Nothing Never Happens

What happens to grassroots movements when they get access to normative power? How does one resist capture? What traditions, theories, and cautionary tales should we reference?

Professor and critic Roderick Ferguson, author of We Demand: The University and Student Protests, among many other works on social movements and the politics of institutional dissent, joins us to discuss these themes, and much more, in our May 2022 episode.

Th...

Get ready for a master class in Theater of the Oppressed! This month we welcome playwright, director, and author Adrian Jackson. Adrian is best known his role as the founder and longtime artistic director London-based theater and arts company Cardboard Citizens, which is dedicated to working with and for people who have experienced homelessness and poverty. Come for the raucous theater games, stay for the organic wisdom and transfo...

How should we collectively defend classrooms from the neoliberal assault on democratic praxis and critical pedagogies? What histories, traditions, and alliances should shape our tactics?

Renowned critical pedagogue and prolific theorist Ira Shor, Professor Emeritus at CUNY Graduate Center, joins us to discuss these questions--and to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Nothing Never Happens.

Ira Shor has produced several foundational wo...

What does it look like for pedagogy to begin with the stories, hopes, and critiques that are already present in the classroom? How has this approach to education been practiced in movements for social transformation? What are its demands on teachers and learners?

In our January 2022 episode, teacher and author Stephen Preskill joins us to talk these questions and much more. Topics include balancing discrete political paradigms with ...

How is public higher education implicated with settler colonial dispossession and genocide? What are methods to visualize, teach, and encourage continual investigation and intervention into these continually unfolding histories? Project team leaders behind Polk Prize-winning Land Grab University research project and database join us to talk these questions and more in our November 2021 episode of Nothing Never Happens.

Speakers: Tri...

How can we align our pedagogies with the Palestinian freedom struggle and other movements for indigenous liberation? Scholar, teacher, and poet Dina Omar joins us to follow this question into the many others it opens up -- from decisions about language and representation, to the exhaustion of social suffering paradigms, to the psychological effects of occupation and eliminatory violence.

We urge listeners to read and adopt the comm...

When does a university cease to serve a public good? What would it look like for universities to work toward justice and solidarity with the cities they call home? In the second episode of this two-part series, historian and critic Davarian Baldwin gives us more tools for understanding the dynamics of race and capital structuring urban higher education in the United States--from campus police forces, to university medical complexes...

What do you get when you cross a school, a real estate tycoon, a hedge fund, a regional medical complex, a massive transit system, a private police force, a low-wage employer, and tax-exemption? Answer: an urban university. In this two-part series, accomplished historian and cultural critic Davarian Baldwin breaks down the relations of pillage, dispossession, and private profit that are increasingly prominent in the U.S. higher edu...

What happens when Theater of the Oppressed meets the prison industrial complex? Wende Ballew, Executive Director of Reforming Arts, shares their work to bring arts-centered liberal education to women who must make their lives in and through contexts of state carceral control. We discuss how Wende came to this work, institutional tightropes they walk, and what intentional space for creativity and critique can make possible (hint: a ...

Our June 2021 episode features two accomplished leaders in the movement to decolonize higher education. Graduates Leah Trotman and Catherine Morkel share their work to establish a more anti-racist, decolonial liberal arts curriculum at Agnes Scott College,. We analyze institutional responses to student leaders who demand that institutions make good on their surface commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

https://nothingne...

Our April 2021 guest is Jodi Melamed, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette University. We spill tea on gestures of liberation that are not liberative, institutional multiculturalisms, and practices of anti-racist pedagogy.

About our guest:

Jodi Melamed is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Ma...

This month we welcome Prof. Felicia Rose Chavez, award-winning educator and author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. We dig into the history of writing programs, a vision of decolonized writing classrooms, intersections of activism and teaching, specific pedagogical strategies, and more.

Our February 2021 episode features Theresa Ronquillio and Tikka Sears, who joined us for a conversation about using Theater of the Oppressed across pedagogical medium. They offer insights on fostering embodied practice, social change, and community building in virtual spaces.

We are ringing in 2021 in style with a podcast featuring Eleni Schirmer, a scholar of labor, social movements, and the political economy of education.  We talk about the debt crisis in higher education as it affects not only students but institutions; the history of teacher unions; how to bring democratic practices from the street and the organizing...

Our December 2020 podcast features Professor Maha Bali, Associate Professor of Practice at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.

Dr. Bali is the author of many articles and blogs that push the boundaries of pedagogical theory and praxis, and in particular online teaching and learning. She is an editor at Hybrid Pedagogy and editorial b...

Our November 2020 podcast features Dr. Jan Willis, acclaimed teacher of religion and author of the lauded memoir Dreaming Me: An African American Buddhist Journey. We talk to her about how engaged Buddhism shapes her pedagogy, the models of teaching that have influenced her, what transformative responses to racist violence look like, and much more.

Jan Willis i...