🔊 Ep 4 👂🏾Phantom Waterways & Unstable Geographies
Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities
But first, an announcement! 🥁
New Year, New Partner! I’m pretty thrilled to share that Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities is now presented in partnership with Respair Production & Media. If you haven’t already heard about them or listened to their podcasts like AirGo or Help This Garden Grow: Respair is a movement journalism and media hub reshaping culture toward liberation. I had the pleasure of meeting co-founders Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger last year at a screening of their documentary, One Million Experiments, and knew immediately that they were brewing something I definitely wanted to be a part of. The film, along with their podcast by the same name, showcases how we can redefine and create safety in a world without police and prisons. Right up my alley. And, for those who find Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities lacking in the way of “solutions” to the various dimensions of carcerality we examine, the One Million Experiments podcast makes an ideal pairing as each episode walks listeners through experiments in abolitionist practice.
Partnering in this way means that wayyyy more people who are already part of Respair’s wide-reaching ecosystem will now have access to Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities through a familiar platform. Much gratitude to Dame, Kiss and their team for finding value and alignment in what we’re making and bringing this collaboration to life. And, if you haven’t already, go listen and subscribe to AirGo wherever you get your podcasts!
Today, we drop Episode 4, Part 2 of Nature, where we explore ghost streams, summer floods, and what they mean for the foundations of the city. Coincidentally, I’m writing this update from Cartagena, Colombia, the Caribbean city where I was viscerally reminded of the themes we explored in this episode when a sudden flood brought on by an unseasonal torrential downpour had me stranded, zig-zagging the city on foot for a few hours, drenched, trying and failing to find a way to cross back into the neighborhood where I was staying. All the main thoroughfares that divided the city had been swallowed by flood water mixed with sewage. I was reminded, quickly, how so much of Detroit’s water-bound precarity is shared; how vulnerable people get the worst of it; and just how much more severe that precarity can be in the Global South. Cartagena is another place where Nature will quickly make fictions of your best laid plans.
Listen and view the full transcript on makingroom.online or listen wherever you get your podcasts:
Human made infrastructures always eventually crumble, lost to time and memory. The 21st century has brought these concerns uncomfortably close to ‘First World’ or technologically advanced societies, societies which tell themselves that they have mastered nature. Levees break, power grids overload, and suddenly a highway is a river. As we wade through the layers of deprivation, segregation and allocation that make it so, we uncover that some of these roads had always been rivers, and their memories may still be stronger than our methods. In this episode Lauren Williams points to human designs nearing failure tolerance, and calls us back to a different relation with Nature and each other.
As always, the entire series was lovingly co-produced by Ayinde Jean Baptiste; audio was mastered by Conor Anderson; and our theme music is the instrumentals from Detroit Summer, by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.
Thank you for listening on makingroom.online or wherever you get your podcasts.