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There’s Something in the Water

Tia-Simone Gardner

In her book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Kathryn Yussof (2018) describes a thick relationship between extractive capitalism, geologic time, and (anti)Blackness. She writes, “As the Anthropocene proclaims the language of species life – Anthropos – through a universalist geologic commons, it neatly erases histories of racism that were incubated through the regulatory structure of geologic relations.

Volume 2: Unsettling Pedagogies

Hale Konitshek, Julie Santella, Keavy McFadden, Richa Nagar, Sara Musaifer

AGITATE! Unsettling Knowledges presents our second volume, “Unsettling Pedagogies.” Forever cognizant of our limitations as a journal that relies on a ‘domain’ based in a R-1 University in the United States, we highlight unsettling lessons in creative co-learning. We rearticulate AGITATE!’s commitment to building learning spaces where radical pedagogies for sociopolitical and epistemic justice are at the front and center of our praxis.

Editorial Introduction – Vol. 1

Beaudelaine Pierre, Hale Konitshek, Julie Santella, Keavy McFadden, Khoi Nguyen, Richa Nagar, Sara Musaifer

We come together to write this inaugural editorial of AGITATE! after journeying as a collective for almost two years. Along this path, members of our group — including our contributing writers, artists, and activists — have joined in and advanced this vision and work at different times. Sometimes this coming together was planned and at other times it was sheer coincidence.

Khalamuni

Efadul Huq

This poem is an act of mourning, remembering, and grieving a loved one taken by the pandemic.

Dreams as R-evolution

Coral Bijoux

Dreams as R-evolution—a visual art and single-use plastic installation of sculpture, drawings, and found objects—is an installation originally created in the University of KwaZulu Natal’s Westville campus plant nursery that now speaks to dreaming as a r-evolutionary act in an old colonial gallery, the IZIKO National Gallery in Cape Town.

Domestic Affairs

Katayoun Amjadi

Domestic Affairs investigates the idea of home in body, structure, and land, and explores the culturally embedded promise of security and hope engendered in the archetypal house. It explores a conceptual topography of “place”; it is a kind of domestic archaeology.

Apertures

Ritika Ganguly and Alia Jeraj

Apertures: A creative portrayal of domestic violence for SEWA-AIFW is a bricolage of stories and art forms. It draws on a variety of artistic disciplines to represent a spectrum of lived experiences of domestic violence in our societies, and the specter of patriarchy that shapes them. It tells four survivor stories from Minnesota through the lens of survivor stories in New Delhi and Chennai.

Parking Ramp Project

Aniccha Arts

Aniccha Arts premieres a performance installation inside a seven-level parking garage. The project asks questions about transience, migration, and stability in a space that temporarily stores cars and is home to nothing. Performers pervade the parking structure with their bodies, working against the visible slant of the ramp to find their individual verticality. Questions we asked in creating the work: How do we find softness in a landscape of concrete? What anchors us on these alternating planes? How do we connect across such a complex landscape?

इंसानियत का लॉकडाउन

Richa Nagar and Richa Singh

The title of this piece translates to—Humanity in Lockdown. It documents the plight of migrant workers who fled Indian cities en masse, the deepening religious divide, and intensifying poverty in the context of COVID-19 pandemic and the nation-wide lockdown that was instituted in April 2020.

Teleportation | عَبْرَة

Ola Saad Znad
View of Baghdad with Tigris River

“Yes, Baghdad and I haven’t seen each other since the war, but am I brave enough to change its perfect image in my memory? The walls of Baghdad extend their reach to me, protecting the only solid memory I have of the place I love, where my roots run deep. These walls keep me wondering: what would my life be if I had never left my home?”

Step, step, breathe

Sophie Oldfield

I started running eight years ago as a way to be in my city, in Cape Town. Step, step, breathe (video above) shares how running gave me a way to move through Cape Town, to see it anew, and to participate in it.

The Passage

Marijana Hameršak and Selma Banich

This work of Selma Banich & Marijana Hameršak that emerged in collaboration with the Women to Women Collective is a collection of portraits of migrants who lost their lives on the perilous journeys in the Balkans.

Baggage

Setareh Ghoreishi

In “Baggage,” I struggle with my baggage, all that I carry with me from home. Every day I carry my memories of Iran with me–with all the emotions and thoughts that brings. This performance shows the complexity inherent in both leaving and staying.

RMF: [Pre]Conceptions of a Movement & Interview with Zaynab Asmal

Zaynab Asmal, interviewed by Koni Benson

RMF:[Pre]Conceptions of a Movement, is a comic book written and drawn by Zaynab Asmal. It was the product of a final assignment for a third year history course “African History Through Comic Books: History for What and For Whom?” designed and taught by Koni Benson, a postdoctoral fellow at the time, at the University of Cape Town in 2016. 

Remembering, Honoring and Grieving Migrant Deaths: Unsettling the Politics of Grave Silence

Emina Bužinkić

Emina Bužinkić I write these lines to remember, record and grieve fallen migrants who fiercely fought against the relentless border regimes in the Balkans and wider European geographies. Pushed into despair and ultimately robbed of breath, thousands of migrants attempt to cross the perilous terrains of the Balkans only to meet police batons, electric shocks,…

SKMS Code of Conduct

Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS)
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A code of conduct for Code of Conduct for Researchers, Writers, Filmmakers and Others Interested in Working with the Sangathan. By the Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS)

Waháŋpi!

Agléška Cohen-Rencountre
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An original work written and performed by Agléška Cohen-Rencountre (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe).

Muddy Truth

Katayoun Amjadi

Original artwork by Katayoun Amjadi.

The Octagon

Ghadeer Alkhenaizi and Sara Musaifer

Our story began with a conversation between two friends, Ghadeer and Sara, walking back to the university library after a quick dinner in Dinkytown on a cold evening in December 2017. Fueled by the crisp air that filled our lungs, our feet rushed through crowded pavements and across busy streets, making their way through a fog of breath exhaled by warm bodies and buildings. Soon enough, our minds wandered away in denial, escaping the painful one mile walk under the cloak of another harsh Minneapolitan winter. Naturally, we both started thinking of home: Bahrain, or should we say: Bahrains?

This is Not an Eggplant

Katayoun Amjadi

Katayoun Amjadi’s multimedia installations and visual poems, This is Not an Eggplant and Diaries of a Village Potter, question the “collective” and meditates on the course of political and environmental shifts.

Not Everything that Shines is Gold

Ericka A. Lara Ovares and Juliana Vélez
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Collaborative writing isn’t easy. In the fall of 2017, Juliana and I (Ericka) took a class on ‘Ways of Knowing: Approaches to Knowledge and Truth in Development Studies and Social Justice’ that encouraged us to write together. Even though our fields are very different, we discovered we had a love for nature and our homelands in common. We took the opportunity to write on what threatens the vitality of our countries’ environments, and to write in a way that also reflects our people’s struggles to maintain sovereignty over their lands.

Vellai Mozhi

Marappachi Theatre, A. Mangai, A. Revathi, and Tamilarasi Anandavalli

We live in a time when conflict and destruction are no longer the exception but the norm. It often feels like a dark cloud is looming over us. However, those of us who have chosen to live with the purpose of changing the world to the best of our ability always see a silver lining to these clouds. Here we feature a performance of A. Revathi’s Vellai Mozhi directed by A. Mangai as well as a bilingual (Tamil/English) panel discussion on the role of art in queer activism. We also include written comments from Mangai and Revathi on how art, theatre, and Vellai Mozhi have presented issues of sexuality in Tamil Nadu.