“A Formation of Psychological Warfare” - Damien Sojoyner’s First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles

In this episode Damien Sojoyner returns to the podcast to talk about his book First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles.

This episode was recorded in November and unfortunately its release was delayed due to the circumstances of the world today, which have necessitated for us a lot of media work in solidarity with Palestinian resistance, and against the genocide being enacted on Palestinians most visibly and egregiously in Gaza. 

I also had the chance to catch up with Damien Sojoyner at the Archives Unbound conference at UC Santa Barbara a few weeks ago, and you can find a brief interview I conducted with them here.

This book First Strike (Currently 50% of with the code: MN91620 through June 30th) is one that I had been wanting to discuss with Damien since I learned of it, because it very much relates to various intersecting interests of mine, the Black Radical Tradition, abolition, the prison industrial complex, and public education. Disrupting common framing of a school-to-prison pipeline Sojoyner really examines how we might understand public schools, and different regimes of education as enclosures upon more radical possibilities. And we get into a discussion of the warehousing function of schools, the psychological warfare aspects and more. As there is a lot of connection between this discussion and the discussion we had with Damien last year on his book Against the Carceral Archive, we have linked that in the show notes as well.

We will have more audio content coming for you later this week as well as more video content on our YouTube channel.

We've created playlist from the Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson Archives Unbound conference.

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