About the Show
A series of programs about borders, walls & fences, visible or invisible, that keep us in, keep us out & keep us divided.
Produced by Mary Salome & Emily Charles.
Part One is about redlining, racial covenants and other racist legal practices that have and continue to support segregation. This program focuses on Chicago but these practices were and are common nationwide.
The program features:
Ghian Foreman is the president and CEO of the Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative, which generates community wealth and amplifies local culture through shared pride, power, and investment for Chicago’s mid-South Side.
Natalie Y. Moore is an award-winning journalist based in Chicago, whose reporting tackles race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. She is the author of the acclaimed book The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation.
Tonika Johnson is a photographer, social justice artist and life-long resident of Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Englewood. She is also co-founder of the Englewood Arts Collective and Resident Association of Greater Englewood, which seek to reframe the narrative of South Side communities, and mobilize people and resources for positive change.
June Jordan reading Requium for the Champ from her book Technical Difficulties
Included in the program is Affirmation, a poem by Assata Shakur; an excerpt from Lorraine Hannesberry’s A RAISIN IN THE SUN; and music by Jamie Branch, Otis Brown, Mike Reed, Tomeka Reid, Nicole Mitchell and Erwin Helfer.
Part 2 is about the cultural evolution of borders on the land, in our minds and in our schools.
This program features:
Shelly Romalis: a retired professor of anthropology from York University in Toronto, Canada, a music producer and musician.
Zachary Reese: A Professor at the University of San Francisco. His research focuses on social comparison, competition, and close relationships. He teaches Research Design, Writing in Psychology, Social Psychology, and African-American Psychology.
Rosario Villasana is the Chairperson of the Child Development & Family Studies Department at City College of San Francisco.
Included in the program is Affirmation, a poem by Assata Shakur, an excerpt from The Martians Claim Canada by Margaret Atwood, music by Jamie Branch, The Doors, Ella Jenkins, Sesame Street
Part 3 is a discussion about the possibility of a world without walls or borders, what might be the benefits or problems .
The program features:
David Gallup a specialist in human rights, world citizenship, world law education and President of the World Service Authority. David Gallup specializes in human rights, world citizenship and world law education. He is President of the World Service Authority®, Washington, DC, a global public service human rights
organization founded in 1954. In addition to his role as President, he has served as General Counsel since 1992
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian, jounalist and the author of the widely acclaimed Blood and Iron and her most current book Beyond the Wall which is a detailed history of the formation of the German Democratic Republic, the events that led to the building of the Berlin Wall, it’s fall and the aftermath. A visiting Reasearch Fellow at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal HIstorical Society, she is a columnist for the Washington Post and hosts the Podcast The New Germany together with Oliver Moody. She was born in East Germany and is now based in the UK.
Ke’aun- a supporter of open borders
Included in the program is Affirmation, a poem by Assata Shakur, a border story, music by Jamie Branch, Mikey Dread, Horde of Two, Marianne Faithful, Megan Keely and Erin Helfer
Part 4 is about fences in our neighborhood and our backyards.
This program features:
Kevin Wolf- one of the founders of N Street Co-housing in Davis, California. A graduate from UC Davis with a degree in evolution and ecology. An organizer for Friends of the River for 10 years, ran his own company for 20 years helping with a complex consensus-based decision making and became the CEO of a wind turbine company.
Coleman Romalis: a retired Sociology Professor at York University and the producer/director of the documentary film Emma Goldman.
Margaret Salome- a person who’s lived in a few countries a few cities, I’m a linguist I have a PhD in linguistics I like languages and um I like to think about languages and do my daily activities in more than one language and speculate on how that makes my life more interesting.
Sarah Moss: a licensed mediator in San Francisco
Included in the program is Affirmation, a poem by Assata Shakur, Mending Wall, a poem by Robert Frost, residents from San Francisco & Chicago talking about backyard fences
Part 5 A discussion about the rise globally of new border walls and how these walls are not effective in stopping human migration but are having a devastating effect on the migration patterns of all animal life around the world.
Élisabeth Vallet is a researcher at the CIC, and the Raoul-Dandurand Chair at UQAM and the Royal Military College Saint Jean. As a CIC fellow, focusing in particular on inequality and border studies, her research aims to understand how global security shocks lead to increase in border fortification around the world, but also how, despite being conceptualized as a remedy for the uncertainties of a world in disarray, the borders themselves produce instability, without resolving the initial problem.
Jeremiah Lebowitz is the Executive Director of Cuenca Los Ojos who’s mission is to protect, restore, and rewild the biodiversity of the US-Mexico Borderlands with its Mexican counterpart, Cuenca los Ojos A.C. (Civil Association), manage the restoration work and protect the land, to preserve and restore the biodiversity of the US/Mexican borderlands through land protection, habitat restoration, and wildlife reintroduction.
Sarah Rogers is a Litigation Fellow, she works with the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s Litigation Program to develop creative strategies to advance the interests and welfare of animals through the legal system.Part 6 Borders, race & multiculturalism
Ilaria Giglioli is a scholar of migration, borders and racialization. A human geographer by training, she studies the creation, legitimization and contestation of borders, with a comparative focus in the Mediterranean and US southern border. In particular, she studies the social, political and economic processes that generate support for border fortification, as well as social movements that contest it. She also studies the relationship between border fortification, territorial inequality, and the production of social difference along lines of race, religion and nationality. Prior to her work on borders, she has also conducted research on the politics of water infrastructure development in the Mediterranean region.
leila awadallah (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, and film wanderer based between Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce and Beirut, Lebanon. Her research in dance centers movement that activates relationships to land / place / peoples, rooted in the context of her own skin as a body and soul that holds indigenous Palestinian, Arab-American, SWANA, Sicilian and mixed Mediterranean worlds and ways. She is the founder of the Body Watani (body-as-homeland) dance project and practice in collaboration with Noelle Awadallah.
Nellie Jo David, Tohono O’odham environmental justice activist and member of the TOHRN (Tohono O’odham Hemajkam Rights Network). She holds a Juris Doctorate and a certificate in indigenous law and policy from the University of Arizona.
Part 7 Caste
Yashica Dutt—Yashica Dutt (she/her) is a leading anti-caste expert, journalist and the award-winning author of the non-fiction memoir, Coming Out as Dalit. A meticulously reported memoir that presents a scathing and intimate account of how the caste system brutally affects Dalits in today’s India.
Subramanian Shankar-is a novelist, literary and cultural critic, and translator from Tamil. Shankar’s most recent book is his third novel Ghost in the Tamarind, published in September 2017, which is set against the background of the anti-caste movement in South India during the twentieth century.
Shankar’s previous books include the award-winning scholarly volume Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation and the Vernacular (2012) and the novel No End to the Journey (2005). Shankar is the editor of Caste and Life Narratives (2017) and of Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration (2003). His translation of Komal Swaminathan’s Tamil play Thaneer, Thaneer (Water!) has been performed on stage in Chennai, India, by the city’s oldest English-language theater group Madras Players.
Shankar is the author or editor of eight books, and is Professor of English and former Director of Creative Writing at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. He is a recipient of a Senior Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship for 2017-2018. He is also the recipient of the University of Hawai`i’s College of Languages, Linguistics and Literatures Excellence in Teaching Award. He has been honored with Scholar-in-Residence appointments at SOAS University (London, UK) and at the University of Houston (Downtown).
Shankar’s scholarly essays and cultural journalism have appeared in anthologies in the US, India and Europe; in popular publications such as The Nation, Village Voice, The Hindu, World Literature Today and Words without Borders; and in scholarly venues like PMLA, Comparative Literature, Cultural Critique, ARIEL, Amerasia Journal, and Journal of Contemporary Thought.
Amrita-is a queer dalit woman who is active in the fight for equal rights in India