Raza Gillani is a journalist and organizer from Pakistan with a robust trajectory leading social movements in favor of students, worker, and immigrants’ rights both in his home country and in New York City. In Lahore, where he grew up, Gillani co-founded the Progressive Students Collective and the Haqooq-e-Khalq movement, which advocated for the rights of the masses. He is currently a member of the Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) collective in NYC, where he serves as an organizer of South Asian working-class communities, leveraging power through electoral and movement work.  More recently, Raza started Muhadjireen NYC, a social media activist community that connects South Asian immigrants in New York City with local politics through journalistic reporting. This project emerged as a response to the underrepresentation of South Asian demands in the mainstream media, and it aims to promote in-depth coverage of how immigrant areas operate on a social, political, and economic level. 

Jonathan Dotan directs the Starling Lab at Stanford University and USC, which uses emerging cryptographic technology to document human rights abuses, from the Holocaust to the current war in Ukraine. Dotan explains how his lab leverages tools usually associated with money and finance to preempt misinformation in the fog of war.

What are we missing when we see only images of spectacle? This month we hear from Marwan Kraidy, the dean of Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, Qatar, who helps us think past the headlines to understand what is really going on in his native country.

This month we are discussing archival footage documenting the Non-Aligned Movement, through images of African and Asian liberation and revolutionary leaders that defined the era of decolonization with Dr Mila Turajlić, award winning filmmaker and archival artist, working on the intersection of personal and national memories. With host Darija Medic.