April 21, 2022

TREVA B. LINDSEY

April 21, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Iyabo Lawal

Black Feminist Historian · Founder of the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative at Ohio State University
Author of America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women & The Struggle for Justice

We have to be unwavering in our commitment to principles of justice and freedom and be harbingers of hope. So for me, this is a lifelong thing, and I think of it as ancestor work that I one day will be somebody's ancestor, and I want them to be proud of the work that we did to give them a world that’s a little better of an inheritance than the world that I was born into. And I think that is how we mark progress in more nuanced ways, in more honest ways. It doesn't need to be a straight line towards freedom, more of a journey with wins and losses, setbacks and victories.

April 01, 2022

(Highlights) ALICE SCHMIDT

April 01, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Marley Hinschberger

Global Sustainability Advisor · Co-Author of The Sustainability Puzzle: How Systems Thinking, Climate Action, Circularity and Social Transformation Can Improve Health, Wealth and Wellbeing for All

What is societal progress? I think the last 70 years, clearly, in the post World War II period, we have been thinking of economic growth and have been equating that with societal progress. To an extent of course that's right. To an extent, we need this economic growth to lift people out of poverty. We’ve kind of lost the reasoning. We have been following only this economic growth paradigm measured by the GDP, the Gross domestic product and we have forgotten that it measures many things, but it doesn't actually measure progress. It doesn't measure how healthy people are, how educated they are, how clean the environment is, how safe it is, how secure it is. It’s something where we really need to do a lot to transform those mindsets and in the end to understand that sustainability is about making their lives better and not worse.

April 01, 2022

ALICE SCHMIDT

April 01, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Marley Hinschberger

Global Sustainability Advisor · Co-Author of The Sustainability Puzzle: How Systems Thinking, Climate Action, Circularity and Social Transformation Can Improve Health, Wealth and Wellbeing for All

March 29, 2022

(Highlights) MARYBETH GASMAN

March 29, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Dayana Gonzalez

Author of Doing the Right Thing: How to End Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring
Executive Director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice & Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions

We all have things to learn when it comes to these diversity-related issues or issues of identity. We have so much to learn. Just because, let's say, you’re a person of color, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to be accepting of transgender individuals. You might have some real hangups. Or you could be transgender and have some hangups around people of color, all around the spectrum. You can be a woman who doesn't support women. You can be a woman who doesn't support women trans-women. There are all of these kinds of things that I think we have to be open to, and we have to be open to learning and also open to making mistakes because sometimes people are going to make mistakes around these issues.

March 29, 2022

MARYBETH GASMAN

March 29, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Dayana Gonzalez

March 08, 2022

DR. G. SAMANTHA ROSENTHAL

March 08, 2022/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Beila Ungar

Author of Living Queer History · Assoc. Professor of History, Roanoke College
Co-founder of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project

One of the things I really tried to get across in Living Queer History, and particularly in my chapter called “The Whiteness of Queerness” is to first make clear that LGBTQ histories have long been informed by white supremacy. It's kind of the unspoken thing that people don't want to talk about. It’s true all over the country. And so what I’ve started to think about is that often LGBTQ spaces are just unthinkingly white because there's a racial blindness, a racial myopia where folks are not thinking about the fact of how racial dominance is playing into that space. Or how racial dominance is playing into the way we tell stories about LGBTQ belonging.

December 17, 2021

(Highlights) MARY EDNA FRASER & ORRIN H. PILKEY

December 17, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Panisara Jaijongkit

Environmental Artist Mary Edna Fraser & Prof. Emeritus Orrin H. Pilkey
Co-authors of A Celebration of the World’s Barrier Islands & Global Climate Change: A Primer

I think any time we are closer to the earth, we can feel the struggles of other human beings as well. –Mary Edna Fraser

All over the world, we’re seeing because of climate change we’re seeing vast changes affecting all aspects of society. That’s something that we’ve not been able to face politically. We need to do that. – Orrin H. Pilkey

December 17, 2021

MARY EDNA FRASER & ORRIN H. PILKEY

December 17, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Panisara Jaijongkit

Environmental Artist Mary Edna Fraser & Prof. Emeritus Orrin H. Pilkey
Co-authors of A Celebration of the World’s Barrier Islands & Global Climate Change: A Primer

I think any time we are closer to the earth, we can feel the struggles of other human beings as well. –Mary Edna Fraser

December 10, 2021

(Highlights) OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE

December 10, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Karina Hammoud

Founder & Executive Director of the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network International

Author of Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature & Artist

There’s a wide range of reasons that we really need to understand the root causes of a lot of our social ills and environmental ills. I think we need to continue to come back to this question of how we heal this imposed divide between the natural world and human social constructs. And that healing is key to how we’re going to really unwind the perilous moment that we face right now. How do we reconnect with the natural world? Not just intellectually, but in a very embodied way.

December 10, 2021

OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE

December 10, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Karina Hammoud

Founder & Executive Director of the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network International

Author of Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature & Artist

December 03, 2021

(Highlights) PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

December 03, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Yesenia Olmos

Founder of Fondasyon Felicitee
Afrodescendant Ourstorian, Educator, Writer & Humanitarian

It’s true. In Haiti, to a large degree more women were involved in the Revolution, in the war, in the fighting for the nation for the very simple reason that women had more opportunities. After a certain time, we became invisible. Once you’re in your 60’s, you are missing a few front teeth, in fact, some of the women used to take a stone and break up their front teeth so that they wouldn’t be noticed anymore. “That’s just an old lady with no front teeth. Okay, she goes about her business, nobody looks at her. She can do nothing.” And those were the fighters–the greatest fighters of our revolution.

December 03, 2021

PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

December 03, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Yesenia Olmos

Founder of Fondasyon Felicitee
Afrodescendant Ourstorian, Educator, Writer & Humanitarian

November 02, 2021

(Highlights) REBECCA WALKER

November 02, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk

Award-Winning Writer, Producer & Co-founder of Third Wave Fund

The idea of writing memoir is about listening carefully. The way to find a story or, at least the story that needs to be told is that moment that you’re writing is the emerges from a deep kind of inner listening and finding the memories that are charged that don’t want to leave that have a certain kind of energy to them and, if you listen to them, and you allow them to be born in the writing, you discover your own story because your story is basically made up of all the memories that continue to hold the charge for you. All the memories that are lodged in your mind that you’ve secreted away and when you can excavate that story and you can write it down, then you can make sense of it and you can understand why you’re living the way you’re living and why you feel the way you feel. And you can also decide to to release those memories so that you can have new memories that can define and can shape your life.

November 02, 2021

REBECCA WALKER

November 02, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk

Award-Winning Writer, Producer & Co-founder of Third Wave Fund

The Creative Process

The Creative Process

SOCIAL JUSTICE & ACTIVISM

The Creative Process

(Highlights) REBECCA WALKER

REBECCA WALKER

The Creative Process