Old Mole Variety Hour for February 22, 2021

Denise Morris Hosts this Episode of the Old Mole which includes

• Motherhood, Work and the Pandemic: Bill Resnick talks with Ursula Ursula McTaggart, teacher of English at Wilmington College in Wilmington, Ohio. Ursula McTaggart’s newest book is Guerrillas in the Industrial Jungle: Radicalism’s Primitive and Industrial Rhetoric. She has written many articles, including “Motherhood and Work in the Pandemic.” They discuss the U.S. response to the pandemic and the deep, intense dilemmas and troubles it’s created for mothers, especially those with little help and lower incomes.  She relates her experience as a worker and mother and principal caretaker/teacher of two young school aged children with their schools closed. McTaggart proposes feasible structural changes that would create profound democratic possibilities. 
• WEB DuBois and Scientific Racism: Scientific racism is the long-established practice of marshaling pseudo-scientific evidence to prove the biological inferiority of African-Americans and other people of color. Patricia Kullberg reads from and comments on two works by scholars of race and science, with an emphasis on how our values shape science. Jordan Besek, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University at Buffalo, writes about DuBois and science in his article: “W.E.B. Du Bois embraced science to fight racism as editor of NAACP’s magazine The Crisis,” published December 14, 2020 in the online journal, The Conversation. Dorothy Rogers, Professor of Law and Sociology at University of Pennsylvania, examines the contemporary re-emergence of race-based science and how it serves capitalist interests in her 2011 book: Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. For more on science and social justice see: Citizen Scientists, Race-based Medicine, Methanol Refineries, Citizen Scientists, and Doughnuts, and A Medical Sea-Change.
• Big Strikes and the Sabotage of Labor, Part 3: Joe Clement concludes their conversation with Marianne Garneau, an organizer and educator with the Industrial Workers of the World, and publisher of the online worker journal Organizing.Work, about the politics of the Big Strike and the retreat from organizing for power on the job.
• African Film Fest: Jan Haaken interviews Tamara Dewit, who is screening her film, Finding Sally, at the 2021 virtual Cascade Festival of African Films. Tamara Dawit is a producer and director based between Canada and Ethiopia. She runs the production company Gobez Media which produces Ethiopian film, TV, digital and music content. After the short film, Grandma Knows Best (2014) she directed the feature documentary Finding Sally which had its North American premiere at the Hot Docs documentary festival in 2020. She is currently directing the feature documentary The Plot and producing the feature drama Last Tears of the Deceased, and the feature documentary Made in Ethiopia. Tamara has produced documentary and digital content for CBC News, MTV, Radio-Canada, Discovery, NHK, and others. She was a resident in Docs in Progress, the Logan Non-Fiction Residency and is an alumnus of Berlinale Talents, Durban Talents, Rotterdam Lab, Apost, and EAVE.