Black Lives Matter - Ghosts Can't Tell Stories

This emergency episode was made quickly during a time of uprising following the killing of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless other African Americans by police.We hear readings of “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay.  perhaps, in all likelihood,he put gently into the earthsome plants which, most likely,some of them, in all likelihood,continue to grow, continueto do what such plants doFellow-AIDS scholars, Drs. Jih-Fei Cheng and Nishant Shahani (co-editors with me of the book AIDS and the Distribution of Crises, Duke 2020) make resonant connections between ecology, blackness, strength, and violence. How plants, earth, and seeds center rather than scatter us. This reminds Nishant of the daily bounties of the earth, the mundane and sustaining connection to the food we grow and eat, another poem: Eve Ewing’s “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store.” The histories of violence written into plants and fruit—seeds, tobacco, and viruses—and attendant histories of pleasure, labor, medicine, and colonial and global capitalist theft will then focus Jih-Fei’s reflections, also borne from poetry and protest.Eric Garner and Emmet Till were silenced by violence. But their stories persist -- voluminous, angry, peaceful, and mundane -- through the words of poets and critics. In this way, we connect to the hardtruth #69 written for the online primer on digital media literacy, “ghosts can’t tell stories” by Quito Zeigler. Poems are not a solution but rather an invitation and an invocation to act and do a little differently, perhaps as plants do: help us breathe so we can engage together to better the internet and ourselves. Join us in the change!  Read or respond to a poem or hardtruth found at the online primer of digital media literacy, #100hardtruths-#fakenews or fakenews-poetry.org.To read Jih-Fei and Nishant's full pieces of writing on which this episode relies, please see "Following A Small Needful Fact," by Jih-Fei Cheng and "Thinking about Small, Needful Facts," by Nishant Shahani on the Duke University Press blog: Dispatches on AIDS and COVID-19: Continuing Conversations from AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Dispatch Three).Organize your own Fake News Poetry Workshop.Reach out with questions or content @ 100hardtruths@gmail.com.Twitter: @100HardTruthsInstagram: #100HardTruthsYouTube: 100 Hard Truths#BlackLivesMatter Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Om Podcasten

We engage in radical digital media literacy by enjoying a bite of education and a bit of poetry, creating humane responses to fake news and social media in the era of Covid-19.Each short episode assembles materials made over three related efforts. First, complex and consequential ideas about fake news: “hardtruths.” These were gathered in 2017 for an online primer in digital media literacy, #100hardtruths-#fakenews. There you can find scores of resources about fake news by artists, journalists, activists, scholars, and more. http://scalar.me/100hardtruths.Next we offer poems that build off of, respond to, or deepen a hardtruth. These were written in 2018 and 2019, at Fake News Poetry Workshops: encounters that address these complex concerns through art, intimacy, technology, and poetry. http://fakenews-poetry.org.Finally, given both the digital and viral truths wrought by the crisis of COVID-19, and to provide some small relief, we provide resources and methods to deepen connection and possibility during a time of social distancing and via technology.Each episode offers things to do with others as well as things that were done before and for you. Tender hand-offs of digital things remind us how we can use technologies that distance us physically for better. Making and making use of poetry and related knowledge can create verification engines that rely on belief structures outside the endangering logics of the internet and the fake news propelled therein.We are people, distanced but maintaining, and we need more than the transmission of messages and data. We want connection, goodness, reason, feeling, and change. In a time when we are more reliant on digital technology than ever, each episode demonstrates methods to take part in digital defiance, without collusion, and with care for our internet things and digital ways.Join us! Read or respond to a poem or hardtruth found on the two websites above.Organize your own Fake News Poetry Workshop.Reach out with questions or content @ 100hardtruths@gmail.com.Twitter: @100HardTruthsInstagram: #100HardTruthsYouTube: 100 Hard Truths   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.