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 , who speaks about her new book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement , published by Simon and Schuster this month. Spell ...
Mar 24, 2025•57 min
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 brings us back to foundational questions about radical pedagogy. His book Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World rejects narrow, romanticized, disciplinary modes of education. It elaborates the concept of “modes of study” ...
Feb 18, 2025•56 min
This podcast is a dual release between Nothing Never Happens and The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism’s “ 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 -- requ...
Nov 18, 2024•1 hr 13 min
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 , a scholar of American religion, religion, and education. Her book, Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York C...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 8 min
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 Comm...
Jul 31, 2024•1 hr 6 min
Feminist Theater of the Oppressed: What is it? How can its philosophies and methods transform our approaches to critical pedagogy? How does Feminist Theater of the Oppressed help us reflect on improvisation, experimentation, and power in our teaching and organizing contexts? Our June 2024 guest, Bárbara Santos , takes up these questions as a portal into discussion of how power shapes (and can be transformed in) our pedagogies. Barbára is an actress, performer, writer, and organizer. She is the a...
Jun 30, 2024•1 hr 11 min
What is anarchist pedagogy? What does it have to do with so-called “alternative” schools, where mainstream educational systems often send students they have expelled, suspended, or otherwise excluded? How can working at the intersection of anarchist pedagogical philosophy and marginalized educational spaces open up new layers for how we rearrange power and accountability in learning spaces? This episode—which features teacher, educational reform leader, and principal Rodney Powell—dives into all...
May 30, 2024•1 hr 7 min
What does critical pedagogy offer when it comes to texts entangled with histories of oppression and disenfranchisement? How might we approach these texts so as to ask new questions and bring out different stories? In this episode, we discuss these questions with three scholars from the Institute for Signifying Scriptures . These scholars discuss how the normative ways of studying "sacred texts" -- from "religious" texts like the Bible to "secular" texts like the US Constitution -- as historical ...
Mar 31, 2024•1 hr 9 min
How can we align our pedagogies with the Palestinian freedom struggle and other anti-colonial movements? How do we tune our minds and imaginations toward just futures--even and especially when facing retaliation for liberationist stances? In light of the reinvigorated global struggle for a free Palestine, and as we witness the state of Israel's ongoing genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, we are re-releasing our January 2021 interview with poet, scholar, teacher, an...
Mar 01, 2024•1 hr 4 min
What does it mean to “teach in and for freedom”? What does it look like to create liberatory spaces centered around the lives and needs of faculty and students of color? How do we sustain and defend such feminist and anti-racist teaching against threats of institutional cooptation, censure, and exploitation? To ring out 2023, we welcome Professor Lorgia García-Peña to discuss these topics and so much more. Dr. García-Peña is currently a Professor of Latinx Studies at the Efron Center for the Stu...
Dec 30, 2023•57 min
Many of us think of public libraries primarily as places to read and check out books—but this is only the beginning of their role in our communities. What else do libraries do? What roles do libraries and librarians play in broader movements for social democracy and educational access? How can we collectively defend our libraries from right-wing attacks on their vital work? Our November 2023 episode features one activist librarian, Oscar Gittemeier , about his journey into library work, his visi...
Nov 30, 2023•59 min
What might educators learn from practitioners of conflict mediation and transformative justice? What does it look like to enact “beloved community” in our classrooms, organizations, and movements? What should teachers and learners do to better align our ideals of justice and equity with our day-to-day practices? Peace educator and nonviolence practitioner Kazu Haga joins us to reflect on these questions and more. The author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm (2020), Ka...
Oct 30, 2023•1 hr 11 min
What does transformative justice look like in practice? What does it mean to teach transformative justice, so that we destroy the cops in our heads and hearts, and begin to build something new? In this episode, Mia Mingus -- visionary movement builder, transformative justice organizer, and human rights + disability justice educator -- dives into these questions and more. We discuss the educational experiences that inspired Mia to her current work, Transformative Justice (TJ) frameworks for commu...
Jun 02, 2023•1 hr 11 min
What is the role of education within radical and revolutionary movements? Is the classroom a political space? How do traditions of Marxian thought and pedagogy frame those questions? In this episode, Derek R. Ford offers a crash orientation to the terrain of Marxist educational theory and practice, with a focus on its dynamic expressions in resistance movements, organizing campaigns, and more formal schooling contexts. Topics include Marxian traditions of education, dialogical pedagogy, practice...
Apr 12, 2023•1 hr 16 min
Is universal design even possible? What does harm reduction look like in a classroom or on a syllabus? What role have university centers for teaching and learning played in supporting radical pedagogy--and when and where have they interrupted projects of liberation? We address these questions in the second part of our series with Sarah Silverman. Sarah E. Silverman , feminist instructional designer and disability studies scholar, breaks down these questions and their reverberant implications. Dr...
Feb 10, 2023•1 hr
How can we prioritize multiplicity and accessibility when designing learning activities? What does an “inclusive” pedagogy entail? Can design ever be universal? And how can teachers and learners make the most of digital tools while also resisting the creep of academic surveillance technologies into our classrooms, homes, and bodies? Sarah E. Silverman , feminist instructional designer and disability studies scholar, breaks down these questions and their reverberant implications. Dr. Silverman is...
Dec 31, 2022•39 min
What becomes possible when we anchor our pedagogical praxes in frameworks of reproductive justice and intersectional feminist care ? What coalitions grow? What visions are revealed, and what worlds emerge? Teacher, organizer, storyteller, and freedom-fighter Loretta Ross shares her wisdom on these questions and so much more. Topics include: attacks on reproductive autonomy, to politicized teaching in a democratic classroom, to the history of Black women's organizing, to creative and effective pr...
Nov 30, 2022•1 hr 13 min
How can we ground our classrooms in praxes of environmental justice? How can teachers and learners build ethical connections to local communities mobilizing against climate emergency and structural abandonment? Scholar-activist Ellen Spears joins us to discuss these questions and more. Prof. Spears is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. She is a prolific author, whose most recent books include the award-winning Baptized in PCBs: Race, Religion, Pollution, ...
Oct 29, 2022•1 hr 5 min
As calls to decolonize education multiply across contexts and institutions, we must push this issue beyond optics and return to the question: what does commitment to decolonization demand? What risks and struggles? What experiments and solidarities? Leigh Patel guides us as we embark on a deep dive into these urgent questions as they ramify across scales. Refusing to partition study from struggle, Patel exposes the settler colonial processes that continue to shape higher education, even as she l...
Oct 01, 2022•1 hr 28 min
Amid the newest wave of attacks on public education and inclusive learning, there are stories of hope and resistance. In this episode we talk with a high school social studies teacher at the front of the fight for antiracist, liberatory K-12 classrooms. Anthony Downer teaches Africana Studies, social studies, and civics at Frederick Douglass High School in the Atlanta Public School system. We talk to Anthony about how he and his students are working together to create a trauma-informed, healing-...
Sep 01, 2022•1 hr 9 min
The common workplace issues of low pay, toxic environment, understaffing, corporate greed, wage theft, union busting, and high turnover also exist in institutions of higher education. Undergraduate students typically earn low wages at campus jobs. In this podcast we explore the concept that students are workers, due just wages and benefits and voice. Beginning in 2016, undergraduate students at Grinnell College in Iowa have worked to form the first union of undergraduate student workers, the Uni...
Jul 12, 2022•1 hr 20 min
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. This interview is for all who know that tough moral or political...
May 30, 2022•1 hr 8 min
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 transformative potential that they unlock. Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and L...
Apr 30, 2022•1 hr 22 min
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 works in the practice of critical pedagogy. Some of his books inc...
Apr 01, 2022•1 hr 26 min
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 democratic methods, the difference between integrative democrati...
Jan 28, 2022•1 hr 14 min
What are the implicit "agreements" structuring our teaching and learning practices? How might we create new agreements for educational justice and collective healing? Professor Emerita Laura Rendón talks college access, contemplative teaching, and practices for survival and connection in our December 2021 episode. Music credit: "Water's Edge" by Aliyah Harris Photo credit: @jrkorpa at Unsplash
Dec 28, 2021•58 min
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: Tristan Ahtone (Kiowa), Margaret Pearce (Citizen Band Potowatomi), ...
Nov 06, 2021•1 hr 14 min
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 commitments outlined in the open letter "Palestine and Praxis," which...
Oct 11, 2021•1 hr 18 min
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, to the low-wage labor on which they depend. We then turn to the...
Sep 21, 2021•49 min
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 education landscape.
Sep 17, 2021•42 min
