The Mission District's incomparable Guillermo Gomez-Peña performs his latest screed, “Notes from Technotopia: On the Cruelty of Indifference” along with a brief retrospective of his work, followed by an open conversation with the audience traversing the complicated borders in which his work resides.
Topics: Gender, Borders, frontiers, gentrification, art, politics, spanglish, Mission District, San...
Enrique Reynoso of Mexico City’s Organización Popular Francisco Villa de Izquierda Independiente (OPFVII), also known as “los Panchos,” reports how tens of thousands of people occupy land and build thriving, autonomous communities in the heart of one of the world’s grittiest cities. Outside of political parties they promote urban self-government, community safety, and autonomous education, culture, and health. Bárbara Suárez Galeano joins him. Co-presented by The Mexico...
Topics: Housing, Mexico City, left politics, autonomy, cooperatives, squatting, land occupations, occupy,...
The Presidio - a military outpost, and South of Market - the industrial and maritime center of early San Francisco, represented worlds of single men, soldiers, sailors, and miners, right? Archaeological research into the 19th-century neighborhood, the 18th-century El Presidio de San Francisco, and recent work around the Transbay Terminal area, gives us a picture of family life and maritime wives, where women and children participated in the hard work of everyday life in these settlements....
Topics: archaeology, early San Francisco, Presidio, Folsom and Main, family life, 19th century, class,...
The boundary-pushing, "wickedly funny" comedian and formidable foe Nato Green gives a stand-up performance, preceded by opener Irene Tu. A free show, followed by conversation... Get your brain stimulated while laughing your head off...
Topics: comedy, stand-up, Irene Tu, Nato Green, sexuality, raunchy, gender, gay
Prisoners and Politics: from the San Quentin Six to Pelican Bay California holds more prisoners than any other state while the U.S. incarcerates far more people than anywhere else on earth. During the 1960s and 1970s a political movement erupted among the imprisoned— Dan Berger ’s new book Captive Nation takes us through that political history. We welcome Luis “Bato” Talamantez and David Johnson — both original members of the San Quentin Six, and Caitlin Kelly Henry —...
Topics: prisons, prisoners, California Department of Corrections, injustice, San Quentin, San Quentin Six,...
Governor Jerry Brown is determined to build the Delta Tunnels through the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta. The once-and-future Peripheral Canal is the latest plumbing scheme to follow the damming and diking of rivers and swamps which began with intensive Chinese manual labor in the 19th century. California has already radically altered its plumbing, but we’ll also look to future efforts at riparian restoration, dam deconstruction, and maintaining or altering our massive hydrological...
Topics: rivers, water, plumbing, maps, dams, delta, tunnels, agriculture, arable soil, rainfall, sewage
In a world where every inch has been impacted—directly or indirectly—by industrial society, what does it mean to “preserve nature”? How does the idea of adaptation shape our responses to extinction, climate chaos, and nature? How does our sense of “history” shape our ideas about nature, evolution, and conservation? How should we understand and value natural processes, wildness, and human technologies? With Peter S. Alagona, Annalee Newitz , and Noah Greenwald . Co-hosted by Wild...
Topics: anthropocene, habitat, endangered species, adaptation, technology, future, civilization, grizzly...
Bureaucratic labor unions, long besieged, seem incapable of defending, let alone advancing, workers’ interests. In Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, workers are rejecting leaders and forming authentic class-struggle unions rooted in sabotage, direct action, and striking to achieve concrete gains. Manny Ness , editor of New Forms Of Worker Organization , and Steve Early , contributor to Continental Crucible: Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America...
Topics: unions, labor, syndicalism, trade unionism, AFT, CWA, Labor Notes, South Africa, Argentina,...
Bricks give literal structure to a history of place. Bricks produced around the Bay were a fire proof building material in early years of a city often engulfed by fire. Archeology work at the Presidio reveals plant time capsules embedded in recovered bricks that help us understand pre-settler ecology. And bricks increasingly confront our current landscape of evictions and displacement. Featuring Ruth Askevold, Lew Stringer, and LisaRuth Elliott . Co-hosted by Wild Equity Institute.
Topics: bricks, seeds, Presidio, bayshore, mud, rubble, earthquakes, ballast
Money! Crime! Vice! Politics! Moral Panic! Gender bending! The history of the Tenderloin, one of the least heralded and worst understood neighborhoods in town, has it all. Peter Field , who gives astounding walking tours there, will cover the early days to WWI while Chris Carlsson will take it from the 1910s to the beginning of the 21st century.
Topics: Tenderloin, St. Ann's Valley, Central City, SROs, Historic buildings, prostitution, parlor houses,...
Vietnam War, Dissent, and the U.S. Military A half-century after the Vietnam War officially began, we’ll look back at military mutinies, the rise of the volunteer army in response to the “Vietnam Syndrome,” and situate the Vietnam War in the long history of U.S. military aggression, even pre-dating the founding of the United States. Paul Cox, Deni Leonard, Michael Blecker
Topics: Presidio stockade, Presidio mutiny, anti-war GI newspapers, anti-war coffeehouses, FTA, FTA tour,...
Conversation with Vandana Makker
Topics: Yoni Ki Baat Performance, South Asian, Queer, Culture
Vandana Makker Interview Part II
Topics: Yoni Ki Baat, Vagina Monologues, South Asian, Queer, Omsri Bharat
Sirron Norris has been splashing his satirical cartoon characters around the Mission and San Francisco for years. From biting social commentary to whimsical commercial art, his work spans a range that challenges the boundaries of art and politics.
Topics: art, murals, cartoons, cartoon literalism, tagging, graffiti, Mission District, commercial art,...
Sirron Norris has been splashing his satirical cartoon characters around the Mission and San Francisco for years. From biting social commentary to whimsical commercial art, his work spans a range that challenges the boundaries of art and politics.
Topics: cartoons, art, commercial art, Art and Politics, murals, Mission District, tagging, graffiti, day...
On the 100th anniversary of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), Gray Brechin and Chris Carlsson discuss the PPIE and the relationship of world’s fairs to the idea of progress over time. How did the presentations at PPIE in their early 20th century context boost now long-held assumptions about progress and development through technological innovation and economic growth?
Topics: World's Fairs, Chicago World's Fair 1893, St. Louis World's Fair 1904, Midwinter Fair 1894, Panama...
Rene Yañez has been at the epicenter of the Mission’s multiple art movements going back to the 1970s. Our Art & Politics series puts him in the spotlight for a retrospective of his life’s work, a free-ranging discussion of the politics that informed his work, and how his work has shaped the neighborhood and the City to which he has contributed so much.
Topics: Day of the Dead, Frieda Kahlo, Galeria de la Raza, Neighborhood Art Centers, La Raza Park, Great...
In 1849 San Francisco was surrounded by wild animals and a flourishing sea and bay, from which most early food was taken. But what is our “wild menu” now? How do foraging, fishing, hunting, and gathering fit into modern life? What role does conservation and ecology play in a contemporary and future wild menu? With Mark Heath, Kirk Lombard , and Chris Carlsson . Co-hosted by Wild Equity Institute and Nature in the City .
Topics: Seafood, fish, herring, sea bass, salmon, sturgeon, perch, hunting, wild boar, deer, geese, ducks,...
What actually happened to Darling Clementine? Historian Joel Pomerantz explores the California floods of 1862. Learn how this historic storm, which killed thousands and caused a number of San Francisco houses to collapse, can be an example for what a really extreme weather event could be like in our future.
Topics: storms, weather, rain, 1861, 1862, Sacramento, Sacramento River, delta, San Francisco floods,...
“Grange Future” celebrates the history and contemporary expression of ‘the grange idea.’ From the 19th century populist movement that backed the early campaign for an “information commons” in the form of Rural Free Mail delivery, to public banking and Farmers co-op banks, this vital movement is re-emerging to confront information and agricultural monopolists of our own era. Severine Fleming of Greenhorns leads a panel discussion with the Internet Archive 's Brewster...
Topics: Commons, internet, property, intellectual property, farming, grange, populism, Omni Commons,...
Clif Ross and Marcy Rein , editors of Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements present a broad overview of the social movements that have pressured one regime after another in Latin America, changing the political calculations for everyone from right to left, from Venezuela to Argentina, Mexico to Chile and more.
Topics: Mexico, Zapatistas, MST, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Ecuador, Peru,...
A discussion of the west side tunnels and MUNI expansion in the 1910s, simultaneous to the building of the Hetch Hetchy water and power system by Elizabeth Creely and Catherine Powell , with Tim Redmond to compare today’s infrastructure build-out (Central Subway, sewers, and rebuilding Hetch Hetchy aqueduct).
Topics: Twin Peaks Tunnel, West Portal, Hetch Hetchy, M.M. O'Shaughnessy, "Sunny Jim" Rolph,...
Janet Delaney has been documenting the changing South of Market since its days as a recently deindustrialized district in the early 1970s to its present boom in luxury residential towers. Our Art & Politics series invites solo artists to talk about their work and share a bit about their process and the relationship of art to politics and vice versa in their work.
Topics: SOMA, redevelopment, Moscone Center, Project One, warehouses, gay leather, SRO, residential hotels,...
Jared Farmer presents his book Trees in Paradise , reading California history through Redwoods/Sequoias, Palms, Citrus, and Eucalyptus. He is joined by Craig Dawson of the Sutro Stewards , a group dedicated to untangling San Francisco’s most fraught forest atop Mt. Sutro.
Topics: Eucalyptus, Sutro Forest, Adolph Sutro, endangered species, invasive species, conservation biology,...
Decades of displacement and eviction have reached another crescendo during 2013-14. Key activists from the 1990s to the present will share tactics and strategies as the war enters its latest stages. With James Tracy with his new book Dispatches Against Displacement , Erin McElroy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Maria Zamudio of Causa Justa .
Topics: housing, evictons, anti-eviction mapping project, Causa Justa, Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition,...
Nicole Gluckstern and Burrito Justice trace the lines of their literary history mapping project ( Bikes to Books ) and map-making, and are joined by historical geographer Dick Walker co-author of the fantastic project The Atlas of California: Mapping the Challenge of a New Era .
Topics: maps, literary history, writers, bikes to books, Atlas of California, cartography, mapmaking
At the outset of the LGBTQ History Month of October, a group of distinguished historians come together to orient us to queer historic sites and events in the city. They reflect on those that have been torn down and what it means that these centers of community are missing, and present a sampling of the many still extant social, cultural, and sexual spaces, and why these places are critical components of LGBTQ history. Please note that the presenters retain their rights to their presentations...
Topics: public space, social amnesia, redevelopment, place, forgetting, gay history, GLBTQ history,...
A discussion among adjunct faculty (aka temp teachers), City College of San Francisco advocates and defenders, and Student Debt activists—how to understand the current neoliberal-imposed crisis in higher education, and what is a future worth fighting for? With Joe Berry of COCAL , Christian Nagler from the recent unionizing success at the San Francisco Art Institute, Wendy Kaufmyn and Lalo Gonzalez from CCSF.
Topics: adjuncts, temporary teaching, visiting faculty, City College of San Francisco, ACCJC, student debt,...
Shaping San Francisco's Chris Carlsson provides an historic tour of the eastern shoreline from its days as tidal mudflats and open sewers crisscrossed by piers and wharves to its new incarnation as a site of ecological restoration and recreation. Anthony Khalil of Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ ) offers a special look at creating a revitalized Candlestick shoreline including habitat restoration and community engagement, while interpreting the wonders of the Franciscan...
Topics: shoreline, landfill, hills, mudflats, wetlands, swamps, San Francisco, Telegraph Hill, Mission Bay,...
APEN organizer Vivian Chang describes political organizing among the Laotian communities in Richmond and Oakland.
Topics: APEN, organizing, Laotian, Oakland, Richmond, environmental justice
Pamela Chang discusses Laotian community and APEN organizing.
Topics: APEN, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, environmental justice, Laotian community, Richmond
Vivian Chang narrates how the Asian Pacific Environmental Network was founded after activists attended the first Environmental Justice conference in the early 1990s.
Topics: APEN, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, environmental justice
In 1913, students, farmers, and roaming revolutionaries working to free India from British colonial rule came together to form the Ghadar Party, to organize mutiny in India and work towards a secular world of economic and social justice. The party, headquartered in San Francisco collaborated with a variety of Bay Area based freethinkers, labor activists, anarchists, and expats of colonized nations. Though formally dissolved in 1948, the work of Ghadar offers potent lessons for political...
Topics: India, British empire, Ghadar, colonialism, networked movements, Irish liberation, IWW, Punjabi, UC...
The plight of pollinators - in particular the honey bee - under the combined stresses of capital and empire, is considered from an unusual perspective. Jake Kosek, a farmer, radical geographer, and apiarist, discusses his researches into 'political entomology', specifically the use of bees as material and metaphor by the US military (foraging for landmines, anti-terrorism weapons).
Topics: bees, swarming, military, agribusiness, nature, technology, economics
Join us for a moderated panel about the issues associated with human density and respectful dog ownership in San Francisco. After decades of looking the other way, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area is proposing to limit off-leash activity to select portions of its lands. Commercial dog walkers and some animal rights groups are opposing this change, and have threatened the extreme measure of dismantling the national park altogether. In 1977/8, Harvey Milk put forth a city ordinance dubbed...
Topics: dogs, habitat, species, leashes, off-leash, GGNRA, National Areas, Recreation and Park Department,...
Yolanda Lopez, Judy Drummond and Donna Amador cover the dynamic history of Los Siete de la Raza and Mission District politics of the 1970s. Yolanda dissects the popular iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the context of racially exploitative advertising over the past few decades, to reveal her own creative processes that have produced beautiful "Virgin"-inspired representations of working Chicana women and more.
Topics: Los Siete, Mission District, 1960s, Third World, San Francisco State, Basta Ya!, Centro de Salud,...
Lauren Coodley ’s new biography of Sinclair dubs him a “California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual”. She sheds light on his remarkable life as the writer who exposed the meatpacking industry in The Jungle , the depradations of the oil industry, the wrongful prosecutions of Sacco and Vanzetti as well as the Wobblies, but Coodley reveals a previously under-appreciated side of Sinclair: his feminism. Jay Martin joins the discussion to focus on Sinclair’s momentous 1934 California...
Topics: Upton Sinclair, feminism, EPIC, End Poverty in California, 1934 Governor's race, California...
I n a recent Earth Island Journal interview, Michael Pollan notes a question underlying his work, "How do you think through this relationship in the messy places where nature and culture have to engage with one another?" As urban dwellers, how do we decide what to do with our open spaces, our sidewalks, our schoolyards, our vacant lots? Do we use them to grow food, tend natives, allow wild spaces to exist? These choices require different skill bases (growing soil vs. tending...
Topics: urban agriculture, farming, community gardens, horticulture, habitat, urban permaculture,...
Cazzarola! is a gripping, epic, political, historical, and romantic novel spanning 130 years in the life of the Discordias, a fictional family of Italian anarchists. It details the family's heroic, multigenerational resistance to fascism in Italy and their ongoing involvement in the anarchist movement. From early 20th-century factory strikes and occupations, armed anarchist militias, and attempts on Mussolini's life, to postwar student and labor protest, and confronting the newest wave of...
Topics: anarchism, Italy, Mussolini, love story, anti-fascism
In this majestic tour de force, celebrated historian Peter Linebaugh takes aim at the thieves of land, polluters of the seas, ravagers of the forests, despoilers of rivers, and removers of mountaintops. Scarcely a society has existed on the face of the earth that has not had commoning at its heart. "Neither the state nor the market," say the planetary commoners. Linebaugh kindles the embers of memory like few other historians of our time to ignite our future commons. Linebaugh...
Topics: commons, enclosures, England, 1790s, Ned Ludd, Queen Mab, industrialization, wage-slavery,...
Cris Benton has used kite photography to document the surprisingly beautiful “saltscapes” of the South Bay, while Matthew Booker ’s Down By the Bay is one of the best recent histories of the long, complicated, and contradictory relationship of urbanizing humans and the amazing inland estuary we enjoy as the Bay.
Topics: Bay, San Francisco Bay, Bay Area, shorelines, salt ponds, reclamation, marshes, wetlands, salt...
As San Francisco emerged as the hub of counterculture pilgrimage routes in the late-1960s, radical politics and social change galvanized design ideals in Berkeley. The East Bay became the site of bold experiments in graphic arts, environmental activism, handcraft pedagogy, and self-build technologies. Fast forward to 2011 and the creation of the local hub PLACE for Sustainable Living in Oakland, a center linking our radical past to the resilient future, as it fosters many of the same ideals. ...
Topics: architecture, design, ecology, emergence, integration, holism, urban nature, geodesic domes, Sym...
As Biophilic Cities are becoming a part of international consciousness, urban spaces are adding green roofs and elevated walking paths that traverse urban canopies, even daylighting creeks. How does San Francisco fit into all this? Could San Francisco could become a City of Biodiversity? Do we use the great work done by other cities as inspiration to celebrate our relationship with the natural world, or in friendly competition with them to become the “greenest”? How can San Franciscans...
Topics: biodiversity, species, habitats, nature, nature in the city, urban nature, flowers, butterflies,...
Songs of Freedom is the name of the songbook edited by James Connolly and published in 1907. Connolly's introduction is better known than the collection for which it was written, containing his oft-quoted maxim: “Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement, it is the dogma of a few and not the faith of the multitude.” Though most of the songs were of Irish derivation, the...
Topics: Ireland, Scotland, England, New York, revolutionary songs, Irish socialism, Scottish socialism,...
Latin American migrants have been part of San Francisco’s story since its beginning. Charting the development of a hybrid Latino identity forged through struggle--latinidad--from the Gold Rush through the civil rights era, Tomás Summers Sandoval describes the rise of San Francisco’s diverse community of Latin American migrants, giving a panoramic pespective on the transformation of a multinational, multi-generational population that is today a visible, cohesive, and politically active...
Topics: Latino, Latina, Chicano, Chicana, Hispanic, San Francisco, North Beach, Mission, MCO,...
The seven young men who became iconic heroes of San Francisco's left and Latino political ferment in the 1970s were eventually acquitted of murder. While the campaign to defend them led to an explosion of social organizing, we know little about how these men's lives developed in the years that followed, losing track of real people in the mists of political legitimacy and hero-worship. Vero Majano takes a look at what happened to Los Siete in the decades since the famous trial, and gives us a...
Topics: Los Siete, La Raza, Latino, San Francisco, Mission, 1970s, New Left, brown power, daily life,...
Art & Politics: Literary Treasures of the North Mission Poets, painters, writers, and other cultural and literary denizens of the single-room-occupancy hotels of the North Mission, especially the Royan, the Crown, the Albion, and others, will be remembered, regaled, and recited. San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia reminisces and recites, bringing in literary heroes of the past decades.
Topics: Literary San Francisco, poets, poetry, Valencia, 16th Street, North Mission, Royan Hotel, Albion...
Doesn't European and American history in San Francisco begin with genocide? What does this mean in practice? Today, we have the chance to talk with people who descend from some of those who lived here before 1775, when Europeans arrived. We can't change what happened, but history is ongoing, including assumptions we hold today. What can we learn about San Francisco, the US, Europe, the Ohlone and Native America from this dialogue? Can "we" change who "we" are? The Ohlone...
Topics: Ohlone, Native Americans, genocide, survival, Alcatraz, American Indians, Indian peoples,...
Who are we, and what is our place in the world of the living? The Modern Synthesis of Biology, much of it conceived and incubated in the San Francisco Bay Area, has become a conceptual steel trap dictating much of what we do not only with our ecosystems, but also with our economy, our politics and our very selves. Liberation Biology proposes a critical approach to the deep roots of our understanding of the living. Based on both an exhumation of forgotten knowledge and on radically...
Topics: Biology, physics, central dogma, dna, code, gene, debunking
In Adriana Camarena's new work the most precarious residents of the Mission are the central storytellers. In this, the latest presentation of her ongoing work-in-progress, she tells the story of El Cabe, accompanied by Los Alegres del Bajio. Her project covers a range of historic tales of Californian daily life: Indigenous migrants on their day off from construction or cooking on the line, watch movies inside their shared group apartments. Parents, raising children in the Mission, fend off...
Topics: migration, border, desert crossing, Guadalajara, Los Angeles, Mexico, Cesar Chavez, trust,...
Imagine a time when the land that we know as the Franciscan Peninsula extended out to the Farallones and mastodons and tigers roamed freely. Imagine small seasonal villages along waterways engaged in trading across the bay, and tule canoes making the journey. Park Historian Breck Parkman will share his extensive research into the prehistory of the Bay Area, and Malcolm Margolin (Heyday Books, The Ohlone Way ) joins in with his years of exploring the indigenous history of the region. ...
Topics: indigenous, ohlone, Bay Area, pre-urban, pre-Spanish, prehistory
Co-editor J. Smith of the three-volume documentary history of the emblematic urban guerrillas will be in town to discuss his work, the life, times and enduring relevance of the RAF. "A fascinating history of the German revolutionary left in the 1970s and 1980s. It powerfully situates the RAF within a broader orbit of revolutionary politics and world events. It gives us the inside story of how militants did and might engage with police, prisons, informants, media and one another in the...
Topics: RAF, Red Army Faction, Revolutionary Cells, Carlos, PFLP, terrorism, 1970s, Germany, 1980s, Red...
What role do nontraditional archives play in the preservation and interpretation of peoples' history? This open discussion will explore some of the opportunities and challenges of radical repositories. Some of the issues that will be addressed include: What defines a radical archive? What can be productive relations between community-based or independent archives and more established (and establishment) institutions? What tools and processes are making it easier to document, catalog, and share...
Topics: archives, history, historiography, silence, digital media, paper, books, newspapers, formats,...
Chris Carlsson presents a historic look at the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, how it has changed over time, going from two-way traffic on the top deck (3 lanes in each direction) with trains and trucks on the lower deck, to today's new span. The history of automobility surrounding the bridge, and the many other schemes to build more bridges and crisscross San Francisco with high-speed freeways shows the context of the Bridge... The new Bike Pier (not quite halfway-across-the-bay bike lane)...
Topics: Bay Bridge, freeways, Freeway Revolt, Southern Crossing, infrastructure
Join a challenging conversation some have dubbed "environmental communications in the Anthropocene" to discuss the problems with presenting complex ecological information publicly. Rose Aguilar from KALW's Your Call radio , Brent Plater of the Wild Equity Institute , and environmental scientist and climate change activist Azibuike Akaba discuss and debate issues of scientific literacy, critical thinking, basic education, attention spans, buzzwords, guest selection, framing and...
Topics: Environmentalism, ecology, anthropocene, communications, meaning, language, memes, propaganda,...
Foxconn, the world's biggest contract manufacturer, employs more than one million people in China alone, working for Apple and many other brands. Foxconn's workers, the iSlaves, face horrendous working conditions while producing iPhones and iPads. In 2010 a series of worker suicides at Chinese Foxconn factories drew world-wide attention. The situation has not changed much since: instead of improving conditions, Foxconn accelerated the relocation of factories to the Chinese hinterland, and still...
Topics: China, Foxconn, Apple, iPhone, iPad, iSlave, iPod, working class, class struggle, strikes, riots,...
In Adriana Camarena's new work the most precarious residents of the Mission are the central storytellers. Theirs are historic tales of Californian daily life: Indigenous migrants on their day off from construction or cooking on the line, watch movies inside their shared group apartments. Parents, raising children in the Mission, fend off poverty by working hard, with the result that their dutifulness sometimes translates into absence for their kids. Lost in plain sight, young kids in gangs...
Topics: Mission District, gentrification, displacement, Homies, Migrants, immigration, mothers, sorrows,...
In recent years, much has made about the opposition between urban strategies and urban tactics. One is supposedly rooted in technocratic control of the city by a planning elite, the other is the response of artists and activists determined to reclaim the right to an environment generated by, and for, citizens themselves. Rebar has explored this territory through tactical urban interventions -- both sactioned and unsanctioned -- but is also interested in going beyond the simple opposition...
Topics: design, tactical urbanism, urbanism, public space, park(ing) day, intervention, art, commons,...
An evening of stories and discussion about the impact of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (which wasn’t rescinded until 1943!) on the Chinese American community in San Francisco. This infamous legacy was both subtly woven into community cultural life, and overtly demarcated social and geographical boundaries. Chinese Whispers , a research and storytelling project about the Chinese who helped build the American West, will present excerpted stories from the Bay Area which reveal the deep impact...
Topics: Chinese, Chinatown, Exclusion Act, racism, community, borders, identity, language
What history teaches us about San Francisco and the Bay-Delta Estuary Ruth Askevold and Robin Grossinger from the San Francisco Estuary Institute present their amazing historical maps and discuss their groundbreaking work in "forensic ecology," which is contributing to restoration efforts and galvanizing public attitudes around the Bay. Derek Hitchcock also joins the conversation to discuss current restoration efforts he is engaged in on the Napa River, as well as contextualizing the...
Topics: San Francisco Bay, coastline, landfill, shellmounds, dikes, berms, riparian corridors, restoration,...
The 2nd volume of George Katsiaficas's monumental study of Asian Revolutions, this provides a unique perspective on uprisings in nine places in East Asia over the past five decades. While the 2011 Arab Spring is well known, the wave of uprisings that swept East Asia in the 1980s became hardly visible. Katsiaficas relates Asian uprisings to predecessors in 1968 and shows their subsequent influence on the wave of uprisings that swept Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. By empirically...
Topics: People Power, Uprisings, Asia, Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Tienamen Square, Taiwan,...
Ralph Wilson, Jasper Rubin, and artist Wendy MacNaughton in a wide-ranging critical look at the history and plans for the oldest industrial buildings west of the Mississippi River, the launchpad for much of the U.S.'s imperial fleet in the late 19th and early 20th century. Increasingly derelict over the past few decades, but still home to the last drydock in San Francisco, big plans are afoot. Join critics, analysts, and artists for a closer look.
Topics: Pier 70, San Francisco, waterfront, shoreline, Union Iron Works, Bethlehem Steel, shipyards, docks
With translator Donald Nicholson-Smith. There is a grain of truth in the stereotypical view that Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, as two leading lights of the Situationist International, stood for two opposite poles of the movement: the objective Debord versus the subjective Vaneigem: Marxism versus anarchism: icy cerebrality versus sensualism: and, of course, The Society of the Spectacle versus The Revolution of Everyday Life --the two major programmatic books of the Situationist International,...
Topics: Situationists, Raoul Vaneigem, Donald Nicholson-Smith, France, radicalism, Debord, Society of the...
In the shadow of the Vietnam War, a significant part of an entire generation refused their assigned roles in the American century. Some took their revolutionary politics to the streets, others decided simply to turn away, seeking to build another world together, outside the state and the market. West of Eden charts the remarkable flowering of communalism in the '60s and '70s, fueled by a radical rejection of the Cold War corporate deal, utopian visions of a peaceful green planet, the new...
Topics: communes, communards, coops, urban, rural, collectives, farms, technology, accountability, Whole...
Selma James speaks on her new book "Sex, Race and Class--The Perspective of Winning; A Selection of Writings 1952-2011." James discusses the class divide in feminism, the anti-capitalism of the social wage, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Haiti: Black Jacobins then and now and much more! With her was George Katsiaficas, author of the just-released "Asia's Unknown Uprisings: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century," and he gave an account of the...
Topics: Feminism, unwaged, wages for housework, prostitutes union, England, South Korea, Gwangju, Tibet,...
Osento Bathhouse. Amelia’s. Artemis Cafe. Old Wives Tales. Modern Times Bookstore. Names and functions of these venues have changed, but they are part of the living memory of Valencia Street. Long before it descended into the white tablecloth, boutique-filled, gentrified peculiarity of today, the Valencia Street corridor was a hotbed of radical feminism and lesbian culture. LisaRuth Elliott moderates a conversation with some of the women who helped create the important sites and undergirded...
Topics: Valencia Street, Mission District, 1970s, 1980s, bars, cafes, weight training, bookstores, gyms,...
with Starhawk, Megan Prelinger, and Chris Carlsson. Megan Prelinger's book "Another Science Fiction" takes a whimsical look at how the Space Race was promoted during its heyday 1957-62, offering a pointed look into a twisted type of corporate "utopian" thinking that informed a whole generation. Meanwhile, Starhawk's "The Fifth Sacred Thing" and Chris Carlsson's "After The Deluge" both present alternative utopian futures for San Francisco a century or more...
Topics: Utopia, urbanism, ecology, revolution, future, dystopia, space, NASA, Mars, San Francisco
The Twin Peaks Bioregion is the hilly heart of San Franciscoâthe top of the city's watershedsâfrom the oak woodlands of Golden Gate Park to Glen Canyon, and from Hawk Hill to Buena Vista Park. Nature in the City has been talking for a couple of years about the heart of the city as a special place to which we should pay attention. Our vision for a Twin Peaks Bioregional Park would consolidate 10-12 different City jurisdictions into one management entity for the protection, restoration and...
Topics: Restoration, Nature, Cities, habitat, butterflies, wild corridors, native plants
A Shaping San Francisco Talk held at CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission at 9th in San Francisco on Wed. Oct. 21, 7:30pm 17 years of Critical Mass and 10,000 members of the Bike Coalition? what's right, what's not with the way bicycling and bicycling politics is developing at the end of the first decade of the 21st century? A broad discussion of bicycle etiquette, transportation and urban design, equipment and safety (good engineering vs. "good shopping"), Stop-Roll, Bike Plan 04 vs....
Topics: bicycling, bicycles, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, bike boulevards, Critical Mass, red lights,...
Friends and neighbors from the Mission District, including Mission Archives and Conscious Youth Media Crew folks, came together at CounterPULSE as part of the Shaping San Francisco Talks series on April 11, 2007, to screen raw footage of low-riders on Mission and other lost footage of the 1970s and 1980s. Ray Balbaran, Vero Majana, Roberto Hernandez, and dozens of others... Back in the late 1970s and early â80s Mission St. was home to a wild scene of lowriders every weekend. Bouncing,...
Topics: Mission District, Latino, Low riders, La Raza, The Lot, El Tecolote, Mission Archives, Conscious...
In decaying and resource-starved public schools, teachers and staffers with incredible vision and energy are trying to make education work. But what do we want from education now? Should it be organized around children spending mandatory time in classrooms or should we take a hint from the burgeoning homeschooling movement and look toward other models? Let's challenge our assumptions in this open-ended discussion. Chris Carlsson, Lisa Schiff, Karen Allen
Topic: San Francisco, public schools, parents, homeschooling, religion, textbooks, social interaction
Part 3 of the Future of Education talk, featuring audience-led dialogue with Will Grant, Lisa Schiff, Ken Tray, and Karen Allen.
Topic: San Francisco, public schools, literacy, adult education, parents, homeschooling, religion,...
Part 4 of the Future of Education talk, featuring audience-led dialogue with Will Grant, Lisa Schiff, Ken Tray, and Karen Allen.
Topic: San Francisco, public schools, literacy, adult education, parents, homeschooling, religion,...
Part two of the program on the future of education, featuring Will Grant, co-founder of statewide network in New Mexico of local leadership groups to transform education from K-12. He is followed by Ken Tray, high school teacher at Lowell High in San Francisco, and director of political education for United Educators of SF, the teachers' union.
Topic: San Francisco, public schools, literacy, adult education, parents, homeschooling, religion,...
continuing the conversation, Peter Brastow of Nature in the City, Brian Holland of Bay Localize, and Peter Berg of Planet Drum Foundation, along with Chris Carlsson, host, and the audience.
Topic: San Francisco, quail, chorus frog, localization, carbon impacts, product redesign
