Block & Build

This week's show was recorded live at the 22nd Century Conference. In this sobering discussion on the rise of political violence, Cayden is joined by Executive Director of 22nd Century Initiative and co-host of the Anti-Authoritarian Podcast (published by Convergence ), Scot Nakagawa, Principal Research Advisor for Political Research Associates, Steven Gardiner, and Co-Executive Director of TakeAc...

This week on the show, Cayden is joined by Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, Hahrie Han. Her 2024 book Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church is a fascinating, ground level chronicle of the years-long effort in a Midwestern evangelical church to reckon with their city’s history of racial segregation and police violence. Resources from this episod...

This week we are joined by Brittany Ramos DeBarros, Interim Organizing Director at About Face: Veterans Against the War ( @vetsaboutface ). Since 2004, About Face (f.k.a. Iraq Veterans Against the War) has provided a political home to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns who are opposed to US militarism and imperialism. We’ll discuss what her organization has been doing to respond to our...

We don’t have a full episode this week, but we wanted to drop a quick check-in for your podcast feed, because a lot is going on. We're celebrating pride and wrestling with the grief of Gaza and political violence, all while staving off the hypernormalization of creeping fascism. So...how are you holding up? Connect with Block & Build and more Contact us: mailbag@convergencemag.com Subscribe to...

This week, Cayden is joined by Suzanne Pharr, a longtime social justice worker from the South. Suzanne is one of the most astute observers of the political project of the far Right from a movement perspective, and someone whose work has spanned issue area and geography. At age 86, her work is relentless as she has recently published a 2nd edition of her book In the Time of the Right: Reflections o...

In April we saw the largest demonstration against the second Trump administration since it started in the Hands Off! actions across over 1,400 locations nation-wide. One of the groups responsible for coordinating these efforts is Indivisible , an organization created in response to the first Trump administration in 2016 with the goal of saving American democracy. In this episode, Cayden is joined...

This episode was recorded live at the Narrative Power Summit in New Orleans, Louisiana on May 9th, 2025. In the episode, Cayden is first joined by colleagues at the summit, Program Specialist for ReFrame , Shaira Chaer and Creative and Brand Specialist at ReFrame, Ivie Osaghae. Narrative power is a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to the full picture of governing power. Governing power is...

Over the past month we’ve been co-publishing a series with our colleagues at The Forge examining “cancel culture.” The four part series entitled Because We Need Each Other is now available for free on both our sites. Today Cayden is joined by the four coauthors of the series, Erika Sasson , Celia Kutz , Shilpa Jain , and Kazu Haga , to talk about the series–and answer your questions about their ef...

This week Cayden is joined by former President of United Teachers Los Angeles and contributor to Convergence Magazine and Jacobin , Alex Caputo-Pearl . We published an essay in his ongoing series on UTLA’s organizing efforts last December, in which he laid out strategies and guidelines of how organized labor can adopt a Block & Build framework during this second Trump administration. We discus...

We take another look at some stories we’ve been following for the past few weeks, from new angles and with new insights. First, Cayden is joined by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky and co-editor of The Jail is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration . As a geographer of prisons and mass incarceration, her work specifically looks...

This week on the show we take a look at how ICE is being used to disappear outspoken voices and effective organizers from their communities; from campuses to farms. It’s also challenging to think through what we can do to fight back...but as you know, that’s what we do on this show. First, we look at how detainment and deportation is being weaponized against labor organizers. Cayden is joined by o...

We’re taking a look at how organizers at the state level are defending vital services like Medicaid, Medicare, public education, and Social Security that are under attack by the Trump administration and sometimes, their own state governments. We’re starting here in my home state of California where the coalition We Are California has been demanding protection of our Medi-Cal program. Joining me to...

On Tuesday, April 1st, Wisconsin voters will be participating in a special election to fill a vacant state Supreme Court seat. Satellite groups and PACs funded and controlled by Elon Musk have invested over $17 million in the election in favor of Trump lackey, Brad Schimel. To learn more about the race and how organizers are pushing back we are joined by State Director of Wisconsin Working Familie...

This week we are featuring a special presentation of a panel hosted by our friends at Essie Justice Group on February 27th in Oakland, California. This intimate conversation led by Michelle Alexander, Maurice Mitchell and Gina Clayton-Johnson talk criminalization, climate change, and organizing Black and brown working class communities in this political moment. Against the backdrop of the LA wildf...

This week on the show Cayden is joined first by Executive Director of Detention Watch Network ( @detentionwatch ), Silky Shah, to help us understand the danger and implications of ICE’s illegal detention of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil earlier this week. Then author Vanessa Priya Daniel ( @vanessapriyadaniel ) joins to discuss her new book Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Every...

This week on the show Cayden is joined by President and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation , Carmen Rojas, as part of our ongoing conversation about what the role of philanthropic foundations and donors can or should be in efforts to bolster movement organizing. We recorded the interview earlier this week and had a great discussion about how Marguerite Casey is working to be in right relations...

Marisa Franco, Executive Director of Mijente , joins Cayden to discuss the Trump administration's purposefully cruel deportation efforts and how Mijente is working to respond to these conditions while building power in immigrant communities. Also in this show, journalist and friend of the pod Sarah Lazare chats about her new piece in the Nation, How Healthcare Workers Are Defending Their Transgend...

Rural communities are fighting back against the MAGA agenda. Cayden is joined by Appalachia Peoples Union Director for Standing Up for Racial Justice , Beth Howard, and organizer with West Virginia Can’t Wait , Stephen Smith. They recently published From Rural America With Love: An Invitation to Bravery . Info on federal worker organizing: federalunionists.net Connect with Block & Build Subscr...

Cayden is out this week so we're featuring an episode of The Fascism Barometer , the new podcast from friend of the show Ejeris Dixon . We hope you find it useful. If so, check out the links below to subscribe and connect with The Fascism Barometer resource hub on their website. The Fascism Barometer, Episode 5: Keeping Ourselves Safe as Fascism Rises Che Johnson-Long and Ken Montenegro, two longt...

The Process is the Punishment , a new podcast from Mainline , documents the struggle of the ATL 61 through interviews with five defendants, and attorneys connected to the case. The ATL 61 were indicted under the state of Georgia’s RICO Act in August 2023, for their protest against the controversial police training facility known as “Cop City.” In this episode we offer a preview of The Process is t...

This week on the show, we are joined by Executive Director of Media Justice , Steven Renderos, to discuss the latest nefarious activities of the FCC. Then the Executive Director of Women’s March , Rachel O’Leary Carmona, joins to discuss what the impact of mass demonstrations can be for organizing in this moment; following on the heels of their recent People's March in Washington D.C. earlier this...

On the show this week, Cayden talks first about Convergence Magazine's recent publishing collaboration with In These Times, The Forge, and The Real News Network . Together, we published a collection of writing and podcast episodes entitled Left Out: The Missing Election Narratives – available in the latest print edition of In These Times and in full and online. Then we're joined by Vice President...

This week on the show Cayden is joined by fellow Convergence editorial board members Max Elbaum and Jon Liss. We recently published a collective editorial statement called Block & Build 2.0 . The piece lays out the many ways the Block & Build strategy has to re-orient to the seismic shifts in the political landscape that are happening as we enter a 2nd Trump term this coming week. Max and...

This week on the show Cayden is joined by one of the editors of the new anthology We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition , out now from Haymarket Books, Maya Schenwar. The book brings together a remarkable collection of voices revealing the complex tapestry of ways people are living abolition in their daily lives through parenting and caregiving. Ranging from personal narratives to...

Cayden is joined this episode by organizer, strategist, co-founder of MediaJustice , and founder of the Radical Loss Project , Malkia Devich Cyril and journalist and author of From The Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire (aff), Sarah Jaffe. Together, they seek to grapple with the political and cultural implications of grief, both individual and collective, arising from everything that’s...