Movement Memos

“At UChicago, they were chanting, ‘40,000 people dead. You are fighting kids instead,’” says author and University of Chicago faculty member Eman Abdelhadi. “Palestine has laid open all the contradictions that are at the core of our society, and the sheer absurdity of trying to suppress this movement.” In this episode, Kelly talks with Abdelhadi and Alex, who participated in the Palestine solidarity encampment at Northeastern University, about what we can learn from the recent wave of student-led protest, and where the movement should go from here. Music: Son Monarcas & You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: truthout.org/audio/let-this-conversation-with-mariame-kaba-radicalize-you/ If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

"When people come from outside your community or your campus, it makes you feel like you're connected to a bigger whole," says Solidarity co-author Astra Taylor. "It makes you feel like what's happening there matters. It creates a sense of a larger coalition. And that's powerful, which is exactly why the people in power don't like it." In this episode, Kelly talks with Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix about solidarity, divide-and-conquer tactics, and the concept of “outside agitators.” Music: Son Monarcas, Curved Mirror, Pulsed & David Celeste You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: truthout.org/audio/let-this-conversation-with-mariame-kaba-radicalize-you/ If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

While Kelly is away on medical leave, we revisit a fan-favorite episode in which Kelly and Mariame Kaba talk about lessons from their book Let This Radicalize You. "I have experienced countless losses, but there have also been some magnificent wins, so I know that these are possible," says Kaba. Music: Son Monarcas & David Celeste You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: truthout.org/audio/let-this-conversation-with-mariame-kaba-radicalize-you/ If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

Kelly is still on medical leave, so we are revisiting their conversation with Dorothy Roberts about the fall of Roe and the carceral nature of the family policing system. “This strategy of making fetal protection more important than the lives and freedom of women and other pregnant people began with the prosecutions of Black women, who were pregnant and using drugs,” said Roberts, author of Torn Apart and Killing The Black Body. Music: Son Monarcas and Pulsed You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: truthout.org/audio/the-end-of-roe-will-lead-to-more-family-separation-and-child-disappearance/ If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

While Kelly is on medical leave, we hope you enjoy this fan favorite from the archives. In this episode, Kelly talked with Sarah Jaffe about surveillance, criminalization, and lessons from Jaffe's book, "Work Won't Love You Back." Music: Son Monarcas You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: truthout.org/audio/work-isnt-fulfilling-because-capitalism-is-a-death-march/ If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“In this moment of crisis, we have to understand how the care economy functions … I think we have to ask ourselves, do we want someone to profit from our pain? Do we want our loved ones to be for sale? I think it is imperative upon all of us to push back on the system of profit from care and to find alternative ways of thinking and doing care,” says author Premila Nadasen. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Nadasen and host Kelly Hayes discuss the role of care work in the U.S. economy, the exploitation of care workers, and why the profit-driven dynamics of the care industry must be upended. Music: Son Monarcas & Heath Cantu You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“The public domain is being purchased, and it is being purchased in order for it to be destroyed,” says journalist Sarah Kendzior. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kendzior and host Kelly Hayes discuss the decline of journalism in the U.S. and how we can resist the erosion of our shared history, our values, and our shared reality. Music: Son Monarcas & Pulsed You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“Every interaction between Black and Brown community members and CPD responding to a gunshot alert is dangerous. It puts people at risk of violence and harm,” says Stop ShotSpotter organizer Navi Heer. In this week’s episode, Kelly talks with two organizers from Chicago’s Stop ShotSpotter campaign, which claimed a major victory this week, and investigative journalist Jim Daley of South Side Weekly, about the interaction of Big Tech and policing in Chicago. Music: Son Monarcas & David Celeste You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“The truth is, every time community groups have asked questions about policing, the police haven't had good answers. And when really pushed, they had to fold to recognize that maybe this technology wasn't worth the money, wasn't doing what it was said. And while sure, it sounded good in a soundbite, it sounded good to the city council when you said you had to do something to stop crime, in reality, it wasn't doing what it said, and may also have had real harms on those communities,” says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, author of The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Guthrie Ferguson and host Kelly Hayes explore the history and failures of predictive policing, and raise the alarm about the creation of new data empires. Music: Son Monarcas & David Celeste You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“Surviving settler colonialism isn't just about surviving its material realities, it's also about surviving how settler colonialism requires destroying cultures, and languages, and sensibilities, and values, and ways of being in the world,” says scholar and activist Nadine Naber. In this episode, Naber and host Kelly Hayes discuss the connections between the struggle for Palestinian liberation and U.S. movements against police and prisons, the history of Palestinian and Arab organizing in the U.S., and why attacks on the analytical framework of settler colonialism are about undermining solidarity. Music: Son Monarcas & Isobel O’Connor You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“Belonging isn't about a claim of ownership, it's actually about this notion of love and longing. And so I've come to say, I don't claim that Palestine belongs to me. I just know that I belong to Palestine,” says Palestinian author Rana Barakat. In this episode, Rana and host Kelly talk about Palestinian history, Indigenous solidarity, how colonial violence disrupts ancestral and familial relationships, and what resisting that disruption can look like. Music: Son Monarcas, David Celeste, Raymond Grouse and Peter Sandberg You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“We're connected to each other and these liberation fights across the globe,” says Indigenous Justice organizer Ashley Crystal Rojas. In this episode of Movement Memos, Rojas and Morning Star Gali talk with host Kelly Hayes about Native solidarity with Palestine, how Native communities have reclaimed the “Thanksgiving” holiday, tools for harm reduction, and how Native organizers are supporting Indigenous victims of violence and their families during the holiday season. Music: Son Monarcas You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“Ruin someone powerful’s afternoon. Our goal is to stop a genocide. We do not have to argue with murderers or appeal to a compassion they do not have. We must make it impossible for them to carry out,” says Palestinian poet and organizer Rasha Abdulhadi. In this episode, Abdulhadi, Nadine Naber, Iman Abid, Mike Merryman-Lotze, Leanne Simpson, Shane Burley, Brant Rosen, and others join Kelly to hold vigil for Palestine, and to talk about what solidarity demands of us in this moment. Music: Son Monarcas and David Celeste You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“Our survival is at stake, and so, let's think about all the best things that can help us better understand how we can ensure the collective survival of as many of us as possible,” says author and organizer Andrea Ritchie. In this episode, Kelly and Andrea discuss organizing, solidarity with Palestine, and why activists cannot defer the work of practicing new worlds. Music: Son Monarcas and David Celeste You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“The danger now is not just in Palestine for Palestinians. It's gone well beyond that now. It's exported, the idea that you can export occupation, you can export the tools of occupation, the tools of apartheid. That is where we currently are in the early 2020s,” says The Palestine Laboratory author Antony Loewenstein. In this episode, Kelly talks with Loewenstein about how Israel has used Palestine as a laboratory for surveillance and war-making technologies. Loewenstein argues that Israel is aligning itself with far-right leaders, promoting an ethno-nationalist and authoritarian worldview, and making despotism “shareable with compact technology.” In this episode, Kelly also speaks with Ahmad Abuznaid, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, about the current situation in Gaza. Music: Son Monarcas and Curved Mirror You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“If you've never tried to organize a movement without the internet, I'm here to tell you, it's really hard. We need to seize the means of computation, because while the internet isn't the most important thing that we have to worry about right now, all the things that are more important, gender and racial justice, inequality, the climate emergency, those are struggles that we're going to win or lose by organizing on the internet,” says author and activist Cory Doctorow. In this episode, Kelly talks with Doctorow about the lessons of his book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. Music: Son Monarcas & David Celeste You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“I want the land to know me, to claim me. I want to feel at home in it in a way that's reciprocal … When we talk about land back, we're not talking about laying claim to land the way that the U.S. might say, or the way that other countries might say, of claiming ownership, it's claiming relationship, and it's claiming a relationship that's reciprocal,” says Becoming Kin author Patty Krawec. In this episode of Movement Memos, Krawec and host Kelly Hayes discuss decolonization, and how activists and organizers can redefine their relationships with the land, and with each other. Music: Son Monarcas & David Celeste You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“What are the ways we could organize people into new social forms in which new human, more humane, more liberatory capacities would emerge that we could use for our own liberation?” asks Aaron Goggans of the WildSeed Society. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Goggans and host Kelly Hayes talk about how activists can resist the trends of late capitalism, including the alienation imposed by the tech world, by cultivating modes of communication and communal care that defy the norms of our individualist society. Goggans argues that social movements are “responsible for figuring out a liberatory and empowering way of filling … the human desire for mutual recognition, belonging and connection.” Music: Son Monarcas, Brendon Moeller, Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen, Lama House, David Celeste & Yonder Dale You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“What we're getting from both Musk and Bezos is this classically new age-y religious drama of disaster and salvation. They preach, they tell us that the end is near, the disaster is coming, that the world is going to end, but there is another world that everybody can build together, a new world and a place that they've never seen and a place that seems totally impossible,” says professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. In this episode, Kelly and MJ discuss the religiosity of “NewSpace,” and how activists can challenge the new “pie in the sky” ideology that billionaires like Musk and Bezos are crafting. Music: Son Monarcas & David Celeste You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

“How are these tools going to be used to increase the power of employers and of management once again, and to be used against workers,” asks Paris Marx. In this episode, Paris and Kelly break down the hype and potential of artificial intelligence, and what we should really be worried about. You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter Music: Son Monarcas, David Celeste, HATAMITSUNAMI, Guustavv & Ryan James Carr