Building the Soil: Transformative Justice Pedagogy with Mia Mingus

Nothing Never Happens

What does transformative justice look like in practice? What does it mean to teach transformative justice, so that we destroy the cops in our heads and hearts, and begin to build something new?

In this episode, Mia Mingus -- visionary movement builder, transformative justice organizer, and human rights + disability justice educator -- dives into these questions and more. We discuss the educational experiences that inspired Mia to her current work, Transformative Justice (TJ) frameworks for community accountability and creative intervention, pedagogies of workshopping, and Pod Mapping as a tool for organizing and movement building.

More about our guest:

Mia Mingus is a co-founder of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective: Building Transformative Justice Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (BATJC) and the founder and leader of SOIL: A Transformative Justice Project.

Mia inspires us to consider words like dignity, love, compassion, care, and justice in ways that address harm and violence and also bring concrete repair and change. For Mia, the opening question of transformative justice is: “What are the conditions that allowed for that violence or that harm to be able to take place in the first place?” The focus is on dismantling oppressive systems and building new, liberatory structures. This justice work is done in intersectional and interdependent community.

“Magnificence comes out of our struggle,” she writes. We think that Mia and the worlds she is building are magnificent, and we encourage you to check out her many published writings, many of which are collected on her blog Leaving Evidence.

Credits:

Co-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether

Audio editor: Aliyah Harris

Intro music by Lance Hogan, performed by Aviva and the Flying Penguins

Outro music by Akrasis