“There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” — Arundhati Roy
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If you’ve been to a protest during the past three decades, you’ve probably seen her, the short, slight woman behind the camera, always in the thick of things, documenting the resistance that Portland is famous for. From the 1990 march to condemn the murder of Mulugeta Seraw by neo-Nazi skinheads to OccupyPDX in 2011; from the 1991 protests against the first Gulf War to sHell No! the successful blockade in 2015 of Shell Oil’s icebreaker bound for the drilling fields in the Arctic; from the 2000 May Day police riot against peaceful demonstrators to 100 Days of BLM protests in 2020, Bette Lee has been there to create images from an activist point of view.
Today Patricia Kullberg interviews Bette Lee about her decades of photographic work and its significance for Portland's activist community. The Old Mole is pleased to present a retrospective of Bette’s work. Every week we’ll post a new photo documenting Portland’s protest history and linking past actions with ongoing organizing and resistance. View her work at KBOO/BetteLee.
Program: Old Mole Variety Hour
Air date: Mon, 8/9/21 - 9:00am to 10:00am
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If you’ve been to a protest during the past three decades, you’ve probably seen her, the short, slight woman behind the camera, always in the thick of things, documenting the resistance that Portland is famous for. From the 1990 march to condemn the murder of Mulugeta Seraw by neo-Nazi skinheads to OccupyPDX in 2011; from the 1991 protests against the first Gulf War to sHell No! the successful blockade in 2015 of Shell Oil’s icebreaker bound for the drilling fields in the Arctic; from the 2000 May Day police riot against peaceful demonstrators to 100 Days of BLM protests in 2020, Bette Lee has been there to create images from an activist point of view.
Today Patricia Kullberg interviews Bette Lee about her decades of photographic work and its significance for Portland's activist community. The Old Mole is pleased to present a retrospective of Bette’s work. Every week we’ll post a new photo documenting Portland’s protest history and linking past actions with ongoing organizing and resistance. View her work at KBOO/BetteLee.
Program: Old Mole Variety Hour
Air date: Mon, 4/19/21 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Patricia Kullberg speaks with Portland Clean Energy Fund activists Anissa Pemberton and Adriana Voss-Andreae about how the PCEF organizing effort has positioned the climate justice community to more successfully challenge the structural elements of our political economy that cause and maintain environmental injustice and have brought us to the brink of climate chaos. Anissa Pemberton is the Portland Clean Energy Fund Coalition Coordinator at the Coalition of Communities of Color. They began working with the Portland Clean Energy Fund as a field organizer in 2018. Adriana Voss-Andreae was the co-founder of 350PDX and a chief petitioner for the Portland Clean Energy Fund ballot initiative. She continues to be active in both local and statewide climate justice initiatives.
Program: Old Mole Variety Hour
Air date: Mon, 5/17/21 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Patricia Kullberg speaks with Dr. Swati Birla about how Primer Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling BJT party set the stage for the coronavirus catastrophe currently unfolding in India and how radical right-wing and anti-Muslim forces in India are attempting to take advantage of the crisis to consolidate their political stranglehold on the country. Dr. Birla is a physician and feminist activist engaged in anti-caste and anti-racist work with the collective Sanhati and the Global Prison Abolitionist Collective. She is currently completing a doctorate degree in sociology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Program: Old Mole Variety Hour
Air date: Mon, 2/22/21 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Scientific racism is the long-established practice of marshalling 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.
Program: Old Mole Variety Hour
Air date: Mon, 11/30/2020 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Norm Diamond and Patricia Kullberg discuss the role of ordinary citizens in mounting successful challenges to the junk science deployed by fossil fuel corporations to promote their climate-killing mega-projects in the Pacific Northwest. Patricia Kullberg is an activist and science writer with Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Program: Old Mole Variety Hour
Air date: Mon, 12/07/2020 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Patricia Kullberg speaks with Dr. Anushka Shenoy, a physician-in-training in psychiatry at Oregon Health Sciences University and a leader of the newly established OHSU House Officers Union. They discuss the punishing working conditions of physicians-in-training (also known as house officers, interns and residents), how increased privatization and profit-making in the health care industry have made the medical encounter worse for both doctors and patients, and the ways that unions might help reverse some of those trends. For more see the website: House Officers Union.
Program: Old Mole Variety Hour
Air date: Mon, 9/28/2020 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Patricia Kullberg speaks with Dr. Jan Haaken about her new book, Psychiatry, Politics and PTSD: Breaking Down. The book could be called a biography of a diagnosis, namely post-traumatice stress disorder. But it is also a profound meditation on human suffering and the way it is managed in the context of late capitalist societies.
Program: Old Mole Variety Hour
Air date: Mon, 9/7/2020 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Patricia Kullberg speaks with Leslie Gregory, a local health practitioner and activist who is at the forefront of the campaign to get racism declared a public health crisis. Gregory is the founder and director of the local non-profit Right to Health, whose vision is to create a national network of healthcare providers, scientists, and community leaders who are committed to dismantling the effects of racism across all ethnic groups, and particularly Black Americans. Patricia and Leslie speak about her vision and how she was inspired by the health care programs of the Black Panthers.
Program: Old Mole Variety Hour
Air date: Mon, 08/10/2020 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Patricia Kullberg speaks with University of Washington medical student Naomi Nkinsi about how racist ideas about African-American bodies are embedded in medical science and how students, doctors and scholars are challenging so-called “race-based medicine” which was supposed to improve care for African-Americans.
Program: Old Mole Variety Hour
Air date: Mon, 07/13/2020 - 9:00am to 10:00am
While the coronavirus pandemic has made more urgent the need for universal access to quality health care, Patricia Kullberg and Jan Haaken take up the problem of racist ideas and practices within the health care setting. They look at myths about the bodies of Black people that persist in medicine, how those are often related to the unconscious biases of health care providers and the adverse impacts on the treatment of African American patients.
Program: Old Mole Variety Hour
Air date: Mon, 05/18/2020 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Jan Haaken and Patricia Kullberg follow the race for a coronavirus vaccine and some of the misleading claims circulating in the media, and they discuss ways of looking at infectious diseases from public health versus medical model perspectives.
