Season 3 - Trailer

Welcome to Season 3 of Holding up the Ladder

In the few months between the end of season 2 and the start of season 3 it seems the world isn’t calming down any time soon - in fact in many ways, it feels more intense and more far-reaching. We’ve had the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, which doesn’t really feel like a victory and more like a pyrrhic victory - you know where no-one really wins. All around the world - Chile, Colombia, Ethiopia, Belarus, the Israel-Palestine conflict, a surge in Asian hate crimes, the list goes on - we can’t avoid it and I don’t want to. What we’re going to do this season, is to try and talk about it - we’re going to talk about justice, about social change, anti-racism, anti-discrimination with people who know these areas really well and because this is a creative podcast, we’re going to talk about how creativity and the arts speaks to justice.

If you listened to last season’s interview with Japanese artist Makoto Fujimura, you will have heard him talk about the art of Kintsugi - that is the art of mending to make new. A bowl or a vessel is brought with all its broken pieces, those pieces are examined and then the pieces are put together with Japanese gold lacquer - we don’t fix, or hide the cracks, instead we accentuate their beauty - in the hope that what we are left with is a vessel that’s more beautiful than before. But before we mend, we examine. So that’s what I’m going to try and do this season - we’re going to examine some of these broken ‘societal’ pieces, with the hopes of finding beauty in the brokenness. 

And as always, I’m interviewing some really interesting creatives from around the world from diverse disciplines - we’ll be talking about race and racism with writers, historians and academics, about blackness and queerness, about sheltering displaced and migrant people and how architects help with that, we’ll be talking about African feminism through tattoos and scarification, we’ll be talking about diversity in business and tech, not asking for a seat at the table but making our own. We’ll be talking about education and class in the UK, about art and art curation, about fashion, diversity in the music industry, we’ll be talking about environmental awareness through transcribing bird and animal song. We’ll be talking about beauty and justice and as always we’ll be talking about music!

One of the reasons Airbnb is sponsoring this series is to support these conversations, so as the season progresses I’ll also be sharing some of the actions Airbnb has been taking around anti racism, anti discrimination and social change so stay tuned for that. I’m really looking forward to this season, I’ll see you for our first episode on Wednesday 23rd June!

Airbnb Report on Travel

Airbnb Summarised Report

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