50 episodes listed below
A freedom seminar for movement minds.
Under the Tree treats freedom as a live political question, not an abstract ideal. Bill Ayers brings conversations from bookshops, schools, and organizing spaces into a searching seminar on schooling, solidarity, war, Palestine, public education, and resistance.
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Under the Tree is a political education podcast shaped like a roaming seminar on freedom. Bill Ayers hosts and writes the show, which repeatedly returns to schools, social movements, antiwar politics, Palestine, working-class history, and the unfinished work of liberation. It is not a neutral current-affairs roundtable. It has a clear moral and political location. Episodes draw from live conversations at places such as Pilsen Community Books and Haymarket House in Chicago, giving the show the feeling of a public room where ideas are being tested in front of others. The pacing is expansive. Guests are given space to tell stories, explain histories, revisit organizing lessons, and sit with grief, anger, contradiction, and hope. One episode moves from Palestinian art and blocked cultural institutions to the power of theater and cinema. Another follows oral history as a way to recover the experience of working-class revolutionaries. Public education becomes a site of constitutional imagination, youth power, and fights over public money. Conversations about Iran, war, and U.S. politics carry anguish without giving up on collective action. The show also makes room for comedy and joy, treating humor as a way to open difficult political questions rather than avoid them. Its register is literary, intimate, and openly movement-based. Repeated rituals, acknowledgments, music credits, and closing calls to keep organizing give the series a recognizable cadence. At its best, Under the Tree turns interviews into study sessions for people already asking how history, schools, art, and resistance fit together. It is dense, principled, and emotionally charged. The show suits listeners who want ideas with stakes, not commentary kept at arm’s length.
Made for: For listeners drawn to left political education, civil rights history, public schooling, antiwar organizing, Palestinian solidarity, and long conversations that connect books to action. It best suits people who prefer reflective movement analysis over quick punditry.
What sets it apart: The show blends teach-in, interview, ritual, and organizing language into one sustained editorial frame. Its strength is the way it treats freedom as something argued through art, schools, grief, public memory, and collective practice.
“Under the Tree” is a new podcast that focuses on freedom—a complex, layered, dynamic, and often contradictory idea—and takes you on a journey each week to fundamentally reimagine how we can bring freedom and liberation to life in relation to schools and schooling, equality and justice, and learning to live together in peace.Our podcast opens a crawl-space, a fugitive field and firmament where we can both explore our wildest freedom dreams, and organize for a liberating insurgency. "Under the Tree" is a seminar, and it runs the gamut from current events to the arts, from history lessons to scientific inquiries, and from essential readings to frequent guest speakers. We’re in the midst of the…
Bill Ayers brings a union research department into your freedom debate; suddenly, the numbers have politics.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A focused conversation on Palestine, cultural gatekeepers, and the political reach of art.
Palestine's struggle comes through here as a question of culture, access, and the institutions that decide what gets seen. The conversation at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago looks at how film, theater, museums, and gallery work can move people in ways that writing or academia…
A candid single-episode review of unequal union representation and the work of preserving movement history.
This single-episode review traces how racial inequality shaped union representation, then widens into a look at how movement history survives through oral history.
A searching conversation on movement power, international solidarity, and collective hope.
Freedom comes through as a shared discipline in this episode, as Bill Ayers and Vijay Prashad move from people in motion to the systems that depend on their labor.
["Rashid Khalidi calls the fighting an \"Israeli-American war\" and traces U.S.
Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers records a February conversation at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago about Motown and the Making of Working Class Revolutionaries.
Vijay Prashad tells Bill Ayers on Under the Tree that capitalism turns the future into a "permanent present," while movements keep building alternatives through struggle, study, and organization.
["Bill Ayers and Saper Vakil open with a March 2 addendum from Haymarket House in Chicago, two days after U.S.
Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers follows Nell and Lita Hirschmann-Levy through an 11-day West Bank delegation that included East Jerusalem, Hebron, Nablus, Balata refugee camp, and Aida refugee camp.
Jeremy Varon discusses Our Grief is Not a Cry for War, his history of opposition to the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture, drone strikes, and intervention in Syria.
Bill Ayers interviews Jay Gillen and Jamarria Hall about a proposed parallel constitution for public education built around young people teaching and earning income through shared knowledge.
Michelle Nickerson discusses her book Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial with host Bill Ayers, focusing on a 1971 draft-board raid and its political trial.
Under the Tree hosts Tarek Barconi, author of Fire in Every Direction and Hamas Contained, in a live Haymarket House conversation about Palestinian memory, queerness, family, and dispossession.
Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom examines Prexy Nesbitt's decades of international solidarity organizing through Martha Biondi's book We Are Internationalists.
Joshua Clark Davis tells Bill Ayers that Police Against the Movement retells the civil rights movement through its campaigns against police violence, surveillance, infiltration, and felony indictments.
Bennett Parten discusses Somewhere Toward Freedom, a history of enslaved people who fled to William T.
Kat Zamarron, a Chicago Public Schools elementary music teacher, describes teaching predictable, creative classes while political violence and immigration enforcement disrupt nearby neighborhoods.
Bill Ayers speaks with RT Walker Petakotla and Aaron Hughes about About Face, veterans’ organizing, and the history of GI resistance.
Lisa Lee interviews playwright and Northwestern professor Zayd Dohrn about Revolutions, his punk-metal-hip-hop musical created with Tom Morello for the Goodman Theater centennial.
Bill Ayers interviews Kristen Buras about Hurricane Katrina's twentieth anniversary and the transformation of New Orleans public schools.
Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers features formerly incarcerated activist and author Emile Soutonnier DeWeaver discussing white supremacy, abolition, prison labor, and reform.
Bill Ayers interviews Erin Miles Cloud, co-founder of the Movement for Family Power and co-editor of How to End Family Policing, about replacing the “child welfare” frame with “family policing.” Erin argues that CPS intervention does not reliably provide groceries, housing, or safety, while poverty, eviction, disability, and alcoholism remain unresolved.
Bill Ayers interviews Vijay Prashad about capitalism, freedom, and the political choices shaped by class, colonialism, and ambition.
Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers examines Chicago’s 1919 Red Summer through a conversation with Franklin Cozy Gay and Peter Cole of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project.
Bill Ayers interviews Frank Wynne and Roxana Espos about Quino’s Argentine comic strip Mafalda and Wynne’s English translation.
Rus Bradburd discusses his novel Big Time with Bill Ayers, imagining a university that accepts a billion-dollar Coors Brewing Company buyout and redirects every department toward football and basketball.
Bill Ayers interviews Brooklyn writer and private investigator Patrick Hoffman about Friends Helping Friends, a novel shaped by coerced informants, criminal defense work, and Hoffman’s research into white supremacist and incel communities.
Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers features Jesse Hagopian discussing Teach Truth: The Struggle for Anti-Racist Education and attacks on public schooling.
Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers interviews University of Illinois at Chicago professor Elizabeth Todd-Breland about Karen Lewis’s memoir, I Didn't Come Here to Lie.
Bill Ayers interviews movement legend Barbara Smith about her lifelong activism and the ongoing struggle for freedom.
Bill Ayers introduces his podcast 'Under the Tree' with a land acknowledgment and reflection on freedom, Chicago, and settler colonialism.
Bill Ayers introduces an upcoming episode featuring Medea Benjamin, Code Pink, and Eleanor Stein, discussing freedom, peace, and justice.
Bill Ayers introduces the podcast 'Under the Tree' with a focus on freedom, justice, and the complex history of Chicago.
Bill Ayers introduces an episode about Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement with guests Barbara Ransby and Asha Ransby-Sporn, promoting his book and upcoming conference.