This week we chatted with Jasmine, an anthropologist and activist involved in the migrant solidarity and freedom of movement cultural organization called Maldusa which is based in some of the southern most reaches of Italy in Palermo, Sicily, and the island of Lampedusa and in the Mediterranean Sea. We speak for the hour about migration across the sea, what drives and draws people to make the treacherous journey, state, para state and civil institutions on both sides of the sea engaging the issue of crossings and other topics.
This week, I spoke with Dr. Alexander Dunlap about a range of topics, such as Degrowth, green anarchism, the violence of extractivism, questions of the conception of renewable energy and resistance to ecocide. We covered a lot in this discussion and he’s written a lot on a range of related topics. Check out his ResearchGate where many pdfs are available or searching his name on AnarchistLibrary.Net. If there’s something at ResearchGate that isn’t available for download, you can email Alexander and request access.
This week, we spoke with Maia Ramnath about her essay contribution to ¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches From a World in Crisis. The essay was entitled “The Other Aryan Supremacy: Fighting Hindu Fascism in the South Asia Diaspora”.
For the hour, we talk about about Hindutva, a brand of Indian ethno-religious-nationalism some have called fascism, the organizations that carry it in India and in the sub-continental or Desi diaspora around the world, some of the ideas and actions attributed to it, Islamophobia, Hindutva’s connections with the project of Israel, also it’s overlaps with far right, Nazi-inspired ideologies and how non-Desi anti-fascists can stand in solidarity against it.
Art for Life: Conversations with the Progressive Writers Movement on Pens, Swords, and Internationalism, from Antifascism to Afro-Asian Solidarity (paperback / ebook)
¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches From a World in Crisis (edited by Shane Burley). The essay was entitled “The Other Aryan Supremacy: Fighting Hindu Fascism in the South Asia Diaspora”. For audiophiles out there, there is an audiobook version of this book available from AK Press, though it’s a little pricey it is over 20 hours long!
Bursts also recommends Azadi by Arundhati Roy, which includes lots of thoughts on these topics. And you can hear our 2020 interview with Pranav Jeevan P. in Karela state in India which covers many of these same topics, which is also transcribed.
Phone Zap for #StopCopCity Arrestee, Emily Murphy
#StopCopCity protestor Emily Murphy has been in jail for almost a month since being arrested 1/22 following the protest against the police killing of Tortuguita. Emily has been vegan for many years, but the Atlanta City Dentention Center has not been giving them food they can eat. They describe being emaciated and having physical problems after a month of starvation. We are asking that you listen to Emily’s statement, participate in our call in campaign, and show up at Atlanta City Dentention Center at 7pm this Friday (2/24/23) to voice your discontent. We present Emily in their own words
This week we are re-airing an interview from November 10th, 2019, by Scott Branson with Eli Meyerhoff about his book “Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World”. In this book, Meyerhoff “traces how key elements of education emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, he charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.” and this quote is from the University of Minnesota webpage, who also published his book.
This interview covers a lot of issues such as the historical and colonial construction of what we think of today as education. In this interview, Scott and Eli talk about his book, the vast terrain that the book covers, experiences in academia when one is operating as politically radical, and some alternatives to education that we can see and experience in the world around us.
This week on The Final Straw, we’re sharing a chat that Scott had with Smirk, Wink & Nudge of the Stop Camp Grayling Offensive, an anarchist effort to oppose the doubling expansion of the largest military base on Turtle Island, based in so-called Michigan. For the hour, the militants talk about the ecological, social, economic and other potential impacts of expanding the military industrial complex and this counterinsurgency training ground in particular.
You can learn more at twitter.com/GraylingCamp or instagram.com/stop_camp_grayling, soon at a blog they’ll be starting or on one of their upcoming info tours, with more information in our shownotes. There is also a zine, entitled “The Base Among The Pines: Notes on the Camp Grayling Expansion on Anishinabewaki” available at RiverValleyRevolt.NoBlogs.
This struggle consider itself in solidarity with the movement to #StopCopCity in so-called Atlanta.
This week, Scott spoke with Mohamed Abdou, a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist activist-scholar who is currently a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Cairo. Mohamed is the author of the recent book, Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances published by Pluto Press in 2022.
For nearly 2 hours, Scott and Mohamed speak about Mohamed’s experience of the Tahrir Square uprising of 2011 and the western media coverage of it, current unrest in Iran, Orientalism, decolonial education, Islam, Settler Colonialism, anarchism and a lot more.
This week on the show, we feature a chat with Aaron Parker of Edgewood Nursery & Tim Holland (aka MC Sole), who together form the Propaganda By The Seed podcast. You can find the podcast on the channel zero network, Libsyn, and a bunch of streaming services. We hope you enjoy this chat as much as Bursts did. We talk about their project of sharing conversations with various farmers, herbalists, propagators, scavengers, historians and cooks about plants, food autonomy, agriculture mutual aid and a host of other, related topics.
You can find a bunch of Sole’s music at his bandcamp. And, if you want to hear past convos we’ve had, you can find a chat Tim & Bursts had (when Bursts was wicked underslept) in 2017 or Amar & Bursts on the “final” Solecast in 2020.
This week on The Final Straw, we’re featuring a recent conversation with anarchist author and activist, Peter Gelderloos about his latest book, “The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies For Ecological Revolution From Below”, published by Pluto Press in 2022. For the hour we speak about critiques of science and Western Civilization that Peter levels, as well as the centrality of struggling on the ground we stand on, creating autonomous infrastructure, resisting colonial extractivism and the need for imagination and care as we tear down this ecocidal system.
This week, you’ll hear my chat with Jon Bigger about the status of the monarchy in the UK, the power it wields, the interventions it makes into parliamentary procedure and where we might see hopes of challenging it from an anarchist approach. Jon is an anarchist who is involved with the Anarchism Research Group, writes a column on UK politics at Freedom News and has been involved in the project Class War. You can find him online at twitter and at his website, jonbigger.uk
This week I am very excited to present an interview with Autumn (she/her/hers), who is an anarchist and scholar-activist, on Fat Liberation in all its many nuances, the pervasive, classist, racist, and colonial nature of fatphobia both in mainstream society and in far left spaces and thought, and the roots of Fat Liberation as a structure which originates and lives with Black, Indigenous, and brown, trans and disabled people. We also speak about Autumn’s syllabus entitled “Fat Liberation Syllabus for Revolutionary Leftists: Confronting Fatphobia on the Left AND Liberalism within the Fat Liberation Movement”. In this document, she compiles writings on the many aspects of fatphobia and gives her own analysis in bulleted form. This document is available for public use, and you can find it at https://tinyurl.com/FatLiberation!
– Hunter A. Shackleford “Hunter Ashleigh Shackelford (they/she) is a Black fat cultural producer, multidisciplinary artist, nonbinary shapeshifter, and data futurist based in Atlanta, Georgia … They are the creator and director of a Southern body liberation organization, Free Figure Revolution, which focuses on decolonizing antiblack body violence … Hunter illustrates the relationship between Blackness, fatness, desire, queerness, and popular culture.” (Instagram: @huntythelion)
– Dr. Dorothy Roberts’ work on CPS and how anti-Black racism and fatphobia infect this institution.
– Health At Every Size, evidence based medical paradigm that heavily critiques the social constructions of “obesity” and diet culture, and aims to present folks with a compassionate and inclusive framework for taking care of themselves.
– Caleb Luna (Instagram: @chairbreaker Twitter: @chairbreaker_) “Caleb Luna (they/them) is a fat queer (of color) critical theorist, performer, poet, essayist, cultural critic, and performance scholar. As a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, their research focuses on performances of eating, and historicizing cultural representations of fat embodiment within the ongoing settler colonization of Turtle Island.
soon at a blog they’ll be starting or on one of their upcoming info tours, with more information in our shownotes. There is also a zine, entitled “The Base Among The Pines: Notes on the Camp Grayling Expansion on Anishinabewaki” available at 
