Janani Eswar

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Janani is the co-founder of GRIN, a social enterprise that plays to connect children to nature. At the age of 12, Janani stepped out of mainstream education and started homeschooling with her family. In the journey of unlearning, she explored the philosophies of Nai Talim, J. Krishnamurthy, John Holt and many more. She spent the…

Antonádia Borges

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Antonádia Borges is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Brasilia. She does research along with popular ethnographers who dedicate their daily lives to theorize, understand and challenge capitalism and State capture. In places like Brazil and South Africa, it has been among young people but mainly women that she has acknowledged how…

Abhay Xaxa

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Abhay Xaxa was born and brought up in Jashpur District of Chhattisgarh. An Adivasi Rights Activist and Sociologist by training, Abhay has worked with grassroots organisations, campaigns, NGO’s, media, and research institutions in different capacities on the issue of Adivasi land rights in central India. He is also the National Convenor at National Campaign on Adivasi…

Koni Benson

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Koni Benson is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. Since 2006 she has been coproducing life histories of self-organization and unfolding political struggles of collective resistance against displacement and for access to land and public services (such as water, housing, and education) in…

Zaynab Asmal

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Zaynab Asmal is a History Access scholar at the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. She is currently completing her third comic book, this time for her masters in history, focusing on social science pedagogy in secondary schools. Outside of the university space, she can be found organising cosplay events at…

యింకో ద్వేష భక్తి గీతం! Another Ode to Hate-riotism

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original poem in Telugu by Afsar, translated into English by N. Venugopal   యింకో ద్వేష భక్తి గీతం!~అయినా ప్రేమిస్తూనే వుండమని కదా చెప్తావ్. గోడలన్నీ నెత్తుటి మరకలవుతాయ్, వీధుల్లో తల ఎత్తుకొని నడవలేను. పసిపిల్లాడి లాగు విప్పి మరీ సున్తీ పరీక్షలు చేస్తావ్. యిప్పటికీ నా పేరు కంటే నా చివరి పేరు మీదే నీ వూనిక. నేనెక్కడా లేను. నేనేమిటో యెవరికీ అక్కర్లేదు. శాసనాలు చేయక్కర్లేదు ఆదేశాలు కాగితాల మీదే…

The Most Lethal Virus Is Not COVID-19

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The escalating panic and fear surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic is palpable across the social spectrum. The Governor of California has ordered the entire to state to “shelter in place” for the foreseeable future, meaning we can leave home only for essential tasks. Yes, the virus is yet to be fully known and controlled; yes, the incidence of infection is increasing and cannot be predicted accurately; yes this virus causes death. And yes, we must keep washing our hands and taking other precautions and maintaining physical distance. We must also practice social solidarity. This means involving ourselves in mutual aid, supporting healthcare workers, and finding effective ways to support workers and families in precarious situations and small businesses at risk of not surviving. At the same time, must keep socializing virtually through dancing, music concerts, and other creative, inspiring, and healing, as well as fun, gatherings.

When humanity fails: A hopeful reminder

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by Elizabeth Sumida Huaman   When did the breath of life start to kill? As Quechua people, we are taught about the power of one’s breath. The fresh Andean air that we take in is a gift that we have been given to live in this world. Each breath is a reminder that we are…

In Praise of Empathy

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by Ruramisai Charumbira   If you had told me that it would take a novel pathogen, to work like a charm, drilling hard into our collective heart, making us shiver with fear and empathy, I would have called you names. If you had told me it would take a novel pathogen, to snap our eyelids…

Statement for a Feminist Foreign Policy to Confront the Coronavirus Pandemic

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In February, three organizations — MADRE, Women Cross DMZ, and Grassroots Global Justice Alliance — convened a group of 23 women and gender nonconforming people from across the United States in order to engage in a cross-movement dialogue on our collective work against militarism and war in order to examine, challenge, and reimagine US foreign policy. While our convening…

A Frank Discussion with Iranian Americans about COVID19 and US Sanctions on Iran

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by CODEPINK   It’s one thing to read news accounts about US sanctions and the outbreak of coronavirus in Iran, but it’s another to hear first-hand accounts. The following is a frank discussion with six Iranian Americans about how the collapse of the Iranian economy and the healthcare crisis affect the lives of people back…

Beaudelaine Pierre

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Beaudelaine Pierre est née et a grandi en Haïti. Son premier roman Testaman a remporté le premier prix du Concours de Roman en Créole du journal Bon Nouvèl. En 2012, elle a coédité avec Nataša Ďurovičová, How to Write an Earthquake, une anthologie sur le tremblement de terre du 12 janvier 2010 en Haïti. Pierre…

Hale Konitshek

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Hale is a lecturer and PhD candidate in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Situated between political theory and feminist philosophy, their research attends to the junctions and conflicts of nationalism, archives, forensic exhumation and narrative testimony to name political violence in Guatemala. They served as a gender and sexual violence…

Elizabeth Sumida Huaman

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The granddaughter of humble farmers with great love for their homelands, Indigenous educational researcher Elizabeth Sumida Huaman works to fulfill her ancestors’ visions for a beautiful world. She is Wanka/Quechua from the Mantaro Valley, Peru, and associate professor of Comparative and International Development Education at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her work focuses on…

Sima Shakhsari

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Sima’s work has been shaped by experiences of living through a revolution, a war, and displacement. Multiple itineraries, from Tehran to San Francisco, Oakland, Toronto, Houston, suburbs of Boston, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis have inspired Sima’s activism, poetry, and scholarship on immigration, queerness, refugeedom, and geopolitics. Sima’s commitment to social justice is informed by the relationship…

Abraham Seda

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Abraham is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on sport, recreation and leisure in colonial Zimbabwe and Africa. Through his research, Abraham conceptualizes African modifications of boxing not just as a protest or resistance, but as a fundamental rejection of the aspirational ideals of western pastimes and games.…

Black Lives Matter and Savarna Supremacy

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by Vishal Jamkar and Richa Nagar   We begin here, with Sharpton’s words, as two writers whose lives are lived across the borders of India and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, where Floyd’s murder has led to a great global uprising against racist and colonial settler structures and logics of the United States and…

Samira Musleh

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PhD Candidate, Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota Samira Musleh is a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies with a minor in Feminist and Critical Sexuality Studies. Her research interest lies in the intersection(s) of gender, religion, and decoloniality. Samira’s current work focuses on unpaid labor, social and biological reproduction, non-capitalist economies, marriage and family…

A Statement by Sociology Graduate Students at the University of Minnesota

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On 4 June, 2020, our department chair informed graduate students that two of the officers charged in George Floyd’s murder “appear to have ties to our department, college, and university.” After expressing sadness and outrage, we were asked to “direct any media inquiries to CLA, UMN (College of Liberal Arts).” As graduate students in the…

The Creative Process

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by James Baldwin (1962)   From Creative America, Ridge Press, 1962. Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone. That all men are, when the chips are down, alone, is a banality—a banality because it is very…

We Belong to the Land

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by Antônio Bispo dos Santos Translated by Carmela Zigoni1 I. When I provoke a debate about colonization, the quilombos2, their manners and their meanings, I do not want to position myself as a thinker. Instead, I am positioning myself as a translator. My elders formed me first through orality, but they put me in school…

Palestinian in Hiroshima

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By Mazin Qumsiyeh   I and Oliver Stone both spoke at Hiroshima on the anniversary of the first nuclear bombing in human history and we are slated to speak in two days at Nagasaki on the anniversary of the second nuclear attack. My speech is below in English (I will send the Japanese version later). These…

Emina Bužinkić

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Emina writes, facilitates, and walks barefoot at the intersections of migration, transnational solidarities, and feminist pedagogies. She engages deeply with anti-militarist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist praxes, grounded in migrants’ daily struggles for freedom and in the epistemes of transnational and decolonial feminism, critical border activism, and collective knowledge production. She is part of AGITATE! Unsettling Knowledges…

Conversations on Tamil Feminist Theater, hosted by Marappachi Theater (Part 1)

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This is the first installment in a two-part series on Tamil Feminist Theater We live in a time when conflict and destruction are no longer the exception but the norm. It may be natural disasters or conflicts created by State and non-state institutions and individuals. It often feels like a dark cloud is looming over…

Conversations on Tamil Feminist Theater, hosted by Marappachi Theater (Part 2)

agitatejournal

This is the second installment in a two-part series on Tamil Feminist Theater We live in a time when conflict and destruction are no longer the exception but the norm. It may be natural disasters or conflicts created by State and non-state institutions and individuals. It often feels like a dark cloud is looming over…

‘We are part of the tapestry’: Black Iranians launch collective

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by Behdad Mahichi (from Aljazeera)   She sits with an air of reflection, a tea in one hand, staring into the moon over the Gulf through the window. Next to her are two books, one titled Iranian. The second one is opened – and on a fresh page she has written down and underlined the…

कुठली मेथडॉलॉजी… Which Methodology…

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by विनायक लष्कर (Vinayak Lashkar)   कुठली मेथडॉलॉजी… -विनायक लष्कर कुठली मेथडॉलॉजी वापरून आमच्या जिवंतपणाचं तुम्ही संशोधन करताय गुर्जीतुमच्या मेलेल्या सिद्धांतांनीआमचं जिवंत असणं कधीच नाकारून टाकलंय…संख्या फेकण्यात तर तुम्ही सराईत तज्ञ आहात गुर्जीपण कोणत्या पद्धती वापरून तुम्ही करणार आहातआमच्या शोषलेल्या रक्ताचं गुणात्मक विश्लेषण…संशोधन पेपरांचे तर तुम्ही ढिगावर ढिग रचतच चाललाय गुर्जीपण आमच्या घामाची शाई तुम्हाला कधीच उमटवता येणार नाही कागदावर…राष्ट्रीय, आंतरराष्ट्रीय पातळीवर टाय कोट…

Nithya Rajan

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Nithya is a writer and researcher from Kerala, India who now lives in San Diego, California. She has a PhD from the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, and currently works as postdoctoral fellow there. Her research looks at the lives of refugee women in Delhi and the ways…

Rest

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by Amoke Kubat   These times; Coronavirus now called COVID-19. The whole world is on lockdown. People are fearful, confused, defiant and restless. Somebody must have cried out from the wilderness, “What next, God?” I asked myself privately, “Is this when Hell freezes over?” I am sleepless with such questions. I am concerned but not…