A Thousand Small Fires – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Détails du podcast

Informations techniques et générales issues du flux RSS du podcast.

A Thousand Small Fires

A thousand small fires

Société & Culture

Histoire

Fréquence : 1 épisode/6j. Total Éps: 22

What would it look like to organise the world around care instead of profit? Not as a fantasy. As a serious, uncomfortable, unresolved question.

A Thousand Small Fires is a podcast that takes anarchist, feminist, and queer thought seriously — not as a doctrine to follow, but as a lens for asking better questions. About work, food, love, land, the state, the prison, the family, the body. About who decides, on whose terms, and what gets built when people refuse to wait for permission.

Each episode is around 15 minutes — long enough to go somewhere real, short enough to earn your attention. The show is philosophical in tone and open in frame. It holds contradictions rather than resolving them. It cites thinkers without hiding behind them. It uses history as evidence rather than as comfort.

The anarchist tradition argues that hierarchy — in governments, workplaces, relationships, and intimate life — is not natural or inevitable. It was made, and it can be unmade. This show follows that argument wherever it goes, including into the places the mainstream left doesn't want to look.

Topics across Season 1 include: mutual aid and what makes it different from charity; the care labour that the economy runs on and refuses to count; food, land, and the global struggle for food sovereignty; the women who built anarchism and were written out of its history; queer liberation as a refusal, not a request; love, relationship anarchy, and the politics of intimate life; prison abolition; settler colonialism; carceral feminism; and what it means to start building the world you want inside the one that exists.

No fixed answers. Only better questions.

New episodes every week.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lire plusRéduire

Site

RSS

Apple

Données mises à jour le 02/10/2026

Classements récents

Dernières positions dans les classements Apple Podcasts et Spotify.

Apple Podcasts

🇩🇪 Allemagne - Philosophy
02/10/2026
#64

Spotify

Aucun classement récent disponible

Liens partagés entre épisodes et podcasts

Liens présents dans les descriptions d'épisodes et autres podcasts les utilisant également.

Aucun lien partagé par ce podcast

Qualité et score du flux RSS

Évaluation technique de la qualité et de la structure du flux RSS.

Qualité du flux RSS

Correct

Score global : 84%

Historique des publications

Répartition mensuelle des publications d'épisodes au fil des années.

Year

Derniers épisodes publiés

Liste des épisodes récents, avec titres, durées et descriptions.

Ep:19 Ferguson and the Streets

Saison 2 · Épisode 5

mardi 29 septembre 2026 • Durée 17:10

On August 9, 2014, a Ferguson, Missouri police officer shot and killed an unarmed eighteen-year-old named Michael Brown and left his body in the street for four hours. What happened next did not come from a headquarters. A rapper helped found Hands Up United. Three young women formed Millennial Activists United days later, because the loudest microphones in the street kept finding their way to men. Nobody asked anybody's permission first.

That organising sits alongside the founding of Black Lives Matter a year earlier by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, who insisted the movement was "leaderful, not leaderless." Ferguson organisers had already absorbed the lesson from COINTELPRO and the assassination of Fred Hampton, that a movement with no single leader has no throat for the state to reach for — the same structural instinct that shows up half a world away in Hong Kong's 2019 "Be Water" protests.

What decentralisation doesn't solve gets an honest accounting too: a foundation that quietly bought a $6 million house, and a media apparatus that, when a leaderless movement declined to supply a face, simply invented one anyway.

Further reading: Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement (Little, Brown, 2016) "Whose Streets?" (2017), directed by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis Alicia Garza, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (One World, 2020) Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) Ming Sho Ho, "Solidarity and Implications of a Leaderless Movement," Communist and Post-Communist Studies (on Hong Kong's 2019 protests)

Tags: Ferguson, Michael Brown, Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, decentralized organizing, leaderful movement, Hong Kong protests, Be Water, COINTELPRO, Mariame Kaba, We Charge Genocide, anarchism

Show notes: Ferguson and the Streets. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 5

Ferguson produced a horizontal, mutual-aid-driven uprising with no headquarters and no single leader, and then the press, the politicians, and eventually the market went looking for a face anyway. This is what happened when they found one.

In this episode:

Hands Up United, Millennial Activists United, and the Organization for Black Struggle
Water, milk, and legal observers: how a leaderless response actually organises itself
Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and "leaderful, not leaderless"
COINTELPRO, Fred Hampton, and why decentralisation is a strategy, not an accident
Mariame Kaba, We Charge Genocide, and UN testimony that echoed a 1951 petition
Hong Kong 2019 and the "Be Water" protests
The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation's $6 million house
DeRay Mckesson and the leader the media invented

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lire plusRéduire

Ep:18 Black Anarchism: The Tradition the White Left Keeps Forgetting

Saison 2 · Épisode 4

mardi 22 septembre 2026 • Durée 19:06

In 1979, a man named Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin sat in a cell at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, serving a life sentence, and wrote a pamphlet arguing that Black liberation did not need a new state built in place of the old one. He called the alternative the Black Commune. He did not arrive at that idea through a European text. He arrived at it through SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and years of watching the American state hunt him personally.

Ervin's argument runs through Kuwasi Balagoon, a Black Panther and Panther 21 defendant who called himself a New Afrikan anarchist and was also, openly, bisexual at a moment when almost no one in the armed Black liberation movement was saying that in public; through Ashanti Alston's insight that the Panthers' own slogan, "all power to the people," was already anarchistic before he ever read the theory; and into the present, at Cooperation Jackson, a federation of worker cooperatives built in Jackson, Mississippi on the same argument Ervin made forty-five years earlier.

Two centuries earlier, at Quilombo dos Palmares, a self-governing Brazilian community survived six Portuguese military expeditions and lasted nearly ninety years. And there's the Haitian Revolution, the only nation in world history founded by a successful uprising of enslaved people, forced afterward to pay for the privilege of having won.

Further reading: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (Pluto Press, 2021) Kuwasi Balagoon, A Soldier's Story: Revolutionary Writings by a New Afrikan Anarchist (Kersplebedeb/PM Press) William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press, 2018) BlackPast.org, "Palmares (ca. 1605-1694)" and "Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)" Cooperation Jackson — cooperationjackson.org

Tags: Black anarchism, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Kuwasi Balagoon, Ashanti Alston, Black Panther Party, New Afrikan anarchism, Palmares, Zumbi, Haitian Revolution, Cooperation Jackson, Anarchist People of Colour, Black radical tradition, anarchism

Show notes: Black Anarchism: The Tradition the White Left Keeps Forgetting. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 4

Ep:17 Queer Anarchists

Saison 2 · Épisode 3

mardi 15 septembre 2026 • Durée 17:55

In 1892, a twenty-two-year-old anarchist named Alexander Berkman walked into a steel magnate's office and shot him. He served fourteen years for it, and it was in that Pennsylvania prison, not a lecture hall, that one of the most significant American texts on homosexuality before the twentieth century's midpoint got written.

Queer anarchism runs from Berkman's Prison Memoirs through Emma Goldman's public defence of Oscar Wilde, at a time when almost no public figure would touch it, into the Two-Spirit traditions that predate the word "anarchism" by centuries and the decolonial history of their erasure. José Esteban Muñoz's argument that queerness is a horizon, not yet here, sits alongside ACT UP's dual structure, built so a small affinity group could chain itself to a stock exchange balcony without the open floor ever knowing it was coming. And there's Simon Nkoli, who came out to his co-defendants inside a South African treason trial that carried the death penalty, and went on to help organise the first Pride march anywhere on the African continent.

Where queer theory and anarchist theory pull apart gets named too: a canon built almost entirely by straight men who rarely theorised gender or sexuality at all, and a queer theory that can drift toward the personal at the expense of the structural. Neither tradition gets a pass.

Further reading: José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009) Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004) Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (Mother Earth Publishing, 1912; available free via Project Gutenberg) Terence Kissack, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917 (AK Press, 2008) South African History Online, Simon Nkoli — sahistory.org.za

Tags: queer anarchism, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, José Esteban Muñoz, queer theory, Two-Spirit, Simon Nkoli, ACT UP, apartheid, Bash Back, queer futurity, LGBTQ history, anarchism

Show notes: Queer Anarchists. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 3

Queer anarchism has existed for well over a century under different names, a tradition both mainstream queer politics and the mostly white, mostly male anarchist canon have had a habit of forgetting was ever there, from a Pennsylvania prison cell to a treason trial in South Africa, asking where the two traditions actually meet.

Ep:16 Burnout, Grief, and Staying in It

Saison 2 · Épisode 2

mardi 8 septembre 2026 • Durée 19:02

In 1974, a psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger needed a word for what he was watching happen to himself and the other volunteers at a free clinic in New York: people who believed their work was too urgent to rest, wearing down until they were useless to the cause they cared about most. He called it burnout. Fifty years later the word is everywhere, mostly drained of its original edge.

This episode turns inward, away from movements and toward the bodies inside them. It follows Audre Lorde's argument that "caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare," written while she was living with the cancer that would kill her, and traces the same idea through adrienne maree brown's Pleasure Activism, Tricia Hersey's Rest as Reparations, and ACT UP's political funerals, where grief itself became protest. It looks at Ella Baker's group-centered leadership, built specifically so a movement wouldn't depend on any single person's stamina to survive, and at Standing Rock, where thousands of people learned the same lesson at the scale of an entire encampment.

It closes somewhere less tidy than a manifesto wants: rest gets sold back as a bath bomb, and the crises this show has spent two seasons naming are not on pause while anyone recovers. Both of those things are true at once.

Further reading: Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: And Other Essays (Firebrand Books, 1988; Ixia Press reissue, 2017) adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (AK Press, 2019) Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (Little, Brown Spark, 2022) Cher Weixia Chen and Paul C. Gorski, "Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists," Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2015 John L. Hammond, "Mística, meaning and popular education in the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement," Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 6(1), 2014

Tags: burnout, activist burnout, grief, Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown, Tricia Hersey, rest as resistance, transformative justice, Ella Baker, SNCC, ACT UP, political funerals, MST, mística, Buen Vivir, healing justice, anarchism

Burnout, Grief, and Staying in It A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 2

Ep:15 The Algorithm Is Not Neutral

Saison 2 · Épisode 1

mardi 1 septembre 2026 • Durée 21:07

Every time you use a free app, search for something, or let a website remember who you are, you generate more information than the service actually needs to function. That extra information used to be treated as waste. It became, instead, the entire business model.

The internet, and now the systems we call artificial intelligence, are not neutral tools that happened to get built — they're a second enclosure of the commons, continuing in a different material. From there it moves through Shoshana Zuboff's concept of behavioural surplus, Kate Crawford's account of the lithium, water, and labour hidden behind "the cloud," and a TIME investigation that found OpenAI's content-moderation pipeline ran partly through Kenyan workers paid as little as $1.32 an hour, into Joy Buolamwini's research on racial bias in facial recognition and a wrongful arrest in Detroit, and Meredith Whittaker's argument that AI isn't separate from the surveillance business model — it's an expansion of it.

Where the alternative is already being built gets equal time: the hacker ethic that predates anarchist theory by decades, a rural South African cooperative that beat NYC Mesh to community-owned internet by two years, and a driver-owned rideshare app proving the current arrangement was a choice, not a law of nature.

Further reading: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019) Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021) Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984) James Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain," Law & Contemporary Problems, 2003 — available via Duke Law, law.duke.edu Joy Buolamwini, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines (Random House, 2023) Billy Perrigo, "OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour," TIME, January 18, 2023 The Drivers Cooperative — drivers.coop Zenzeleni Networks — zenzeleni.net

Tags: surveillance capitalism, AI ethics, algorithmic bias, digital enclosure, facial recognition, data labor, platform cooperativism, mesh networks, Shoshana Zuboff, Kate Crawford, Joy Buolamwini, Meredith Whittaker, GNU, free software, Cambridge Analytica, predictive policing, anarchism

Special: Luisa Capetillo — a lectora, an organizer, and the woman anarchist history forgot to write down.

jeudi 27 août 2026 • Durée 09:12

In July 1915, a woman named Luisa Capetillo was arrested in Havana for wearing trousers in public. She didn't apologize. She told the judge she always wore pants, and the charges were dropped. It's the only part of her life most people have heard, if they've heard anything at all.

For a decade before that arrest, and years after it, Capetillo worked as a lectora, reading newspapers, novels, and anarchist theory aloud to cigar and tobacco workers who couldn't read for themselves, on factory floors across Puerto Rico, Cuba, Florida, and New York. She wrote one of the most direct early arguments in the Spanish-speaking world for women's liberation as part of the revolution, not an issue to deal with afterward. And she organized: in 1916 she helped lead a sugar strike that pulled out over forty thousand workers across Puerto Rico, still one of the largest labor actions in the island's history.

This episode covers her childhood in Arecibo, the practice of the lectora and why factory owners fought to ban it, her writing on marriage and free love, the 1916 strike, a political compromise in 1919 that's worth sitting with rather than smoothing over, and the farm school she built at the end of her life on the theory that reading and organizing were never really separate.

There's a harder question underneath it too: why a woman who organized forty thousand workers into her country's largest strike is harder to find in the history of anarchism than men who wrote considerably less and organized considerably fewer people.

Further reading: Norma Valle-Ferrer, Luisa Capetillo, Pioneer Puerto Rican Feminist (Peter Lang, 2006; originally published in Spanish as Luisa Capetillo: Historia de una mujer proscrita, 1990) Luisa Capetillo, A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out / Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer, ed. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez (Arte Público Press, 2004)

Tags: Luisa Capetillo, anarchism, feminism, Puerto Rico history, labor history, women's history, tobacco workers, lectora, general strike, free love, Caribbean history

Show notes:

Special: Sacco and Vanzetti — a rigged trial, and the seven years between arrest and execution.

dimanche 23 août 2026 • Durée 09:06

On May 5, 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested on a streetcar outside Boston, carrying loaded pistols and lying to police about where they'd been. Three weeks earlier, two men had been shot dead in a payroll robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Sacco and Vanzetti had nothing to do with it. They were anarchists trying to protect their community, two days after a friend held in secret federal custody fell to his death from a fourteenth-floor window.

That's not a footnote. It's the reason the case became what it became: a shoemaker and a fish peddler convicted less on evidence than on their politics, their nationality, and their fear, then executed seven years later, after a confession from the actual robber was thrown out and a governor's own advisory panel found the rigged trial fair.

This episode is about the two men underneath the trial everyone half-remembers. Where they came from. What they believed. The militant anarchist movement around them, which included real bombings alongside real innocence. And what got said, in the last weeks of their lives, in the letters they wrote to each other and to the people trying to save them.

It also sits with the harder question: what do you do with a case where the men on trial were framed, but the movement they belonged to wasn't uniformly peaceful? Honesty doesn't land cleanly on either side of that story.

Further reading: Bruce Watson, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (Pantheon, 2007) Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton University Press, 1991) The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, ed. Marion Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson (Viking Press, 1928) Massachusetts state archive on the case — mass.gov/info-details/sacco-vanzetti-who-were-sacco-vanzetti

Tags: Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchism, Red Scare, Palmer Raids, Luigi Galleani, Andrea Salsedo, wrongful conviction, labor history, Italian immigration, 1920s America, Judge Webster Thayer, capital punishment, Haymarket, Governor Michael Dukakis, direct action, state violence, anarchist history

Show notes:

The shoemaker, the fish peddler, and the car nobody got to drive A Thousand Small Fires

Ep:14 What are we actually building?

Saison 1 · Épisode 14

lundi 17 août 2026 • Durée 28:46

I want to start with something I don't know how to resolve.

Over the course of this season I have argued that the state is not your friend, that prisons do not produce safety, that settler colonialism is ongoing, that the feminist movement made things worse for the most marginalised women by handing their safety to the same system that endangered them. I believe all of that. And I also live inside all of it. I pay taxes that fund the prison system I said should not exist. I live on land whose original custodians never ceded it. I have called the police, once, in a situation where I did not know what else to do.

The contradiction is not something I can argue my way out of. And I don't think the point of this show was ever to pretend I could.

This is the season one finale of A Thousand Small Fires. It does not summarise. It reconsiders. It pulls threads from all fourteen episodes, names the three things the season did not resolve, and turns the critical lens on anarchism itself as a tradition that has not always practiced what it preaches.

It closes with the questions i´m still carrying, about what it means to practice mutual aid rather than just believe in it, about what we owe people who need something now, about what you would have to give up. And with a glimpse of what season two is going to be about.

Further reading:

All reading from Episodes 1-13 remains relevant — this episode draws on the whole season

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974) — the novel closest in spirit to what this show is trying to do

Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso, 2020)

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution — free at theanarchistlibrary.org

Tags: season finale, prefigurative politics, mutual aid, anarchism, self-critique, prison abolition, settler colonialism, carceral feminism, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Zapatistas, Black Panthers, Mondragón, season two, A Thousand Small Fires

Ep:13 Building the world inside the shell of the old one

Saison 1 · Épisode 13

lundi 10 août 2026 • Durée 18:39

The founding constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, written in 1905, contains a phrase that has stayed in anarchist and labour movements for over a century: building the new society in the shell of the old.

It is not a metaphor for waiting. It is a description of what you do right now, today, inside the world as it exists. You do not wait for the conditions to be right. You build, in the present, the relationships and institutions and ways of being together that you want to characterise the future.

This episode is about prefigurative politics — the most practical and the most demanding idea in the entire season. It asks what the twentieth century taught us about what happens when the means don't match the ends. It looks at what the Black Panther Party built with their survival programs, what the Zapatistas have sustained for thirty years in Chiapas, what the workers at Mondragón in the Basque Country built from a failing factory in 1956, and what thirty workers in a factory in Thessaloniki did in 2011 when their bosses walked away: voted 97.5% to keep running it themselves, changed production to ecological soap, and have been making it ever since — while the Greek state has repeatedly tried to evict them.

It also asks the question prefigurative politics has never fully answered: how do you scale horizontal structures without reproducing the hierarchy you were trying to escape? And is scaling even the right goal?

Further reading:

Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press, 2010)

Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! (Pluto Press, 2008)

Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy (AK Press, 2017)

Schools for Chiapas — schoolsforchiapas.org

Vio.Me worker cooperative — viome.org

Tags: prefigurative politics, mutual aid, horizontal organisation, IWW, Black Panther Party, survival programs, Zapatistas, Mondragón, cooperatives, Vio.Me, worker self-management, dual power, anarchism, Emma Goldman, Spain 1936, Russian soviets, Sarvodaya, Ubuntu

Ep:12 Feminism that calls the police

Saison 1 · Épisode 12

lundi 3 août 2026 • Durée 17:09

You have been hurt by someone close to you. You are standing in front of a choice nobody prepared you for. You can call the police, and maybe they help or maybe they arrest you too, deport your partner, or make things worse in ways you couldn't predict. Or you don't call. And you carry it alone.

This is the situation millions of people face inside a system that spent decades calling itself feminist.

Carceral feminism is the name for what happened when the mainstream feminist anti-violence movement aligned itself with the criminal justice system, mandatory arrest laws, longer sentences, more policing and called it protection. This episode traces how it happened: from the genuinely radical battered women's movement of the 1970s, through the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, to the documented reality that mandatory arrest policies increased arrests of women and did not reduce domestic violence rates.

It asks who the carceral turn protected, and who it abandoned. Drawing on the work of Beth Richie, INCITE!, and the Color of Violence conference that brought two thousand people to UC Santa Cruz in 2000, it names the feminist alternative: community accountability, transformative justice, and the organisations already doing this work without adequate resources or recognition.

It also looks beyond the US, at Ni Una Menos in Argentina and the feminist movement in Kenya that took to the streets in 2024 — and at what it means to build feminist politics in a context where the state is not a potential ally but a known source of harm.

Further reading:

Elizabeth Bernstein, "Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism," Signs (2010)

Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012)

Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, Beth Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Haymarket, 2022)

INCITE! Color of Violence anthology (South End Press, 2006)

Victoria Law, "Against Carceral Feminism," Jacobin (2014) — free to read online

Podcasts Similaires Basées sur le Contenu

Découvrez des podcasts liées à A Thousand Small Fires. Explorez des podcasts avec des thèmes, sujets, et formats similaires. Ces similarités sont calculées grâce à des données tangibles, pas d'extrapolations !

Il n'y a pas de contenu associé à ce podcast.

À propos Méthodologie Contact Me soutenir Politique de confidentialité Mentions légales

A Thousand Small Fires – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Détails du podcast

Classements récents

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Liens partagés entre épisodes et podcasts

Qualité et score du flux RSS

Historique des publications

Derniers épisodes publiés

Podcasts et contenus similaires

Podcasts Similaires Basées sur le Contenu

Apple Podcasts

Spotify