Here we continued our conversation, and talked about building relationships, whiteness and trauma. I’d recommend listening to part one first but it’s not essential.
This conversation was recorded in late 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Continue reading Conversation with Dzifa Afonu – part twoThis conversation was recorded in late 2019.
Click ‘Continue Reading’ for the transcript.
Continue reading Conversation with Dzifa Afonu – part oneThe Sideways Times Podcast is back! After quite a long absence we’re back with a great interview with Sophie from Docs Not Cops, who campaign against the British government’s ‘hostile environment’ policy in the National Health Service (NHS). In this podcast we talk about how Docs Not Cops organise, the history of charging, and the hostile environment within the NHS. We also touch on the wider context of racism within the British healthcare system. Sophie is a doctor who’s been involved with Docs Not Cops since its beginning in 2014. The interview was conducted before the British general election in December 2019.
Dee Woods and Leslie Barson talk to Lani Parker of Sideways Times about their experiences of working in the award-winning Granville Community Kitchen.
Food is politics. Every time we eat something or we go to a shop and we decide to buy say chocolate versus locally made bread, we are making a political choice that impacts on someone somewhere in the world.
Listen to the podcast
Read the transcript
Lani: Welcome to Sideways Times; a UK based podcast in which we talk about the politics of disability and disability justice. Through this podcast I hope to have many conversations which broaden, deepen and challenge our understandings of how to work against ableism and how this connects to other struggles. I am Lani Parker and in this edition I talk to Dee Woods and Leslie Barson about their work in Granville Community Kitchen. We talk about themes such as community infrastructure, food sovereignty and gentrification. You’ll hear more at the very beginning of the podcast. Relax and enjoy this round the table discussion.
Yeah so if you want to introduce yourself… We’re laughing because I – we had some of this conversation and I thought I was recording it and I wasn’t so now take two.
Leslie: Take two.
Lani: Yeah.
Dee: [Laughs] This is not live radio! thank goodness yeah.
Leslie: Er. Right I’m Leslie Barson and I’ve helped – I’ve been working in the Granville Community Centre for a long time on South Guildford estate and I, along with my friend, helped to found an organisation called Granville Community Kitchen, which is about – for me it’s very much about community and community building through food issues or community issues too, around…
Dee: Yeah.
Leslie: Yeah, yeah.
Dee: And I’m Leslie’s friend. [They laugh] Dee Woods, I’ve been involved with the Granville Community Centre, which has gone through various iterations and sort of co-founded Granville Community Kitchen, which is now an award-winning –
Lani: Ooh.
Dee: – yeah, project was recently named as one of London’s fifty Urban Food Heroes.
Lani: Yeah, yeah. Very proud. So yeah, it’s made me feel slightly stilted again now because [laughs] we’ve had like a twenty minute conversation already. But, as you might know, my name’s Lani Parker. This is Sideways Times and I’ve brought these two wonderful people around the table because I think the work they’re doing is brilliant and I like them both very much –
Dee: Thank you. [Laughs]
Lani: – and I wanted to have some conversations with them about food and community and infrastructure, what we need for survival and how we get to actually build what we need and in the context of the UK as a colonial nation at a time of Brexit and all of those sort of things. So I just wanted to, yeah have this conversation. So I hope you enjoy it; the people who are listening.
Dee: How long do we have?
[They laugh]
Lani: We have however long we like –
Dee: OK.
Lani: – but about forty-five minutes [laughs]. So yeah… tell us a bit more about whatever you want to tell us for a bit.
Dee: Granville Community Kitchen was set up to sort of meet the needs of a community that was in sort of deprivation; long-term and entrenched deprivation. So our sort of tag-line or whatever is empowering community through food and within that we saw that we have a community – a very diverse community and people who have skills, knowledge, especially coming from various countries, that they could pass on with regards to food and food growing and cooking. But you know as Leslie just said, it was also about community building because the area has been under regeneration again. We saw that the community was being divided and we wanted a way to bring community back and to build those bonds again and yeah, just sort of community resilience, basically using food as a way to build that.
“To some extent all our political motivations and morality are based on imaginary states”
Hamja Ahsan, author of Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert, discusses humour, connecting diverse movements and struggles, and imaginary spaces in activism.
Listen to the podcast
Read the transcript:
Lani: Welcome to Sideways Times, a UK-based podcast in which we talk about the politics of disability and disability justice. Throughout this podcast I hope to have many conversations which deepen and broaden as well as challenge our understanding of how to work against ableism and how this connects to other struggles.
I am Lani Parker and in this edition I talk to Hamja Ahsan about his book Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert. We discussed what influenced the book, the use of humour in the book and in art in general, and how the themes relate to issues of racism and ableism, as well as some more things. I hope you enjoy it, let me know what you think.
Lani: Hi Hamja, thank you for coming to meet me. To start with could you tell me a bit about Shy Radicals and how it came about?
Hamja: So Shy Radicals has something I feel has always existed in me as a form of coping with feeling excluded and demeaned and bullied I guess, through what I call extrovert supremacist culture. It became a book last year, published by Bookworks – it’s an artist’s writing publisher. They’ve published people like Lubaina Himid, Liam Gillick and Jeremy Deller and then they’re like one of the best I think experimental publishers. And there’s a series called Common Objectives which is edited by an activist called Nina Power, who you might know through organisations like Defend the Right to Protest, or the Alfie Meadows campaign, and feminist philosophy. And she selected this as part of the series. So the way I’ve conceptualised my own feelings of inferiority and being bullied through being someone who is going to be the more awkward shy or quiet person in the room and thinking in a way of… not seeing it as something to be corrected but a different mode of being. I guess the questions which are often around the term neurodiversity and the way many people with Asperger’s Syndrome or autistic spectrum, and forms of resisting mental health diagnosis and medical models of mental disability, and reclaiming them as different ways of being. So I made up a revolutionary political party which would be like the Black Panthers but for shy people. Continue reading Shy Radicals: An interview with Hamja Ahsan
We’re talking about a human relationship of interdependence that values everybody as part of the world that we live in. And not only people but the whole world.
Lani: Welcome to Sideways Times, a new UK-based podcast in which we talk about the politics of disability and disability justice. Through this podcast I hope to have many conversations which broaden, deepen and challenge our understanding of how to work against ableism and how this connects to other struggles. I’m Lani Parker, and in this edition Andrea D’Cruz interviews me, following requests from some people to hear more of my perspective. We mainly talk about some of my thoughts around disability justice and interdependence, following many conversations with many amazing people.
Andrea: I first learnt about the framework of disability justice from having conversations with you, and it’s something that’s come up in a few of the previous podcasts that you’ve recorded – so I though it’d be really nice if we could have a whole podcast that was you talking about what disability justice means, and what it means to you personally, so maybe we could start – could you give me 3 sentences on what disability justice is, or what it means to you?
Lani: OK, so… disability justice as a framework was kind of put together by some disabled women of colour, or disabled people of colour, in the States, and to me the key things about it are that it connects issues and movements together, and that it has – it’s radically anti-capitalist, and that it has a commitment to interdependence and valuing the gifts that disabled people bring to the world, and so there’s lots of aspects to it, but I would say those are more than 3 sentences, but a little bit about what I think.
Poet, artist and writer Khairani Barokka (Okka) speaks to Lani Parker of Sideways Times about the importance of narrative, storytelling and emotions as an artist; colonialism, disability, her art and her PhD.
Being a human is confusing, and challenging for everybody. But I’m glad that I feel like the worst of what I’ve gone through in life, knock on wood, was gone through with an understanding of how language can shape and reflect experiences.
Read the transcript:
Khairani Barokka: I am an Indonesian writer, poet and artist in London. I’m a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths in visual cultures, doing a PhD by practice. I have been researching and writing and making for 6 years now on specifically intersectional experimental ways of telling stories, particularly around crip cultures and feminisms. Continue reading Disabled artists are out here: A conversation with Okka
Michelle Daley, co-founder of Sisters of Frida, talks to Lani Parker of Sideways Times about black disabled people’s experiences in Britain, intersectionalities with the disabled people’s movement, global privilege and interdependence.
We should keep growing, like a tree. Keep pushing forward, keep going, in all directions.
Michelle Daley
The interview is provided as a podcast with a transcript below.
Continue reading Independence and interdependence: an interview with Michelle Daley
This month Lani interviews Steve Graby, a Disability Studies researcher at the University of Leeds. They discuss the tensions inherent within the personal assistance employer-employee relationship, as well as the opportunities for solidarity.
Read more about Steve’s work: visit his website or follow him on Twitter.
Read the transcript below. Continue reading Conversation with Steve Graby on Personal Assistance: The Challenge of Autonomy
In this interview Lydia X.Z Brown talks about disability justice as a praxis which honours the body and the whole person. Disability justice is a radical framework which requires understanding the interconnected nature of oppression and that we must tackle all forms of oppression in order to change the system we live in. We also talk about differences in language, tensions within disability movements and the importance of using a variety of tactics amongst other things….
Transcript below:
Sideways Times 