The Invisible Institute—with its evocative and mysterious name—exists in the proud tradition of “guerrilla journalism,” a difficult to define or pigeon-hole practice of human rights inquiry and documentation. This dazzling collection of journalists, archivists, writers, thinkers, organic intellectuals-without-portfolio, organizers, activists, data analysts and other collaborators pioneer a form of journalism based on long-term relationship-building, deep inquiry, and on-going interrogation of our shared social/political world. They are investigative reporters, multimedia storytellers, human rights champions, and facilitators of difficult public conversations. The Invisible Institute has won two Pulitzer Prizes, and produced a film that was a finalist for a short documentary Academy Award. They also won a landmark court decision, Kalven v. Chicago, in 2014 establishing that in Illinois police misconduct files are public information. We’re joined by two brilliant members of the Invisible Institute team, Maira Khwaja, Director of Public Strategy, and Trina Reynolds-Tyler, Director of Data.

Thousands of student visas cancelled by the government! Legal residents snatched off the streets by masked agents, detained and deported! Federal research grants to universities scrapped! The government asserting its right to oversee academic departments and curriculum decisions! The frequency of events like these across the country are dizzying, and the pace is accelerating. Academic freedom is in the cross-hairs. The First Amendment says that you can say any idiotic thing that you want to in the public square, pretty much without constraint; academic freedom includes that, but goes far beyond: academic freedom is the right to interrogate the world, the right to teach, and the right to learn. Academic freedom is the right to think at all. We’re joined by Katherine Franke, renowned law professor, courageous scholar, and human rights champion who has endured a relentless campaign of threat and harassment because of her intrepid support of Palestinian rights.

To be ruled is to be spied upon and inspected, quantified, measured, and ranked, and then registered and regulated with all the inherent structural violence packed into those arrangements. To be free is to abolish all of it, to reject that system’s hold over our minds as well as to defeat its power in the world. What kind of society do we want to live in? What world will we build? Today we’re joined in conversation with Anita Say Chan, a feminist, decolonial scholar, and author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and our Fight for an Independent Future, as we think about techno-surveillance, algorithmic discrimination, the noisy echoes of the anti-immigration and eugenics movements of the 19th century all around us, as well as alternative data practices and projects developed by minorities actors in pursuit of justice.

What is your North Star? What are you fighting for, and what are you struggling to overcome, or leave behind? The goal is not a precise and detailed roadmap—that way lies dogma, orthodoxy, and worse—but rather a vision and a hope with which to gauge and partially frame our work in the here and now. The great Uruguay revolutionary, Edwardo Galeano, tells a story of being confronted by a person accusing him of being a utopian, and asking contemptuously, “What good is Utopia?” Galeano says, “It’s true that if I walk 2 steps toward Utopia, Utopia walks 2 steps away, and if I walk 10 steps toward her, she walks 10 steps away. So what good is Utopia?” His reply: “It’s good for walking.” We’re joined in conversation by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, authors of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, a novel that is so imaginative, so challenging, and so surprising that it reorders our conception of what’s possible to write—and to think.

James (Jimmy) Soto was released from Stateville Prison in November, 2023, after suffering 42 years and 2 months in custody for a crime he did not commit. A month before his release he had received his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University. He and his co-defendant, Tyrone Ayala, also exonerated, were the longest serving wrongfully convicted people in Illinois history. At our Homecoming Party for Jimmy several men toasted him, and thanked him for the legal research he did as a jailhouse lawyer for them while inside. Knowing that Jimmy was planning to pursue a law degree, one of his compatriots said, “I saw what this brother did with a yellow pad and a pencil, now with a law degree, Look Out!” After his release, Soto said he felt “elated” but also full of “righteous anger…It should not have taken 42 years for this to happen.” A talented writer, artist, public speaker, and thinker, Jimmy Soto is a Justice Fellow at Beyond Prisons at the University of Chicago, and a paralegal at Northwestern School of Law.

Barbara Smith is a Movement legend— the kind of courageous activist, powerful thinker, persistent organizer and whole-hearted doer who keeps the Movement moving. She is co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and co-author of the acclaimed 1977 statement that has been one of the most influential Black feminist documents of the twentieth century—“Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community, which allows us to continue our struggle and work.” She’s been a freedom fighter for over half a century—a long time in the life of a person, but, as she knows, the blink of an eye in the life of a struggle, and so she is neither nostalgic for a ship that’s already left the shore nor interested in burnishing a legacy. Rather, she is leaning forward—on the move and in the mix—still fighting for peace and freedom and joy and justice, still asking the most insistent and burning questions: How do we name this political moment? Where do we go from here? What does the known demand of us now? Here is Barbara Smith in conversation with Bill Ayers on December 5, 2024 at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York.

Human beings are suspended in webs-of-significance—we make sense and we make meaning—and culture is nothing more nor less than the webs. Those webs-of-significance are alive, forever trembling and vibrating, evolving and regenerating, changing and developing as messages and stories and ways-of-being vibrate across the surface. So culture can never stand still, never sit static or inert; rather it is always on the move, in the mix, and on the make—dynamic and churning and charging forward. The joy of the churn, and the burden of resistance, re-imagination, and reconstruction lives within the counter-culture. We’re joined by Alex Zamalin in a wide-ranging conversation about culture, counter-culture, and the quest for revolutionary freedom.