Listen Up: A Podcast Discussion Club
Join us for a twice-monthly podcast discussion club: like a book club, but for your ears. Once you've registered, you'll be sent Zoom meeting info a half hour before each session.
Each month will be a new theme and have a new set of podcasts to listen to: from narrative formats to interviews and everything in between. We'll talk content and construction, and participants can have a say in what we listen to in upcoming sessions. And be on the lookout for guest speakers!
Podcast aficionados and newbies welcome!
April's Theme: Local History & Journalism
For April, we are looking at local stories. From the big city to the small town street, let's listen to how communities are making sense of their history and present through podcasts and other audio projects.
Podcasts for Session 1 on April 6th:
Two recent podcast series focused on schools, segregation, and racial justice right here in Brooklyn. We’ll talk about how School Colors and Nice White Parents combined historical research with modern voices to examine these issues.
Nice White Parents, Episode Two: “I Still Believe in It”
In this episode, Chana Joffe-Walt searches the New York City Board of Education archives for more information about the School for International Studies, which was originally called I.S. 293. In the process, she finds a folder of letters written in 1963 by mostly white families in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. They are asking for the board to change the proposed construction of the school to a site where it would be more likely to be racially integrated. It’s less than a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, amid a growing civil rights movement, and the white parents writing letters are emphatic that they want an integrated school. They get their way and the school site changes — but after that, nothing else goes as planned.
School Colors, Episode Two: “Power to the People”
In the late 1960s, the Central Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville was at the center of a bold experiment in community control of public schools. But as Black and Puerto Rican parents in Ocean Hill-Brownsville tried to exercise power over their schools, they collided headfirst with the teachers’ union — leading to the longest teachers’ strike in American history, 51 years ago this fall. What started as a local pilot project turned into one of the most divisive racial confrontations ever witnessed in New York City. Ocean Hill-Brownsville made the national news for months, shattered political coalitions and created new ones, and fundamentally shaped the city we live in today. But as the strike shut down schools citywide, Ocean Hill-Brownsville mobilized to keep their schools open — and prove to the world that Black people could educate their own children and run their own institutions successfully. In the process, they inspired a particular brand of defiant, independent, and intensely proud Black activism that would define political life in Central Brooklyn for generations.
Podcasts for Session 2 on April 20th:
Thunder Bay, A Post-Truth Town
Rumble Strip Vermont, Town Meeting
