Loaded Lives is hosted by a sex worker and an illicit drug user in conversation, exploring research, social justice and community organising, day to day lived experience, activism and politics under dominator culture. We aim to tear each of these apart to better understand and highlight the complexities/contradictions/hypocrisies and conflicting realities. We will locate ourselves across liminal spaces to better observe these competing phenomena and how this impacts our communities, activism and our lives under white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.  

B is an illicit drug user and a punk scene drop out. With her roots in DIY punk culture and environmental and land back campaigns, her current focus is on the stigma and discrimination of drug use/users and the human rights of people who use drugs. She yearns for a world liberated from harmful drug prohibitionist policy, where all drug use is accepted and health care is accessible without judgement for all. The daughter of white euro immigrant parents, she grew up on Kaurna Country and now works, plays, learns and loves on Wurundjeri Woiwurrung lands of the Kulin Nations. She is interested in exploring the ethical conflict of drug users as peer workers in government funded organisations, the watering down of harm reduction principles in public health policy and practice and its co-option by the non-profit industrial complex, and how drug policy is a tool of colonial power and control used against those deemed undesirable by the white supremacist state. She loves riding her bike high as on a balmy summer evening and is a total karaoke hog.

R is a bilingual European settler coloniser on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri people in the Kulin nation. She’s a queer sex worker who’s worked for over a decade and is deeply connected to the sex worker community. She is a sex worker and activist first and foremost and lastly an ‘academic’ who’s recently completed a PhD exploring the everyday lives of South Australian sex workers. She hopes to talk about all things peer and wants to learn from other peer activists to better understand how they overcome social and structural barriers in the peer work/activism they do in order to overcome stigma and help build resistance and resilience in community. She loves her cat Angel, enjoys a leisurely bike ride in the sun and hates sticky hands with a passion.

Week 7 – Radio A & A
Presenters: Anne-lise and Ani

https://www.instagram.com/radio.a.and.a/

https://radioaanda.carrd.co/