Since 2021, radio hosts and movement workers Daniel Kisslinger and Damon Williams have hosted “One Million Experiments,” a podcast created in collaboration with Interrupting Criminalization that seeks to help listeners better understand abolition as not just a buzzword but as an everyday practice rife with creative potential.
“One Million Experiments” is one of a series of podcasts produced by Respair Production and Media, an ecosystem hub built by the duo that creates new media projects designed in collaboration with social movement visionaries. While Kisslinger and Williams went to college together, the genesis of “AirGo”—the hub’s flagship weekly podcast—lies in a moment shared at a solidarity march held in Chicago in 2015 after the murder of Freddie Gray.
“I was doing some chanting, and I had this rigged-up sound system with a car battery in the speaker on a dolly,” Williams shared during our conversation. “I’m pushing it and doing the mic and chanting at the same time, and then somebody comes, takes the dolly, and pushes it. I look, and it’s Daniel, and I didn’t even know he was there.”
The two describe this moment as “the narrative seed” that would soon blossom into “AirGo” and Respair Production and Media.
The underlying logic of “One Million Experiments” and the work of its collaborators, including organizer and educator Mariame Kaba and Interrupting Criminalization’s creative director Eva Nagao, is that the idea of an “alternative to prisons and police” is both a limiting and dangerous framework that at once legitimizes the current system while foreclosing the possibilities of a more dynamic world. Instead, they suggest, there must be wholly new ways of relating to one another and providing actual safety, ways already in existence in communities across the country. Many of the projects, initiatives, and programs are actively being experimented with, changing lives for people within these communities, and generating lessons that can be used by those living outside of them.
Each episode of “One Million Experiments” highlights one of these experiments through an in-depth interview with the organizers, practitioners, and activists who have created them. The experiments vary in size, focus, and scope, but all work toward a world absent of prisons and police. This year, Respair Production and Media is releasing “One Million Experiments: The Film,” a documentary highlighting some of the experiments covered in the show’s first season. Like the podcast, the film seeks to be an “invitation to the movement” and an open door for those curious to ideate experiments that can be piloted in their own communities and develop the fortitude and imagination that work will require. Prism joined hosts Kisslinger and Williams for a conversation about the podcast, the new film, what it’s taught them, and what they hope it can show listeners and, now, viewers.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Tamar Sarai: I’d love to start by learning about your individual backgrounds. What was your introduction to movement work?
Daniel Kisslinger: I’m from New York City from the Bronx, originally. And to go all the way back, there were moments of entry into movement work as a kid. My parents are involved in various ways, and so I have very strong memories of being in mass action moments as a kid. The two that come to mind are the 2003 Climate March. There was a huge Climate March and then a mass action against the Iraq War. So those are like very, under 12 years old kind of core memory experiences, just the catharsis of being in mass action. Being here in Chicago, Damon and I went to college together. He came home after we graduated, and I moved here and, through various winding roads, found myself as part of this creative social movement community here of people who were both at the open mic and in the streets organizing the protests. It felt like this very dynamic convergence of the same people understanding the value of both of those things as part of world-making. And I wanted to figure out how to contribute to that.
Damon Williams: There are some seeds that inform how I found myself in the space. I did not really, in my childhood, have a language or understanding of organizing, but from a young age, I was doing public speaking and advocacy and popular education around socioeconomic inequity and trying to figure out how to use cooperative economic strategies toward community-building. In that I developed some voice and some understanding of myself as a change agent, and going into school with the critical question of “what are the structural reasons the South and North Side of Chicago look and function so differently? What procedures, processes, businesses can be created that can address that inequity?” So, coming out of that question and learning about capitalism and social oppression more distinctly radicalized me and also gave me access to the history of liberation movements.
In school and after, I found myself in this cultural community that at the time was being discussed as a youth-driven, hip-hop-centered renaissance with spaces like Kuumba Lynx, Young Chicago Authors, and Free Street Theater, with poetry, hip-hop, and theater being at the core of this space. So in 2014, a month before the Ferguson, Missouri, uprising, we basically shifted our capacity from trying to put out mixtapes and create stage shows to building this grassroots liberatory organization that started in response to calls to action to support the resistance to state violence happening in Ferguson. Through that, the #LetUsBreathe Collective came about, and we co-emerged with an organization called Lifted Voices that was really at the front line of a lot of the protests in Ferguson. So before even the language of Black Lives Matter started to emerge, this Ferguson style of protest that was more reverent, less concerned with respectability politics, and calling for more radical visions of liberation really shaped our origin.
Sarai: How did “One Million Experiments” come about, and how did you connect with Mariame Kaba?
Williams: Mariame, even before we were activated, had already been such an important educator, facilitator, mentor, creator of space here in Chicago through her work in the Chicago Freedom Schools, Project NIA, and We Charge Genocide. I met her first a few times through direct action and through her supporting some of the work of #LetUsBreathe and being always a voice of wisdom to folks who were very green. Then, within our first 30 episodes or so, we had her on our show [in 2016]. Her episode was the first one that was used as an educational tool. The conversation we had in 2016—when abolition was not a popular contemporary word or concept–—to have her on and explain from her perspective what it means, what the legacies are, what the traditions of it are was really impactful for us and our listenership and shifted us toward seeing this as not just entertainment or our larger goal of building an archive, but as immediate education. [That episode] was rebroadcast in Canadian Prison Radio Network and then published in a few places, and that’s where our essence and origin started. Through that we kept close collaboration.
Kisslinger: In the summer of 2020, in the midst of the uprisings, sometimes in good faith sometimes in bad faith, there was this question that was being asked of people who had been involved in the abolition space, which was, “We’re talking about replacing policing and prisons—what’s the institution that we replace them with?” And Mariame said, with a lot of wisdom, we don’t need one institution to replace this one death-making institution, we need a million experiments of what creates safety for different communities. So she started building this spreadsheet on her computer of different experiments in what creating safety can look like across the country and beyond and then worked with Eva [Nagao] and Interrupting Criminalization to turn this into an online resource, millionexperiments.com, which was this online encyclopedia of these experiments.
We saw it and thought that it was amazing, and so we came to them and asked, “Would you be interested in making a podcast where we interview the different experiments with one per episode?” And they trusted us based on our past relationship; it’s also just part of the ethos of how Mariame works to trust collaborators and not hold ownership.
From the beginning, part of the plan was also to build this companion film because stepping into film has been a long-term ambition and goal for us. After years of working in the long-form audio space, we know that people react to it differently, and some people don’t want to sit and listen for an hour. Really, the point of this project is to be an invitation into movement, an invitation into experimentation for people wherever they are.
The film is complete, and we’re excited to be taking it on the road this year. We’re gonna be doing a bunch of screenings, six main screenings in partnership with the different experiments that we talked about in the film, all over the country and beyond, and then additional screenings. We’re really excited to get it working, doing what it’s supposed to do, which is bringing people into movement and in the work that’s already been done.
Sarai: I viewed the film via an online screening, which included a talkback with Mariame and Eva. In that conversation, Eva noted that many of the featured experiments are hyperlocal, shaped by context, and as such, not necessarily scalable, reproducible, or even easily evaluated by the metrics we usually evaluate these things by. That said, I’m wondering what your hope is for listeners or viewers who want to try new things in their communities but won’t be able to make a 1:1 match with these because they’re not models, but rather experiments.
Kisslinger: I agree, these aren’t 1:1 models to replicate; they’re not blueprints, but I do think they’re kind of like sketches that you can build off of. I know it’s true for me in the things we’ve made—and I imagine it’s true for other listeners and for people who really dig into this—that it may not give you a “how to,” but you leave every episode with concrete guidance on what does it mean to start an experiment that is similar to what you just spent an hour listening to people talked about.
The last question we ask every guest is if someone you know wants to make a similar thing in their space, what are the tools they need in their toolbox? What are the things they need to know? And the [answers] range from really abstract but important ideas to making sure you have your paperwork together or making sure you have a lawyer to look over how you’re framing your mutual aid projects. I think the goal of all this was to equip people with two things: those tangible tools and the sense that you don’t have to professionalize movement work. Wherever you are, there’s already work happening that you can plug into at whatever scale, and if you want to start something in collective work with your people, you can just start, it’s OK to make mistakes. That’s gonna happen, that’s good, and that’s part of the process.
Williams: Yeah. To just build off that, you know, there’s an old adage that can be cliche, but I think it’s true it’s that, “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible,” and that is true, and I have tried to expand that to say, before it’s irresistible, the role of the makers is to make revolution legible and to make liberation legible. I think most folks don’t even recognize that these practices are already in progress, and they may be happening near them. It can be easy to just drive past the farm or overlook a crisis response hotline number that’s posted somewhere. Particularly because of the way neoliberalism has shaped our understanding of what non-market resources look like and the charity service nonprofit-industrial complex, it means that when [folks] see people doing something that isn’t a corporate job, it’s a service project or it’s something to give back.
So one is the legibility of this work, and then secondly, it is to build an example of this ethos and understanding that this work is actually really simple but it’s not easy. It’s not complicated, but it is difficult. So once it’s legible, and you show up and participate and are connected and entrenched in the community, what are the basic steps to be present in people’s lives? It’s not calculus: people need food, people need medicine, people need people, people need support when they are in crisis, people need these ancient indigenous practices of being in circle with each other. It’s simple, but it’s really difficult, and so what I think the show provides is some of the lessons that can prepare folks for that difficulty, understanding that this is under-resourced work and that if we are really being intentional about being in the most-impacted communities, we’re dealing with a lot of trauma and a lot of disconnects and a lot of fragmentation. These are basic steps of what to do and how to show up, but to be grounded in it for a lifetime takes a certain fortification. To know that the people who’ve been doing it for 20 years or five years or who have just started are going through similar things can help build the generational endurance that we need.
And I think that is a more important lesson and model than how to build my agenda or write my mission statement or go and get funding. If we say that the cops can’t keep us safe and that is, therefore, our responsibility, that responsibility is a big heavy burden that can weigh people down, and most people come into this work and leave very quickly. It can be very transitory in that way. We hope this piece allows for folks to feel more grounded, not feel alone, and understand what it really takes to create this world.
[E]ven when The New York Times stops printing articles talking about defund, the work continues to happen, and it happens in ways that even we don’t know about. As Mariame says in this last episode, this is a good time for experimentation, and thank God we’re not broadcasting every step of it because people need the room to make mistakes and then be able to talk about it afterward.
Daniel Kisslinger
Sarai: I know you both entered into this project with years of individual experience in movement work, but I’m wondering whether through the course of the show, your definitions of safety have expanded or deepened?
Kisslinger: Yes, absolutely. Not because I didn’t understand all the buckets of what keeps people safe: having access to housing, mental health care, physical health care, education, food, opportunities for expression, economic justice. I understood all of those buckets in the abstract, but I think what I learned or what would deepen for me from talking to people who have been practitioners in ways that I haven’t is the deep, almost calm patience that comes from people who are actually day in and day out figuring these questions out.
I’m thinking about one of the last episodes we did, it’s actually gonna be a bonus episode coming out in a couple of months with this group called Collective Justice based in Washington state that hosts circles with people who are incarcerated and then also connects and leads facilitation for people who have been affected by incarceration or affected by violence, and there’s just a deep groundedness you can tell when people have actually been in those conversations and in that work, a type of flexibility, patience, and tired but loving care for the people that they’re making it with. I think that has been eye-opening for me like, ‘Oh, this is how people who do this work of creating safety find rhythm and safety for themselves.’ And that work is by coming to a communal care ethic.
Williams: I have two things that come to mind. First, it’s just reinforced or reinvigorated my value of the small. Because we live in this artificial nation-state of 300 million people, and we live in a city of 2.5 million people, we also want institutions on that scale. I think we are learning and have learned that is not healthy and that things need to be built from the ground up and need to be more direct and more personal. I can’t imagine from the 20 or so projects that we talked about [in the show] that they are dealing in the thousands or the tens of thousands of people. They’re dealing within the hundreds or the dozens, and that’s really where the work happens.
Then the second one is deeper because, for a while now, being nerdy and trying to be theoretical in the movement space, I’ve actually rejected the vocabulary of safety and security for how it shows up in two ways. Primarily, how the larger society and the state use that language—when you look up the word safety and security, their [definitions] are kind of flimsy, and they don’t have a root positive, meaning that the best you’ll get is the “absence of risk” or the “absence of danger.” I think that the instability of its definition has allowed it to be used to promote a lot of normalized violence. So the idea of security as we’re seeing right now in Palestine or how our war machine is not called the Department of War or the Department of Weapons, it’s called the Department of Defense. In Chicago, the CPD headquarters is actually not called the Chicago Police Department Headquarters, it’s called the Public Safety Headquarters.
And then secondly, sometimes I saw the language of “safe space” or “I don’t feel safe” as a way for folks to remove themselves from accountability or to reentrench power, like “I will not engage with you because I do not feel safe, and safety is what is required for me to participate,” which I don’t think will always be the conditions in struggle.
So, the language that I’ve used is wellness and protection. I came into the show with all of that wordy-word stuff and etymology and definitions and theory. But then, in having these conversations, I’ve recognized that sometimes, in practice, that doesn’t matter: we understand what people are saying and building toward and their alignment. Semantics and vocabulary are not at the tip of how we need to be engaging with these things. So while I’m also thinking that we need to move away from this notion of safety that actually promotes a lot of violence, I’m understanding that in our radical spaces, folks are still using that language to create more liberatory relationships, and I’m letting some of that go while still holding the thinking that got me to challenge those concepts.
Sarai: I’m curious about projects you all covered that were particularly surprising to you or that brought about learnings that were unexpected and have stayed with you.
Kisslinger: Two popped in my head. One was early on: we talked to The Friendly Fridge, a street fridge in the Bronx, actually right near where I grew up, and I think it was a great example of what we hope the show does. This was a group that didn’t start thinking of themselves as putting into practice capital “A” abolitionist theory, like it wasn’t on that level. It was people seeing food waste and people going hungry, understanding the effect of the pandemic on people’s ability to feed themselves, and starting from a place of what can we do, what can we make. They talk in the interview about their own journey and politicization through action. The first time they started going to the police precinct not far from where the fridge is and asking for support with donations and being laughed out of the door and realizing that response to something that is like such a no-brainer was an important kernel of how we should do our work, and that led them to a politicization that they didn’t have coming in. It also led them to a shifting of their mindset around the idea of charitable acts versus understanding people who are taking food from the fridge as their neighbors and the people who were putting food in the fridge as their neighbors and thinking about this as neighbors helping neighbors. So I think that I just love that as an example of seeing it in practice.
On a bit more of a meta level, we talked to this group called Natural Helpers, which is associated with API Chaya [an organization supporting survivors of domestic and sexual violence and trafficking] out in Seattle, and what sticks with me about that one is really more about the conversation and the power of the storytelling of how people do the how and why of their work. I don’t want to give the whole thing away, but we had been in conversation for about 25 minutes on air recording, and we’re basically just being taken on the ride of the story of their origins. And then there was a reveal of the personal connection of the person we were talking to to the grief and the trauma that had birthed the organization. For one, the effect of telling that story in the way it was told, more so than any of the work we did, really helped me understand the value and the importance of narrative building and how we tell the stories of movement work. We could have learned that in one sentence, but we learned it over a beautifully told 25-minute story that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. So those are two examples, one about the process of people in action and the other about the telling of the story and what that makes possible.
Williams: The first one for me is MASK, which has evolved to Mothers and Men Against Senseless Killings, and it’s based here in Chicago in the Englewood neighborhood. It’s shifted a little bit, but for me growing up, when talking about pathology or statistics of the state of Black people that are centered around trauma, Englewood would be like the proverbial neighborhood. So Mothers Against Senseless Killings is literally just mothers and women in the community seeing that policing was not preventing any violence at all and just hosting pop-ups on the corner and being a presence throughout the day, and they saw statistically a drop in violence. Pulling out chairs and some coolers then transformed into doing more mutual aid work, doing enrichment programs, building classes, and being in deeper relationships with young people in the neighborhood. It is as close as possible to the infrastructure of what my ultimate hundred-year vision of relationship-based proactive community units of wellness and protection will look like.
And then second is the Black Trans Travel Fund in New York, which was very early on. So the Black Trans Travel Fund basically started as coordinating rideshares for Black trans people in New York, who would come to an action or come to an event and have to go through public transportation and face harassment, face fear, face anxieties that no human being should have to walk through the world with. So it basically started as a mutual aid fund to get Ubers for the girls, and that feels very basic, like you don’t have to read Frantz Fanon to understand getting a ride home. But as we kept going through the conversation, and they discussed as they grew to [thinking about] whether they book flights for folks to go to different convenings, or “What are the ways in which we can invest in the travel of Black trans people?”
In that moment, I realized that the power of mobility is the root of all oppression and that all carceral violence is the restriction of the mobility of bodies. So this small thing of how do we get around the boroughs is the same thing that a border is—a border is restricting, there’s no disagreement that a prison is about keeping people from moving, and capitalism and jobs are about you having to be here, and you can’t leave for these eight hours. So, this notion that restriction of mobility is at the root of all of our oppression. Then at the root of our humanity, from like an evolutionary standpoint, is that we are migratory, and our essence is to move and to find safety or to find resources or to find a place where we can help cohabitate and build home together, and so to interrupt that process is to interrupt our humanity at its core level. And again, you know, there’s a cliche of like centering the margins, but so many times Black trans and gender-nonconforming people have taught me so much about how the world operates: it’s not just about breaking the gender binary, it’s about breaking all binaries. It’s not just about, you know, protecting those who have the highest death rates, it’s about figuring out why we don’t value all life and why there are some lives that are deemed expendable. And so yeah, that notion around mobility taking it from the super micro to the ultimate macro was really such a crystallization for me that that has definitely stayed with me.
Sarai: Thank you. I know you open your conversations asking guests about the hypothesis they had for their projects. If we view the podcast (and now film) as an experiment in and of itself, I’d love to know what expectations you had for it and whether that hypothesis you had has come to fruition?
Kisslinger: I mean, on a very tangible like production level, my hypothesis was that this was a thing that people were searching for, and they were looking for examples. There were people asking this question of what do we “replace” policing with in bad faith, but there are also people who are really looking for answers to the question, “What are the tangible things we can make?” And that’s proven to be true; we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about metrics, but this collaboration and this project have been by far our most dynamic. People have really participated and responded, and we’ve heard great things.
On some level, I think this is really affirming not just as media makers, but as people who have committed their lives to this type of experimentation. People maybe needed some structure and had some questions they were looking for answers to, but they wanted to be active, and even when The New York Times stops printing articles talking about defund, the work continues to happen, and it happens in ways that even we don’t know about. As Mariame says in this last episode, this is a good time for experimentation, and thank God we’re not broadcasting every step of it because people need the room to make mistakes and then be able to talk about it afterward. So part of my hypothesis was that people want to be in the movement, people want to be experimenting, and hopefully, this could be a contribution to that, and that’s really proven to be true.
Williams: My hypothesis was how to create space to center the actual thing, and I’ll say what I mean by that. Like I said, some of the skills from childhood and other stuff put me in a place where when I entered movement, I found myself being asked to speak in public spaces a lot, and I got really, really good at talking about how fucked up the cops are and how bad police and policing are for the health of society. And then as 2020 happened, we launched this Defund CPD campaign and had all of these political education trainings and again got really, really concrete at naming how disproportionate our investment in policing is to all other things and centering the harms of murder, torture, sexual violence that this institution brings to communities.
But there’s a deeper human level that’s really at the center of what we’re saying. Like we’re saying, get rid of the police so that we can empower people to be more human, and to be in each others’ lives, and to embody these restorative, transformative practices and processes. So in talking about these experiments, we actually very rarely, relative to scale, talked about police and prisons. The work is about mental health care. The work is about sitting in circles. The work is about learning together; it’s about grief. How does putting bread in a fridge or sitting in a circle with massage workers lead toward the type of world that we want? There’s not gonna be one alternative; we have to create solutions while the system still exists. And so really, in the conversation about divest, invest, and abolition, we center the institution as a way to slip in that actually, even though we want to divest from something, we’re not asking less of them, we’re asking more of you, and that’s a much harder conversation, and there is no playbook for it.
We talked about how beautiful all of this can be in the film, but it’s also really hard and something that most people would rather avoid and have been conditioned, again, through capital and through neoliberalism to see themselves as isolated individuals who are alienated from the people around them. That’s really what we’re trying to shift. So the hypothesis was if folks want to ask about abolition, how do we actually make legible what the word really means? It’s not just getting good at talking about how bad the cops are or just going to protest and having a well-rhymed chant—even though I can bust one of those out. How we center the actual thing is this revolutionary tradition of how do we be more human and create the structures and the ecosystems that allow for that.
