizer Wende Marshall, contingent faculty scholar of anti-racism Damon Dees, and Seattle-based adjunct activist Benedict Stork.
Among the questions considered:
What good are public statements against racism issued from institutions ensconced in a racialized system of inequality?
How can an academy historically and presently structured by and operating through exploitation hope to address systemic racism?
How are corporate elites and neoliberal administrators (and even some faculty) responding to the current crisis in ways that perfume rather than uproot the fundamental inequalities that run through and around our colleges and universities?
What would truly egalitarian, anti-racist praxis look like for those based in higher ed ?
What are the structures of colleges and universities that need to be transformed if we are to ever realize the universalist promise of the University?
Can the University itself be reformed apart from a larger change in society?
How can and how must academic activists and organizers transform ourselves and our organizations in order to make anti-racism and social equality more than virtue signaling and corporate rhetoric?
How so might contingency itself create opportunities for organizing the increasingly precarious faculty majority--on campus and off--in ways that reconnect us to communities and struggles that for too long have been locked out of the official agenda of academic politics?
Friday Jun 26, 2020
Immigrant Struggles for Justice During the COVID-19 Crisis, May 7, 2020
Friday Jun 26, 2020
Friday Jun 26, 2020
In our fifth episode of Shelter & Solidarity, we are scholar-activists Aviva Chomsky (author of Undocumented, ‘They Take Our Jobs!’ and Twenty Other Myths about Immigration), Joseph Nevins and Mizue Aizeki (co-authors of the book, Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid), as well as veteran organizerAlma De Jesus (of AF3IRM) for an urgent but deep dive into the current crisis. How can we support immigrant communities, public health, and human rights in this COVID-19 pandemic moment?
Saturday Jun 20, 2020
What Are We Reading? What Are We Learning? May 14, 2020
Saturday Jun 20, 2020
Saturday Jun 20, 2020
Our sixth episode is a social hour!
S&S’s first social hour! Framing questions: What book has most resonated with you during this unprecedented time, and why? Share with others what you are enjoying and what you are taking away from the text. Reading and sharing what’s valuable on the page can help us cope with–and deepen our grasp of– the challenges we face in this difficult historical period. Help us buoy spirits as well as build shields for future battles.
Books discussed include:
- Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door
- Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust
- George Lakey, Viking Economics
- Ling Ma, Severance
- Augustine Sedgewick, Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
- Stephen Schlesinger & Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
- Tim Sheard, The Lenny Moss Mysteries (9 books)
- Jessie Sima, Love, Z
- Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo, The Martin Beck Police Mystery Series (10 books)
- Rob Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu
Friday Jun 19, 2020
Friday Jun 19, 2020
Shelter and Solidarity #11 is a co-hosted discussion about resisting the system of mass incarceration with members of the New York-based frontline organization Its Up to Us to End Mass Incarceration. We will be joined by IUTU organizer Michael Nugent as well as Tydina Brown and Nicole James, family members of currently incarcerated people who are struggling for justice for their loved ones in the midst of the COVID pandemic and also speaking out for other families. It’s Up to Us strives to build leadership among those directly affected by the racist and tortuous criminal justice system to build a movement of resistance to end mass incarceration once and for all.
Sunday Jun 14, 2020
Public Institutions under Attack: Threats to the Common Good, May 21, 2020
Sunday Jun 14, 2020
Sunday Jun 14, 2020
A conversation about the government and corporate class campaigns to use the COVID moment to privatize or destroy our most critical public services: The US Postal Service, public K-12, and higher education, public hospitals, the Veterans Affairs health services, and more. We are joined by postal worker organizer, Charles Zlatkin, New York Labor Communications Council, as well as Clarissa Eaton on public higher education in Massachusetts.
- Visit the American Postal Workers Union to send a letter to your representatives and senators about the USPS.
- The Faculty Staff Union at UMass Boston has a petition challenging the effective layoffs of contingent faculty.
The show covered a lot of ground. Our host and guests called attention to may different sources of information. We list the links below in their “raw form” but will be updating them presently to make it more user-friendly:
- The Atlantic's Philip F. Rubio explains why we must “Save the Post Office“
- The free-market right’s critique of the USPS, see “Restructuring the U.S. Postal Service” by Chris Edwards of the CATO Institute (funded by the Koch brothers, but also Google, Whole Foods (Amazon), FedEx, and Google)
- The Economic Policy Institute’s Darryl J. Anderson debunks myths about USPS in “Brookings paper on the Postal Service gets the facts wrong.“
- http://www.campaignforpostalbanking.org/news/why-we-need-a-bank-at-the-post-office/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Post_Bank
- https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/05/18/lecturer-whos-been-cut-due-pandemic-questions-justice-it-opinion?fbclid=IwAR3hsYiDvrYulJJsHUPizbgOlxeuLnUuYzC3I7D4T-l5fQPHfPOP-ezVPQ8
- https://www.wbur.org/edify/2020/05/12/umass-boston-possible-layoffs
- https://www.chronicle.com/article/Faculty-Cuts-Begin-With/248795
- https://edsource.org/2020/education-funding-in-second-stimulus-bill-in-house-falls-far-short-of-education-leaders-requests/631585
- https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2016/12/13/for-a-rich-state-massachusetts-higher-ed-funding.html
- https://shef.sheeo.org/
Sunday Jun 14, 2020
Poets of the Rebellion, June 10, 2020
Sunday Jun 14, 2020
Sunday Jun 14, 2020
Performances of original poetry from Lorraine Currelley, Bronx Beat Poet Laureate & Activist, as well as Raymond Nat Turner, members of the Harlem Poets Guild, and North Carolina-based poet-critic-activist Demetrius Noble. w/ co-hosts Joe Ramsey and Tim Sheard.
Tuesday Jun 09, 2020
The Rebellion in Our Time with Bill Fletcher and August Nimtz, June 4, 2020
Tuesday Jun 09, 2020
Tuesday Jun 09, 2020
As the frontline communities and others of good conscience grieve and revolt, the US’s democratic trappings yield to its iron fist core. What are must be done to re-energize the long revolution against slavery and capitalism and for democracy and freedom? Long-time radical intellectual and pan-Africanist, Bill Fletcher and the Marxist activist-scholar August Nimtz join Johanna Fernandez and Joe Ramsey for a conversation about strategy for the left.
Sunday Jun 07, 2020
Contingent Faculty Struggles and Strategy on Campus and Beyond, May 28, 2020
Sunday Jun 07, 2020
Sunday Jun 07, 2020
COVID-19 has exposed the brittle core of higher education today: super-exploited academic workers going by dozens of titles–temporary, part-timer, adjunct, visiting, precarious, etc.–all meaning “contingent” i.e. workers who provide most of the teaching but who receive few benefits and next to no job security. It has also raised sharply the question of the university’s relationship to a broader community now in a state of crisis: from students, to workers, to campus neighbors. Join us for a roundtable discussion with contingent faculty organizers across the US, from the community colleges of California, to Temple University, CUNY, SUNY, Rutgers, and UMass Boston. Guests will include California-based adjunct faculty scholar and union organizer Bobbi-Lee Smart, Philadelphia-based community organizer and educator Wende Marshall, and Boyda Johnstone of CUNY’s Rank & File Action.