Learning Out Loud

Hello friends, and happy Sunday.

In case you missed it, we just wrapped up our first mini series of the brand new podcast version of our long-standing radio show Radio Reversal. The series was titled Learning Out Loud, and brought together some of the central themes and concerns that drive the Radio Reversal collective.

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One of the main reasons that we were so excited to launch a podcast version of the show - and to do so via substack - was because the work we do as a collective is always located within a much bigger context, but we don’t always have time to explain that on air. We try to take seriously who we are thinking with and learning from; recognising, as Sara Ahmed puts it, that

“citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the the paths we were told to follow.”

Over the years of producing the show, we’ve grown and developed our ethical approaches to learning out loud; a specific radio form of critical, feminist citation. We aim, always, to actively amplify the insights of those most directly impacted by the political dynamics we examine on the show. But we also reckon with the problems of extracting additional unpaid labour from people whose labours are often already devalued, undermined, and underpaid. So one of the things we hope to do as part of this podcasting project is to take time at the end of each series to take stock of what we’ve learned; and offer an (always incomplete) map of the people and places that have shaped it.

When I first imagined writing a wrap-up newsletter for our introductory series, I thought it would be about the texts and scholars who have shaped our thinking on political education and radical pedagogy; people like bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Chelsea Watego, Paulo Freire, Adrienne Marie Brown, Dylan Rodriguez, The Red Nation, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Joy James, and so, so many others. The collective behind Radio Reversal overlaps considerably with the Brisbane Free University, particularly as participants in a fortnightly Radical Reading Group. We spend a lot of time together thinking about the potentially transformative experiences of teaching and learning; the ways that political education can equip us to build movements for more just futures. We are huge nerds, and if a decade of community education has taught us anything, it’s that there are a lot of other nerds out there.

But this week, it feels like it makes more sense to reflect on the political context of this work; and what it means to hold onto a sense of responsibility to engage seriously with the world around us. Beyond texts and readings, our thinking on political education and radical pedagogy is a product of collective struggle. Recording protest marches; interviewing organisers; listening and listening again. Reflecting together as we carry hand-made banners down city streets, paint posters, plan slogans, and wonder whether we’ll know when it’s time to swap those paint brushes for bolt cutters.

Like a lot of other people, I’ve been overwhelmed over the past few weeks by the sheer scale of racism, violence, and colonial complicity being demonstrated (and glorified) across the colonising “west.” From Israel’s genocidal siege on Gaza, to the repressive racist policing of both Palestinian resistance and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty on this continent: it feels like we are entering a new conjuncture. The contradictions of colonialism have been exposed globally, rupturing the status quo. The pendulum of liberal democracies - that uneven and unpredictable swing from repression and reform and back again - is now firmly geared towards repression. The Voice referendum has been resolutely defeated after a campaign that laid bare the violent and persistent racism at the heart of this colonial project. The housing crisis across major cities in this country, couple with apocalyptic climate change and increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather events are pushing more and more people into precarity. All the while, the stolen wealth of billionaires and colonial states alike is carefully protected by purpose-built regimes of policing and incarceration. The cliché stands: stealing from Coles is a crime; but stealing the continent? Just fine.

And of course, at the same time, people resisting these overlapping oppressions are being subjected to ever more extreme violence: the tried-and-true tactic of managing the threat of collective resistance through military and police violence, dispossession, deportation, incarceration, and then eventually, the flimsy promise that some piecemeal liberal reforms will fix the problem.

The confluence of these dynamics is not a coincidence.

As our friends at the Institute of Collaborative Race Research put it:

Colonising powers aim to separate our struggles, in order to fragment our resistance and make Indigenous and racialised peoples easier to control. The similarities that we can see in this moment between the repression of Indigenous peoples’ globally are not a coincidence. From racist stereotypes to state surveillance, violent technologies of colonial control continue to be necessary because Indigenous peoples keep resisting colonisation: forging global networks of solidarity that actively threaten the legitimacy and power of the colonising state.

At the Justice for Palestine rally on Friday 13th October, Jonathan Sriranganathan reminded us that:

the ongoing colonisation, dispossession and invasion of Palestine is an unflattering mirror of Australian colonisation. All of us who are settlers on this continent have a responsibility to look that in the eye; and recognise our own complicity in colonisation, and the responsibility that all of us share to stand up against colonial imperialism in all its forms, including right here on this stolen land.

Just this weekend, Australia has rejected the constitutional reforms on offer in the referendum. We’ve watched as explicitly racist rhetoric is proliferating in mainstream media. The Opera House is lit up in the colours of the Israeli flag, guarded by lines of armed police. Racist slurs against Palestinians are repeated comfortably in the mainstream media while mere accusations of anti-semitism at Palestinian justice rallies are enough to prompt Peter Dutton to call for deportations. And still, Labor and the LNP will steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the racism at the heart of the colonial project.

We have work to do.

So I’ll end this week with these moving and important words from our dear friend and comrade, Palestinian student, organiser, and musician Zayd Nabulsi.

Colonisation is nothing new for my people, but the scale of the current massacre is genocidal.

The media paints us as the savages in our resistance, yet it is the Palestinian babies and children being pulled out of the rubble of collapsed residential buildings. We see the use of internationally outlawed (for use in civilian areas) white phosphorous, used against a 2 million large population that is half children.

So don’t you dare speak to me of savagery.

It is the coloniser who invented savagery. It is the coloniser who sowed the seeds of violence.

I pray that one day, Palestinian love will be allowed to freely grow. I pray that my future children can play amongst the olive groves that I have never known.

The promise of such future is rooted in our resistance now. Free, free Palestine.

Thank you for reading Radio Reversal: The Podcast's Substack. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Upcoming events:

If you’re in Brisbane, a reminder that there is another Justice for Palestine rally planned for Saturday 21st October at 2pm.

The IRL Prison Letter Writing group is always looking for new writers interested in and committed to regularly writing to people incarcerated in so-called australia. They meet monthly on Saturdays and there is an introductory workshop and overview for new writers who are not sure what is expected of them. You can contact irlinfoshop @ gmail.com for more details about the Meanjin/Brisbane chapter of the group.

If you’re interested in joining the Brisbane Free University Radical Reading Group, our next book is Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi and the next in-person and online discussion is from 6pm - 7.30pm on Thursday 26th October. If you use facebook, join the BFU Radical Reading Group for updates on upcoming discussions. If you don’t use facebook, you can find all the materials and schedule for the reading group on our google drive.

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