Race Matters

Paying homage to the stories written decades ago, by the mother of Afrofuturism, Octavia Butler, Race Matters' King, Tim Worton and Tristan Cornelissen chat to artists Atong Atem and Santilla Chingaipe about how their practices have been shaped by the ever expansive tenents of Afrofuturism. Together they ask: was Butler forseeing the future, or just paying closer attention than the rest of us? Bui...

A different kind of seeing - with Aja Monet   Grammy-nominated poet, musician and artist aja monet joins Race Matters for a conversation exploring the spiritual dimensions of poetry, the wisdom of ancestral knowledge and the unseen forces that shape how we move through the world. From the poet’s eye to the rhythms we inherit, she reflects on the power of language, the sacredness of crea...

A different kind of seeing - with Aja Monet  Grammy-nominated poet, musician and artist aja monet joins Race Matters for a conversation exploring the spiritual dimensions of poetry, the wisdom of ancestral knowledge and the unseen forces that shape how we move through the world. From the poet’s eye to the rhythms we inherit, she reflects on the power of language, the sacredness of creat...

Striking against U.S. Imperialism in one territory will strike against U.S. Imperialism everywhere. When we wage and win the war against U.S. Imperialism in our homeland, that in turn positively impacts the fight for Indigenous sovereignty here. Yvonne Hong interviews Jamie Tyberg and Miyeon Jang from Nodutdol, a NYC based diasporic Korean organisation that organise for a world free of imperialism...

“Why be a sunflower and turn towards the sun? I myself am the sun” Ousmane Sembène ~ In this episode of Race Matters, kaapse South African sound-maker Tristan Cornelissen speaks with Safia Amadou, co-founder and co-director of Africa Film Festival Australia, about the importance of creating space for African and African-diaspora filmmakers to tell their own stories. From the his...

What does it mean to understand the personal and political as truly intertwined?  To know and to understand that the wins, griefs, losses, day-to-days and dreams of our lives are all shaped by political infrastructures?  And how can this knowing transform how we live our lives? On today’s show, Samantha Haran is in conversation with Lebanese writer Sheree Joseph about her new memoi...

“What kind of space allows people like us to fully exist? To be a Black, queer creative is to return to this question again and again, and, sometimes, to become the answer yourself.” Visionary performer, curator, founder of Pyramid, Basjia reflects on the language she discovered through movement, tracing the journey from a body shaped by expectation to one that became a site of freedom...

What languages do we inherit before we ever find the words for ourselves? Huda the Goddess traces the journey from the language of her childhood in Sudan and Egypt to the poetry that became her way of making sense of the world. Together, King and Huda reflect on ancestry, oral storytelling and the wisdom carried through memory before turning toward the communities that teach us how to belong. Thro...

after the floods, people. after the fires, people. not governments. not borders. not the soldiers  or rifles. not the state history or news or flag.  people, in masks, cooking food, sorting rubble  & burned wood, driving tonmng each other, asking are you  okay, baby? when the sky turned black, when the sun  went into the ocean, when ash fell  instead of rain. Fati...

Knowing means understanding there are things we can never know  All knowledge is limited by positionality and governed by relationships  The world cannot be fully understood by life in human shapes because humans cannot occupy the spaces held by all other life or to see to the end of connections Ambelin Kwaymullina After Eelam is a patchwork of voices, struggles, solidarities that ask wh...

Today on the show, long-time Race Matters host Sara El Youghun interviews some of our new brilliant volunteers: King, Tristan and Leya. Together, they chat through why they were drawn to joining this community, some of their favourite and most formative tracks, and what makes a place like Race Matters brilliant & special <3 Shout out to our other new vols Day & Malaak, to Shareeka Helal...

What Does It Mean To Be A Person Beyond the Body? In today's convo, Race Matters' Janey Li and Sehej Kaur chat with technologist, researcher, designer and writer of A Sexual History of the Internet's Mindy Seu. A day after Mindy's lecture performance of the same title, the trio touch on the sprawling connections between sexuality, techno-development, autonomy and innovation, desire and extraction....

What role does spirituality play in our solidarity movements? What is spirituality without accountability? Alicia Zhao traces the connection between ritual, chanting and protest, joined by Joannie Lee. We hear from artist, organiser and Buddhist practitioner Elaine Su-Hui, who reflects on how devotional recitation meets collective voice, and ritual becomes a site of both grounding and action. We a...

The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression. Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded ~  Angela Davis Beyond the Bars  is a Prison Radio broadcast by 3CR that aired during NAIDOC Week 2026 . This special episode is a syndication of Monday July 6ths broad...

Poet, musician and cultural visionary  Saul Williams  joins Yorta Yorta artist, writer and activist  Neil Morris  for a conversation that traces the colonial logics hidden in plain sight. From Wall Street to Boundary Street, they unpack how empire is built through naming, branding, borders and memory, and how these structures continue to shape the worlds we inherit. Together, t...

“Intelligence is relatively new to life on Earth, but your hierarchical tendencies are ancient.”  - Octavia Butler, Lilith’s Brood. The dawn of generative AI may seem like a whole new age - but in reality, it is part of an ancient history. Today on the show, Sara El Youghun, Joannie Lee, Janey Li and Samantha Haran come together to map this new genAI tech within the longer h...

'There are two issues of our time really, that I think amount to a litmus test for morality as far as I'm concerned. One is what you're prepared to do on behalf of the Palestinian people and the other is what are you prepared to do on behalf of gay and lesbian people?" - Black, queer poet and activist June Jordan in an interview for 'A Place of Rage' (1991) by Prabhita Parmar What are people willi...

Sehej, Leya and Yvonne hop into the studio today to chat about the history of looksmaxxing as an inherited tradition for all oppressed people. Inspired by texts on the 'Politics of Being Ugly', digressions include Jia Tolentino's  'The Age of Instagram Face' , the distinctions between gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia, and looksmaxxing as self-surveillance for brown Women of Colour. This e...

This episode is a love letter to everyone mothering on stolen land, in displaced bodies, in the precarity of modernity. It is a reminder that queer and Indigenous ways of childrearing and matrilineal care are often similar practices. One and a half years into raising a child and a lifetime into raising themselves in community, executive producer Prinita Thevarajah collages conversations with Vanes...

For this special episode of Race Matters, we are joined by Boe Spearim from Frontier War Stories, Gamilaraay and Kooma activisit and Dad who has been archiving so called Australiaʼs first wars since 2020. Frontier War Stories is a podcast that details across the continent, the wars waged by the colonising British, the massacres and horific dehumanisation that was used as a strategy of genocide by...

We are bound by the same chains, therefore we must forge the same key. Two stories of interconnected struggles and how we can forge the tools towards freedom.  Day Soriano chats to Sunday of Philippines liberation movement Anakbayan on yearning itself can be a weapon, and that until the diaspora can return, they must continue to fight the struggle of the people no matter where they are....

From the rivers of Chile, the mountains of Gyeonggi-do, to the Cumberland Highway, exploring what it means to be and live and remember in relation to place. Our first episode in collaboration with abolitionist youth organisation  Yung Prodigy , after a mentorship exploring radical radio from the roots up. Two debut works by Lucy Norton and a newfound colalbroation between Leya and Sehej Kaur...

Extreme music for people with extreme experiences. Noise is a genre that can be misunderstood as anti-social and harsh, but for our guest producer artist Carmen Mercedes Gago Schieb aka  Society of Cutting Up Men (S.C.U.M) ; it’s been a vital source of place-making and connection. Alongside artists Rosa /  Making Out  and  Yvette Ofa Agapow , she brings us an interstate p...

A bittersweet send off to Executive Producer Shareeka Helaluddin who has metamorphed Race Matters into the ever abundant, ever expansive program that it is. Previous producers Darren Lesaguis and Tanya Ali bear witness to Shareeka's shepherding of the show, bringing to mic the unheard and the unseen. Also hearing from six of the Race Matter's current producers, Sara El Younghun, Toobs, Joannie Lee...

We know that what we do today is intiamtely connected with what has been done before.  Samantha Haran and Tim Worton reflect as kinfolk on their journey with Race Matters, and expanding into their queerness. They pay tribute to the episodes and producers that drew them into community, and challenged them into evolving and unfurling their embodiment of queerness in so called Australia, as two...