An invitation to imagine freedom, decolonization and liberatory futures.
Radical Futures
Claim This Podcastby Bhakti Shringarpure
5.0(2 reviews)
27 episodes
Updated Daily
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Podcast Overview
An invitation to imagine freedom, decolonization and liberatory futures.
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
5/2/2025
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28
Podcast Authority
BetaPoorBased on show quality, social media presence, reviews, charts, and more
Quality21
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YouTube85
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Recent Episodes
April 16, 2026
Complaint Activism, Killjoy Feminism, and the Power of NO! Featuring Sara Ahmed
<p>“Complaints often get us to the politics of how the institution works. And that's how I've tried to see it - as a lens into the institution.” Writer, scholar and activist Sara Ahmed learned the harsh truth about academic institutions over a decade ago. When a group of students and feminist faculty collectively complained about sexual harassment at their institution - Goldsmiths, University of London - a suite of deflective actions from the university ensured that the complaint never saw light of day and that the harassers stayed protected. In what became a long, drawn out battle against the institution, Ahmed fiercely advocated for all those who complained, and eventually blew the whistle on the university. The atmosphere turned so hostile and abusive towards her that it became untenable to work there and Ahmed resigned.</p><p>When the resignation became public and the practices of the university were exposed, Ahmed was flooded with stories from all over the world. People wrote to her sharing that they had gone through something similar: They had been harassed, their complaints had been blocked, and some had even lost their jobs. “And that's actually what enabled the research,” Ahmed explains.</p><p>“It was the kind of connections that are possible when we disclose information that professionalism tells us to keep hidden.” Saying “No” to her institution allowed Ahmed “to be part of a political movement that was not bound by one specific institution, but was actually thinking about what are these structural problems that are not being dealt with.”</p><p>Ahmed’s book, NO! The Art and Activism of Complaining, published by Feminist Press (New York, 2026) is an astounding analytical work that exposes the deep rot within institutions of all types. Workplaces in most professions are hotbeds of injustice and oppression, and disproportionately impact women, queer and trans people, people of color, and people with disabilities. NO! emerges from research compiled over several years, as people began telling Ahmed their stories of sexual harassment, racism, sexism, transphobia and ableism in the workplace. Ahmed became a friend, teacher, parent, activist, therapist and scholar all rolled into one, and cultivated what she called a “feminist ear” in order to listen to and learn from grievances, reports and complaints.</p><p>Institutional violence, Ahmed found, was a structure not an event, and is continually replicated by those in power in order to keep themselves in power. The complaint can be one way in which this unchecked power can be disrupted, exposed, and sometimes even ruptured. In NO! Ahmed offers an anatomy of a complaint: what happens when it's made, how it travels within the system, which complaint is repressed and which is quickly resolved, who complies, who resists, who benefits, and who is cast out. Ahmed believes that it is nearly impossible for an official complaint to ever become a vehicle for justice, but it is the act of complaining that is ultimately invaluable. The complaint itself, and the solidarities that emerge when a complaint is out there, becomes a tool for power mapping; a means of understanding exactly where power lies, who holds it, and how it moves. Along the way, it exposes the administrators who are invested in preserving the status quo despite pretending to care about helping the person being harassed.</p><p>In this wide-ranging conversation with Bhakti Shringarpure, Ahmed discusses the art and activism of complaining by taking apart the nuts and bolts of workplace culture that purports to do one thing, but often does the exact opposite. She interrogates the nature of professionalism, the push for confidentiality, the culture of open secrets, hollow (non) performative gestures, the faux interest in diversity, gender and disability justice, and the institutional gaslighting of the persons who complain about being harassed. In fact, the last years of genocide in Palestine have proven just how low institutions have sunk. Complaints have been manufactured in order to justify the disciplining, harassment and the firing of people who have been outspoken about Palestine.</p><p>“So I think that everything you do because you do not believe that it is okay to genocide a people can be used against you,” Ahmed says. “The very language of oppression can be used against you. The very language of being a victim can be used against you. Identity politics can be used against you. Universalism can be used against you. Anything can be used against you.”</p><p>Ahmed thinks it's time to get louder and more creative. This might mean turning your complaint into a placard or a prayer or a poster, or even a post-it, where it can be seen. Complaints may not become instruments of justice, but they can be deployed to raise consciousness.</p><p>“We're in a time of grotesque imperial wars,” Ahmed says. “We have to keep complaining and keep protesting.”</p><p>Buy NO! The Art and Activism of Complaining here: <u><a href="https://feministpress.org/products/9781558613683-no" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://feministpress.org/products/9781558613683-no</a></u></p><p>Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Edited by Agatha Jamari</p><p>Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes</p><p>Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat</p><p>Subscribe | Follow <a href="www.radicalbookscollective.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">www.radicalbookscollective.com</a></p>
April 4, 2026
Love, Freedom, Feminism, and Keeping Dalit Life Intact: Featuring Nikhil Pandhi
<p>A story about love can “unspool the complexities of caste,” says Nikhil Pandhi, the editor of Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist Anthology of Love Stories published by Zubaan Books, an indie feminist press based in India. Such stories not only serve to give space to the rich, inner lives of Dalit communities but they can be an important resource for anyone who is keen to understand caste. “Rather than quoting an academic treatise, I felt like it is just much easier for them to read a short story,” says Pandhi.</p><p>A collection of 17 stories from across India, Love in the Time of Caste makes love the prism through which one can observe, absorb, and critique caste regimes in India. The book powerfully illustrates the ways in which the violence of casteism permeates all aspects of social relations while simultaneously structuring Dalit lives, psyches and sociality too.</p><p>Unsurprisingly, these are not sappy love stories with happy endings. Rather, “this is love that is anchored in embodied violence that is so real” that even dreaming, fantasizing and desiring can become perilous. Caste is necropolitical, says Pandhi, but the writers in the book rearrange those desires and reframe circuits of connection and belonging. The stories span a wide range of themes, certainly love but also revenge, inter-caste and intra-caste relationships, heartbreak, healing, toxic masculinity, Dalit women’s agency, the absence of childhood, and, quite often, quests for freedom.</p><p>Pandhi states that the stories attempt to explore different ways of inhabiting love. Even the conversation on love “is so saturated by heterosexism and a hetero-patriarchal Brahmanical understanding that it's hard to even get at it.” To unravel this knot requires a subversion of these norms from within. One goal of the collection was to “rethink Dalits as passionate subjects and Dalit life as capable, in a very critical fashion, of generating new ways of affiliation.”</p><p>Anchoring these reflections on love is a deeply considered anti-caste, Dalit feminism that is stitched into the fabric of every single story in the book. Pandhi defines anti-caste, Dalit feminism as “a rejection of Brahmanical norms, Brahmanical sensitivities and sensibilities around touch, around intimacy, around how desire should be performed, around this obsession with respectability politics, around expressions and economies of flesh.” Yet it is not defined by negation but by its capaciousness and creativity.</p><p>Pandhi says that he has twenty pen drives of unpublished love stories and he believes this is intrinsically connected to “Dalit feminism as a creative and critical project that is expanding outwards, that is global in its scope, that is looking at global feminisms, but is very conscious of the fact that it also represents something that has a frictious relationship with what is normative feminism in the Indian context.”</p><p>In the foreword to the anthology, writer Anita Bharti asks what keeps Dalit life intact despite the excess of violence, harm, injury and humiliation being meted out on a daily basis? Pandhi believes that Bharti’s prescient question is “urging us to think about the fact that hope or that compassion, that maitri, emerges because there is a very intimate understanding of what pain is, what pain does. And one of the things that vedana or pain does is it also potentializes chetana. It also potentializes consciousness. Consciousness is only known to someone who actually knows.”</p><p>Buy the book:</p><p>Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist anthology of love stories edited and translated by Nikhil Pandhi https://zubaanbooks.com/shop/love-in-the-time-of-caste-a-dalit-feminist-anthology-of-love-stories/</p><p></p><p>Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Edited by Agatha Jamari</p><p>Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes</p><p>Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat</p><p>Subscribe | Follow www.radicalbookscollective.com</p>
March 23, 2026
Queer, Palestinian and Decolonial: Featuring Tareq Baconi
<p>“I had always placed my queer identity and my Palestinian identity in different buckets,” admits writer Tareq Baconi. This changed when he began writing his memoir, Fire in Every Direction, a first-person account of young Tareq, a Palestinian boy living in Jordan and gradually coming to terms with his sexuality.</p><p>“Through the writing of this book, and as I became more involved in Palestine organizing, I realized that this separation is obviously a false separation,” Baconi says. “Not only that, I began to understand that I came to Palestine through a queer lens, and specifically through my experience of identifying as queer in Jordan, sort of breaking apart or resisting these hegemonic structures that are placed on us.”</p><p>Fire in Every Direction is Baconi’s second book, and it is a surprising pivot. His first book, Hamas Contained:The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, was a scholarly work rather than a personal and intimate reflection. The memoir positions coming out as gay and coming out as Palestinian as deeply connected journeys. Along the way, it also reframes and expands the “coming out” trope, the moment when an individual discloses their queer orientation. Queer coming of age stories often position the “coming out” as a triumphant finale, but Baconi’s book instead focuses on the long road ahead for a gay Arab man, showing that the Westernized coming out framing is not one-size-fits-all and requires recalibration, depending on the culture one belongs to.</p><p>Fire in Every Direction is a unique and timely book, published at a time when settler colonial violence in Palestine refuses to abate. “It's heightened in this moment of genocide, when you understand actually that what's happening in Gaza is because decolonization of the globe or pushing back against empire and colonialism in the West is unfinished business,” he says.</p><p>By embracing and embodying the intersections between queer and Palestinian identity, Baconi’s memoir offers a true path to decolonial and liberatory futures.</p><p>Further reading:</p><p><a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fire-in-Every-Direction/Tareq-Baconi/9781668068564" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Fire in Every Direction </a>by Tareq Baconi</p><p><a href="https://www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/hamas-contained" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Hamas Contained:The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance </a>by Tareq Baconi</p>
27 total episodes available
Recent guests on Radical Futures
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Huda Fakhreddine
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Laura Kasinof
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Rim Mugahed
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Reem Gaafar
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Sim Kern
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