The Revolution Begins at Home

It's time again for a bonus podcast. A little extra audio for your ears. We thought that last week's episode was enraging and encouraging and devastating and hopeful and we had many thoughts and feelings and so we wrote them down and then said them out loud. This is the final episode in our first series and we'd love to know what you thought of it so why not leave us a review on iTunes or drop us a message on Instagram. We want to hear what you liked and what we could improve on as well as the kinds of activists that you want to hear from next time.You can read the transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In our final episode of this season, Chantelle spoke to Jemima Hartshorn from Mums for Lungs about air pollution and how to organise on an issue that feels so big and so unsolvable. To find out more, check out our reading list...Jemima recommends:Following the Ella Roberta Family FoundationSuffragetteYou might also want to check out:The Book of Trespass by Nick HayesWhat Goes Around by Emily ChappelleBack in the Frame by Jools WalkerStreets AheadWheels for wellbeingThe Ranty Highwayman The following sound effects were used in this episode:Walking Across London Bridge JoeDinesSoundsBuses.wave dggrunzweig "Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.orgIf you enjoyed this podcast, you should listen to the Surviving Society Podcast which is also hosted by Chantelle and check out other shows supported by Content is Queen. You can follow Cerys on Twitter or sign up to their mailing list to find out what else they're up to.You can find the transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week's episode left us with a lot of thoughts. Here's a little bonus episode about getting involved and doing your research and the things that we learned from Siân and Chantelle's conversation. We'd love to know what you think so why not drop us a line on Twitter or Instagram?The transcript can be found here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Chantelle talks to comedian and former stripper Siân Docksey about sex work and the integral role that sex workers have played in activist movements. Their conversation covers everything from the 2008 economic crisis to how we can (and should) be engaging with feminism critically.We're doing our reading list a little differently this week. To find out more about activism around sex work and decriminalisation in the UK, Siân recommends engaging with the following organisations:National Ugly MugsEnglish Collective of ProstitutesSWARMDecrim NowYou might also want to check out:The Life and Death of Marsha P JohnsonRevolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly SmithPole the Other One, a brand new podcast all about Pole Dancing presented by... Siân Docksey!If you enjoyed this podcast, you should listen to the Surviving Society Podcast which is also hosted by Chantelle and check out other shows supported by Content is Queen. You can follow Cerys on Twitter or sign up to their mailing list to find out what else they're up to.You can find the transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're back again with more thoughts (and feelings) about last week's episode. What did you think? Are you ready to get crafty? Let us know on Instagram @therevolutionbeginsathome. If you're not on the gram, drop us a review or tweet @hashtagcerys with the hashtag #TheRevolutionBeginsAtHome.You can find the transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Chantelle spoke to Sarah Corbett from the Craftivist Collective about growing up an activist and the power of gentle protest. Their conversation explores activism burnout and how the Crativist Collective came to be as well as the origins of craftivism and the incredible campaigns that Sarah has run with it. To learn more you might want to check out our reading list...Sarah recommends:The Gift of Anger by Arun Gandhi and translated by Suzan Cenani AlioğluA Gift of Love by Martin Luther King Jr.and has also written several books on craftivism:A Little Book of Crativism by Sarah CorbettHow to Be a Craftivist by Sarah CorbettCraftivist Collective Handbook by Sarah CorbettYou might also want to check out:craftivism: the art of craft and activism by Betsy GreerKnitting for good! by Betsy GreerThe Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre LordeThe following sound effects were used in this podcast:knitting and dropping metal knitting needle by HanulSkyGirlSeamstress’ Large Scissors by JakobthiesenSeamstress’ sewing machine setup and run by JakobthiesenPaper Crumple Craft Sound by EminYILDIRIMIf you enjoyed this podcast, you should listen to the Surviving Society Podcast which is also hosted by Chantelle and check out other shows supported by Content is Queen. You can follow Cerys on Twitter or sign up to their mailing list to find out what else they're up to.You can find the transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We had some thoughts (and feelings) about last week's episode and didn't have anywhere to put them so now they're here (in your ears). What did you think about the episode? What did you think about the Halo Collective and hair discrimination and hair as a site of activism? Let us know on Instagram @therevolutionbeginsathome. If you're not on the gram, drop us a review or tweet @hashtagcerys with the hashtag #TheRevolutionBeginsAtHomeTranscriptIntroductionHello, and welcome to The Revolution Begins at Home (bonus reflections podcast). My name is Cerys, I’m the producer here at The Revolution Begins at Home and, after each episode, I’m going to be sharing a couple of things the episode made me think about whilst I was helping to make it.I realise that, as the producer, it’s generally not my job to say things but, the truth is, I have a lot of thoughts! And there’s not a whole lot of space in a half hour podcast so I thought I could have my own bit where I share them and I asked the producer if that would be ok and they said yes because they are me.This episodeIn the episode that this bonus episode is about, Chantelle, our wonderful host, talked to Kaisha-Wade Speed, a 17 year old activist working to end hair discrimination through the Halo Collective. They talked about hair discrimination, its impact, and the power of intergenerational communication and compassion and I learned a lot from getting to sit in on that conversation. Personally, I have never experienced hair discrimination, because, if you haven’t already guessed from that statement, I am white. I would actually say that my experience with my hair is the literal opposite of the kinds that Kaisha and Chantelle shared in their interview. I dye my hair a lot of different colours. I spent several years cutting it myself (as well as this year just gone, of course, because of lockdown) I’ve had some rough home-made haircuts in my time and none of this has ever really been an issue. I’ve certainly never been told that my hair is inappropriate at my school or workplace, even when my school had an explicit policy against dyed hair because, as we heard in the episode, these policies aren’t really about hair.My hair is still something I think about a lot though. Being queer and, I think, especially being non-binary, I try to use my hair to signify certain things about me. I keep it short, for example, I try very hard to get haircuts that are coded as masculine. This isn’t exactly effective – I feel like whatever haircut I ask for, or attempt myself, I almost always end up looking like a forty-year old divorcee who’s getting over her husband through a fun haircut and, to be honest, I’ve made my peace with that. If my soul’s inspiration board is a middle aged woman with an asymmetric fringe and an armful of stories about why her ex is a bastard then I am here for it.Anyway, my point is, I have a lot of thoughts about hair and hairstyles and so I was really grateful that Kaisha spoke to us about the Halo Collective and the work that they do because it gave me an opportunity to learn about hair and the value of hair from a different perspective to my own.Hair as a site of protestSo, what is the value of hair and what is its role in activism? Well, one of the things that this episode really made me think about was our bodies, and our hair especially, as sites of protest. For a lot of people, in one form or another, the body is a site of oppression. We, by which I mean society, project onto our bodies, by which I mean our bodies, yours and mine, an idealised image of what we (again society) expect everyone to look like and then we (all of us, you, me and society) enforce this through things like beauty standards or social conventions or uniform policies and, you know, actual laws. In the episode Kaisha and Chantelle explored how hair perpetuates and enforces racism, texturism and colourism.Kaisha: I mean, when we look at things like the media, there are often really positive connotations, looking at like lighter skinned people… And on the opposite side of that is like all of the negative things that come with being dark skinned and come with having like 4C or more kinkier hair, or having like bigger lips and a bigger nose, it's just not as appealing as like, like your lighter... you're just not as appealing as your lighter skin counterparts.Kaisha explained how we have a hierarchy of hairstyles which was developed under colonialism and still today perpetuates the false ideology that white people are superior, in the way that we look and behave and participate in society. Sort of over time we went from this idea that certain hairstyles were dirty and messy and bad because they were Black people’s hairstyles to Black people who have these hairstyles are dirty and messy and bad. Through this process, hair becomes an expression of prejudice. And we, again as a society, use hair to enforce a lot of different values, the ones that Kaisha talked about as well as things like patriotism or modesty or maternalism. Because afros look unprofessional and boys shouldn’t have long hair or painted nails whereas women should have hair that their husbands like, right? It needs to be feminine and demonstrate the effort she is making to look pretty for the world and take up so much of her time that she can’t do anything else like gain financial independence, for example. Also, we do get to make fun of her for being so obsessed with something as trivial as her hairstyle because that’s a silly, girly thing to do. In some places covering your hair and your face is against the law and in others the opposite is true because some people think it makes you untrustworthy and others immodest and, crucially, everyone else’s comfort is more important in that space than your own.We all have to follow a certain set of rules that dictate what our hair has to look like and those rules are different for different people because, again, it’s not really about the hair and some people have to follow more rules than others and are punished more severely when they break those rules because people do break the rules and when everyone is telling you that your hair needs to look like a certain way, you can use your hair to tell them you are not participating in their systems of oppression. For example… In 1922, in Egypt, the feminist leader and suffragette, Huda Sha’arawi removed her veil in public and trampled it beneath her feet [1]. She revealed her hair to the world around the same time that, in the US, women were making the scandalous decision to cut their hair short and, in doing so, reject the cultural code that long hair equals femininity. Fast forward forty years and long hair became associated with hippies and the anti-war movement and was used to push-back against military haircuts and, this time, representations of masculinity [2]. This was all happening at a time when Kathleen Cleaver famously explained how she wore her hair in an afro because it was natural and because it was beautiful [3]. And, today, the hair and the head remain a powerful site of protest. In 2019, Monireh Arabshahi, Yasaman Aryani and Mojgan Keshavarz were arrested for removing their veils and handing out flowers on a train in a fight for the freedom to choose what to wear [4]. Just earlier this year and a few miles from me in London, students at Pimlico Academy gathered to protest new uniform policies that punished students with afro-hairstyles [5] and limited the self-expression of students who wear hijabs. The school claimed that afros might block the view of pupils seated behind them, placing a hypothetical discomfort above the right of Black students to grow their hair naturally. The idea that some people’s hair is a kind of collective property, partially owned by a society that gets to weigh in on how it should be styled and what it should look like persists to this day.Perhaps this is why hair is a site of protest. But maybe it’s also because we all have hair? Or heads at least. As far as sites of protest go, our scalp is pretty close. It’s something that people even with limited power can exercise control over. That’s something that Britney Spears potentially most famously demonstrated way back in 2007? Cutting your hair or growing it from your armpits or whatever you want to do with it can be a bold and simple and empowering act because embedding a protest into your hairstyle is a reclamation of bodily autonomy that goes way beyond what you end up looking like.The work is hardListening to the history of the Halo Collective, the way that it’s evolved and developed as an organisation, the approach it has chosen and the response it has received has made me think a lot about how using your body to protest is hard work. If you think about it, it’s a place that you can’t really leave. If you go to a march or a demonstration and it wears you down, you can take a break, go lie in a dark room somewhere, sleep in your own bed and get up in the morning and decide whether or not you want to go back but if your protest is your hair it can be harder to leave that protest. You’re literally carrying it around with you on your head all the time. And, if your school tells you that the way your hair grows naturally is wrong then there’s not really much you can do about that. Sure, you can choose to change your hairstyle, by cutting it or paying someone to chemically relax it but you can’t change the way that it grows and so you can’t really escape from the fact that your school is telling you that the way you grow, naturally, is wrong. So I think having this protest in the space of your own body also brings about a different kind of toll. It must take a lot to come back up against that criticism again and again.This is why it was disheartening to hear Chantelle and Kaisha talk about the way that the work of the Halo Collective has been dismissed by some, as if focusing a movement on hair is trivial. Kaisha: people will say, like, Oh, so

In our first episode Chantelle talks to Kaisha from the Halo Collective, their work to end hair discrimination in the UK and the barriers that young, Black women face in activism. Their conversation takes us through the origins of the Halo Collective, how hair discrimination developed under colonialism and the power of education in activism. To learn more, you might want to check out our reading list:Kaisha recommends:Stokely Speaks by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)Don't Touch My Hair by Emma Dabirito my sisters, the podcastYou might also want to check out...Coiled Hot Comb by Ebony FlowersHair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America by Ayan D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women's Hair Care by Lanita Jacobs-HueyBeauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry by Tiffany M. GillPlucked: A History of Hair Removal by Rebecca M. HerzigThe following sound effects were used in this podcast:Hair Dryer – Different speeds by LeonelmailShaving hair by MancoMeio Brushing Hair.wav by TumiwiththesoundsIf you enjoyed this podcast, you should listen to the Surviving Society Podcast which is also hosted by Chantelle and check out other shows supported by Content is Queen. You can follow Cerys on Twitter or sign up to their mailing list to find out what else they're up to.Podcast transcript:Chantelle 0:03  Hello and welcome to the revolution begins at home, a podcast about activism, what it looks like and who gets to do it. Chantelle 0:12  My name is Chantel Lewis. I'm a Public Sociologist and the co-founder and co-host of the Surviving Society Podcast. Chantelle 0:21  Throughout this series, I'm going to be speaking to activists and advocates about their work. We'll be talking about what it means to be an activist, what it involves, and how structures of power determine what we consider to be activism or worthy of an activist movement. Chantelle 0:46  In today's episode, I spoke to Kaisha-Wade Speid.Kaisha 0:50  I just ordered, so many books. I've been doing, like, book swaps with other Black people and my mum when she saw the parcels coming, she was like "Kaisha, you're becoming a revolutionary" and I was like, "Yeah!" I love it...Chantelle 1:00  Kaisha is a student, and whilst on the fellowship at the Advocacy Academy, she co-founded the Halo Collective. I talked to her about their ethos, how they got started, and everything they've already achieved, but before we hear the full interview. Here are Kaisha's activist influences...Kaisha 1:19  Oh my god, I could literally just- I could sit here and list all day. First of all, like from the UK, Olive Morris. Olive Morris who was like really crucial in the Black Panther Party in the UK and like the Squatters Rights Movement. 'Cause my my gran lives in Brixton, and she's like, part of that whole Windrush Movement and so that was really prevalent for her during that time and even like intellectuals Franz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, anti-imperialist, like, anti-capitalists, Far Left like even Marxist revolutionaries, who, throughout the lockdown I've really been like reading into like, involving myself in all of the literature, all of the like Black Revolutionary Literature surrounding it, you can really see how the things that they talk about, it seems so extreme, like, "oh, let's burn down like the capitalist state". But you can see these manifestations of like capitalism in everyday society, and like capitalism, imperialism, racism, homophobia, all kind of ties within, it all ties together. You know? When we talk about like, intersectionality, and all the different types of oppression that people face. It's so much to take in, but it's very necessary. I love-I love them. Big up to them. [theme music]Chantelle 2:36  Hello, Kaisha Wade speed. Kaisha 2:39  Hello.Chantelle 2:41  Kashia, thank you so much for joining me this afternoon. I am literally so inspired by you having only just been talking to you for the past half an hour of everything you've just achieved, we get to the end of our conversation, and I find out you're in Sixth Form. Kaisha 2:56  Yeah. Chantelle 2:57  Oh my days, you are incredible! So Kaisha, listeners, is a Sixth Former, but is the co-founder of the Halo Collective. Kaisha tell the listeners about the Halo Collective.Kaisha 3:09  So the Halo Collective is basically an activism group that is composed of Black young people, and we're kind of based in London, who all in some way have some experience with hair discrimination or being told by different authoritative members, maybe in their school or workplace, that they can't have their hair a specific way. And we were like, "well, this is something that we need to change, because it's not right and it's far too much of a common occurrence for us to just let it slide or say it was a one time thing", because it's definitely not and it makes Black people... well, Black people all over the country that we've spoken to all have some sort of experience with being policed because of their hairstyle. And we noticed that it was really a racialized thing, because if we were to ask white people have you had this experience, it was completely foreign to them. So as a part of kind of breaking down institutional racism and racist microaggressions, we decided to form the Halo Collective, which just kind of aims to end hair discrimination in all professional environments and in general.Chantelle 4:13  Listening to you talk straight away, I'm thinking about, right, so this praxis that you guys are doing, this praxis of collectivity in terms of fighting, a type of racist microaggression and institutional racism - I'm thinking about scholarship and books that have contributed to this stuff, and then how it then later connects to what you are doing in practice. What I mean by that I'm thinking about like Black Media Platforms like Black Ballad, Emma Dabiri's book, I'm thinking about Shirley Anne Tate, Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Laura Connelly, people that have been writing about this stuff. So I'm familiar with the literature, and then reading and going on your website and hearing about all the things you've done. It's like a prime example of connecting theory to practice.Kaisha 5:01  Yeah, exactly. Chantelle 5:02  And it is so, so inspiring. And it would be really good for the listeners on that basis of connecting theory and practice to find out a bit about the journey in coming to set up the Halo Collective because anyone that's been involved in organizing, any kind of organizer knows how hard work it is. So how did this happen?Kaisha 5:19  Well, this is actually one of most interesting parts when I tell people like, oh, how did this come about? So basically, in February of 2020, Chantelle 5:27  Oh, pre-pre COVID. Kaisha 5:28  Yeah, pre COVID times, when COVID was kind of lingering, but we weren't, we didn't really care about her, then. Well, I signed up to an organization called the Advocacy Academy, which is literally like the mother of young youth social justice work in London, particularly. And I got in, and we basically, from the summer of 2020, because of COVID, obviously, we had to do an online fellowship. And usually it's a real life residential, where we go out and stay somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I don't know. And they basically train us up all things activism. So every day, we just tackle different things like gender and race and we did a lot of like introspective work, and basically all to be like good activists and like we completely dissected, like everything when it comes to social justice. And by the end of it, even though we had only met each other in real life twice, like me, and the rest of the people involved in Advocacy, we literally felt like brand new people. It was honestly the most transformative thing. It was like I was being born again, like intellectually, even though it was all through Zoom. So, um, from Advocacy, in one of the last weeks, Advocacy always is known for like their flagship kind of campaigns, so all of the young people, they go into groups, and they create campaigns, on literally whatever you want to do, as long as it's feasible, then you can do it. So we completely organically kind of grouped together, me and four other Black girls who were in Advocacy. And we said, right, so what is our common experience? Well, we're all Black and we're all women, and what have we experienced? We're all the same age... And hair discrimination is just something that came up like straight off the bat, and we grouped with some Advocacy Academy alumni. So people who had already done the Social Justice Fellowship and are like older people, so they have all the practice and campaigning knowledge. And then from then we just kind of, it was the Code, first of all, which was me and four other girls, and then it became the Collective when we banded with those other people. So we kind of had more arms and more capacity to do things because I didn't think it would not have nearly been as successful as it has been if we didn't have those, like, alumni who joined with us.Chantelle 7:44  And in terms of it becoming a Collective, when we talk about this in terms of organizing and activism, in practice, what does that mean on a week by week basis?Kaisha 7:56  Erm, in the everyday world, it basically means that in the beginning, we had a lot of different arms. So we had a lot of different people with different expertise to work in all the different areas that we needed. So we took schools, me and the other four girls took schools, because obviously we were all students at the time, we had connections to other students, it was just like, convenient. And then we had a team that was also about like marketing. And basically when we had our launch, they already had people who were in media. Obviously, this was me and the four girls's first time doing anything to do with campaigning. So we had no

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