Welcome to "Fermented Feelings", SEAD's digital audio storytelling jar! 

ຂອບໃຈ. cảm ơn. ua tsaug. អរគុណ. thank you for listening.

You are listening to the first episode of an audio reflection series for the Rad Café pilot program that asks what role critical thinking plays in how Southeast Asian Americans relate to and engage with the big political problems that impact all the communities we care about in the present, past, and future.

Unedited transcription for this podcast conversation can be viewed here.

Ua tsaug and major thanks to SEAD's Autumn 2021 Cultural Organizer, Quincy Yangh, for conducting the interview. We're excited for your next chapter teaching English and engaging in environmental geography studies during your Fulbright Scholarship awarded stay in Taiwan!

More about what happened at Rad Café below

Rad Café was a political co-learning pilot program that was designed, administered, and facilitated by Tri Vo, a cultural organizer at SEAD in 2021. This audio reflection series features conversations whose guests were active participants in this pilot program. Between 8-10 longform audio episodes will be released in the month of January 2022. Don't miss this series!

Rad Café was an attempt for SE Asians in the U.S to co-design an intentional dialogue circle space for expanding and challenging our political imaginations and practical frameworks. In this series, we did this by politicizing the mundane of our everyday lives; things as common as a popular cultural dish, a well-known song or artist, the topics we’re taught in class, the visions of success that the adults and peers in our lives reinforce on us, and so forth. We incrementally zoom out from these subjects of the everyday to explore the political economies, or the social, political, and economic processes, shaping the ways that these things impact us in ways both minor and widely-pervading.

The goals of the Rad Café program included:

• Equipping cohort members with skills to engage, analyze, and share high level political topics and themes in a variety of communities and audiences
• Applying SEAD’s storytelling approach to change, equipping 1st person narratives with big picture frameworks
• Building healthy community and relationships around dialogues surrounding these topics and themes

You can view the various drafts of research notes self-compiled by Rad Café cohort members at this Rad Café Notion interactive webpage.

Please send any inquiries regarding Rad Café to Tri at [email protected] or connect via Instagram @tritactoe. Send inquiries regarding The SEAD Project to [email protected].