We are thrilled to release new episodes for season two of the Pandemicene Podcast! This podcast is part of The Pandemicene Project, which is rooted from the premise that creating trust-worthy knowledge that can foster a more just world requires attending to both the COVID-19 pandemic and the deep inequalities and fissures in the polity that this pandemic has laid bare. It also requires attending both to what is going on locally (e.g., from the shelter-in-place locations of our students), while drawing on the power and insights of global networks.
In season one we interviewed colleagues from our robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners, discussing with them the projects they were working on to grapple with and take action on the many forms of inequality and injustice the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and amplified.
For season two, our overarching theme is: Listening to the Pandemic. Over this last year, many of our standard modes of collectively learning and perceiving the world have been forced to shift and adapt. In the wake of these changes, we, as a team of students at UC Santa Cruz, have been experimenting with new ways of sensing our interconnected worlds, especially how we listen, and who we listen to. Our aim has been to denaturalize listening. Through having conversations, we have listened to how different communities have responded to the multiple crises of this year, as well as to how the pandemic has intersected with movements for racial and social justice.
This season features three episodes. In the first, Sandy Chung explores the surge of xenophobia in her podcast centered on anti-Asian hate and violence, amplifying the voices of members of the Asian-American community whose stories tend to be left unheard. In the second, Sophia Parizadeh interviews four women of color – Aissata Ba, Ekta Menghani, Dr. Taraneh Sarlati, and Dr. Paria Sadat Musavi Gharavi – about their racialized and gendered experiences of labor and employment, and life more generally, this past year. Finally, Isa Ansari and Dennis Browe speak with activist-scholar Dean Spade about his new book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). These episodes, 11 – 13, can be found at: https://pandemicene.ucsc.edu/category/podcast/.
We give our special thanks to Samuel Levin Cowles and Joseph Tejeda for helping develop this season’s theme, and to Jeff Aquino for superb sound mixing and audio editing.
We consider listening to be an act of world-making. We invite our listeners to also tune in and experiment with us. With a refocused awareness, what new insights may arise about how to connect across divides to learn and live together in the Pandemicene?