Nothing Never Happens

What role did education play in the US civil rights movement? What did it look like for anti-racist organizers to build radical schooling and organizing spaces that could evade the harsh surveillance lights of white supremacy and Jim Crow? What lessons can we learn from them today? Our March 2025 episode features journalist Elaine Weiss [https://www.ElaineWeiss.com], who speaks about her new book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Spell-Freedom/Elaine-Weiss/9781668002698#:~:text=%E2%80%9CSpell%20Freedom%20is%20a%20powerful,in%20the%20Jim%20Crow%20South.], published by Simon and Schuster this month. Spell Freedom traces the educational program that was the underpinning of the civil rights movement and voter registration drives. The Citizenship Schools originated from workshops in the summer of 1954 at the Highlander Center [https://beta.highlandercenter.org/], a labor and social justice training center, located on a mountain in Monteagle, TN, just after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The heart of the book is Elaine’s vivid retelling the stories of the four main leaders of the citizenship school movement, Septima Clark, Bernice Robinson, Esau Jenkins, and one of the founders of the Highlander Center, Myles Horton. She traces the path from this mountain center to Charleston and the sea islands of South Carolina, all framed by the segregated and racist South and the leaders who rose up to organize and resist Jim Crow and create a new South. As is often said in southern movement building (from the World Social Forum in 2006), “another South is possible; another South is necessary,” and Spell Freedom connects the histories and voices of the movements that continue to be necessary today. Episode Credits: Co-hosts and co-producers: Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin Editing and Production Manager: Aliyah Harris Intro Music: Lance Haugen and the Flying Penguins Outro Music: "Plato's Republic" by Akrasis [https://akrasis.bandcamp.com/music]

What is education for? What modes of study become possible beyond the frameworks of formal schools and universities? How does radical studying fit into the work of grassroots liberation work? As we enter the new year, educator, writer, and organizer Eli Meyerhoff [https://elimeyerhoff.com/] brings us back to foundational questions about radical pedagogy. His book Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World [https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517902032/beyond-education/]rejects narrow, romanticized, disciplinary modes of education. It elaborates the concept of “modes of study” — which cracks open possibilities for how we might learn, teach, transform, and organize together. He is one of the co-collaborators on Abolition University [https://abolition.university/] and Cops Off Campus Research Project [https://abolition.university/cops-off-campus-research-project/]. Recently Eli has written important critiques of the "Antisemitism 101" [https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2024/06/062624-meyerhoff-unmasking-indoctrination] trainings held by universities in response to Palestine liberation and anti-Zionist organizers. Currently, Eli currently works at Duke University at the John Hope Franklin Center Humanities Lab. [https://jhfc.duke.edu/] He has previously worked as an adjunct instructor at the University of Minnesota and at Duke. He earned a PhD in Political Science, with a political theory focus, from the University of Minnesota in 2013.  Episode Credits: Co-hosts and co-producers: Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin Editing and Production Manager: Aliyah Harris Intro Music: Lance Haugen and the Flying Penguins Outro Music: "Plato's Republic" by Akrasis

This podcast is a dual release between Nothing Never Happens and The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism’s “Unpacking Zionism [https://criticalzionismstudies.org/our-work/podcast-unpacking-zionism/]” podcast. * * * * * How have the norms of mainstream educational institutions shaped how teachers and students can study and talk about Zionism? What does it mean to study Zionism critically? What does the current moment -- fourteen months into an ongoing genocide of Palestinians, when global solidarity movements persist in the face of extreme repression -- require of radical pedagogues? What knowledge, tools, and legacies of struggle should we turn to for guidance? In this dual-release episode, Tina and Lucia interview two founding collective members of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism [https://criticalzionismstudies.org/] (ICSZ), Dr. Emmaia Gelman [https://emmaiagelman.com/] and Dr. Yulia Gilich [https://www.yuliagilich.com/]. The Institute examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions within and beyond their direct advocacy for Israel. Our conversation includes the genesis of ICSZ and its interventions into institutional norms around the study of Zionism, the creation of their No IHRA Toolkit [https://criticalzionismstudies.org/2024/05/23/noihratoolkit/] (in response to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism), the weaponization of antisemitism through definitions and other repressive means, and examples of creative and critical pedagogies investigating Zionism in higher education classes.  More about our guests: Emmaia Gelman [https://emmaiagelman.com/]has taught at NYU and Sarah Lawrence College. She researches the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as political levers in the realm of hate crimes policy, surveillance, anti-terror measures, and war. Emmaia is at work on a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (1913-1990). She is the co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism [https://www.theasa.net/communities/caucuses/caucus-academic-community-activism], and a longtime activist in New York City on Palestine, policing, antiracism, and queer issues. Yulia Gilich [https://www.yuliagilich.com/] is a media artist, theorist, and community organizer. They are a founding collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. They received their PhD in Film & Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz where they are currently a lecturer teaching courses at the intersection of critical race and media studies. CREDITS Co-produced with the "Unpacking Zionism" podcast team -- thanks especially to Emmaia and Yulia for your back-end editing work! Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether Editor and audio engineer: Aliyah Harris Summer 2024 Intern: Ella Stuccio Theme music by Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying Penguins Outro music is "Unnervous" by Akrasis [https://akrasis.bandcamp.com/music] Support Nothing Never Happens on Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/radpedagogy/posts]!

How has the intersection between religious and racial politics shaped the landscape of public education in the United States? How have communities, both past and present, historically resisted covert and overt white Christian supremacy in public education? What lessons can radical pedagogues draw from these movements today? Our September 2024 episode features Dr. Leslie Ribovich [https://www.leslieribovich.com/], a scholar of American religion, religion, and education. Her book, Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools [https://nyupress.org/9781479817276/without-a-prayer/](NYU Press, 2024), is illuminating reading for anyone seeking to understand the entangled histories — and surprising consequences and reverberations — of the simultaneous legal desegregation and legal secularization of public school classrooms. From the moral codes underwriting racist school discipline policies, to presumptive Protestant norms governing moral education programs, to grassroots community movements to build more equitable and just public education systems, Without a Prayer [https://nyupress.org/9781479817276/without-a-prayer/]offers key context to understanding contemporary battles over the future of public education policy. Read an excerpt here [https://therevealer.org/public-schools-religion-and-race/?]. Leslie Ribovich is currently the Director of the Greenberg Center for Public Life [https://www.trincoll.edu/greenberg-center/] at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where she is also an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Law and Public Policy. She is working on a second project about forms of moral and character education in modern U.S. history. CREDITS Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether Editor, Audio Engineer, and composer of outro music: Aliyah Harris Summer 2024 Intern: Ella Stuccio Theme music by Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying Penguins Support us on Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/radpedagogy/posts]!

Sometimes theories of critical pedagogy can be quite abstract. What does it look like to front concrete practices in our approaches to this tradition? How do those practices change in the context of community colleges? What can radical community college educators teach us about radical teaching and learning broadly? Our July 2024 episode features three community college educators who co-edited the recent edited collection Humanizing Collectivist Critical Pedagogy: Teaching the Humanities in Community College and Beyond [https://www.peterlang.com/document/1363759](Peter Lang 2024). This book is a must-read for teachers curious about the practical applications of critical pedagogy for crafting syllabi, building more democratic classroom structures, creating socially engaged classrooms, and fighting for more just and equitable educational systems.  Sujung Kim [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sujung-kim-45a3a364/] is an interdisciplinary scholar of critical pedagogy of higher education who is currently a research associate with the Futures Initiative and Humanities Alliance at CUNY Graduate Center. Leigh Garrison-Fetcher [https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/members/leigh/]is a linguistics professor in the Education and Language Acquisition Department at LaGuardia Community College. Kaysi Holman [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaysi-holman/] is the Director of People and Culture at the California-based educational equity nonprofit 10,000 Degrees [https://10000degrees.org/]. Sujung, Leigh, and Kaysi met in the context of their shared work with the Mellon-funded CUNY Humanities Alliance [https://www.gc.cuny.edu/humanities-alliance]—of which Kaysi was a key creator and leader—where they worked graduate teachers and faculty on creating social justice oriented classrooms. CREDITS Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether Editor and Audio Engineer: Aliyah Harris Summer 2024 Intern: Ella Stuccio Theme music by Lance Haugen and Aviva and the Flying Penguins Outro Music: “hemlock hed” by Akrasis [https://akrasis.bandcamp.com/album/unemployed-apologist] Support us on Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/radpedagogy/posts]!