Hajar Yazdiha on the politics of togetherness and imagining collective futures

In a world of co-optation, violent othering and systemic oppression, how can tracing the histories of resistance and collective resilience of communities (including those we are not from) liberate and expand imaginations beyond the confines of sociopolitical structures? What can life look like if we, as humans, abide again by nature’s laws of interconnectedness, cyclical healing and symbiotic living?

In this month’s episode, we are joined by Hajar Yazdiha, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California and faculty affiliate of the USC Equity Research Institute. Hajar researches the politics of inclusion and exclusion, examining the forces that bring us together and keep us apart as we work to forge collective futures. She is author of the book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement with Princeton University Press. She is also a public scholar whose writing and research has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, Time Magazine, LA Times, ABC News, The Hill, and The Grio.

In this wonderfully inspiring conversation, Hajar dismantles the politics of togetherness and othering by interweaving her lived experiences, the collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement and the innate creative abilities of the human being to illustrate how systems have historically oppressed and violated certain groups, but also how these groups have resisted and transformed these systems of harm. It is in these stories of struggle and resilience that hope emerges, a sense of shared hope and relief that we can remake the liberation created and experienced by generations before us.

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