Respair Production and Media (RPM) builds new media projects in partnership with social movement participants and visionaries, enabling their work to reach new audiences.
We create space for the ideological frameworks and material needs of those reimagining our world to be heard, shared, and supported.
Respair contributes programming, production, publishing, development, and personal tools to emergent media makers, while encouraging the autonomy necessary to independently build transformative media. A resilient, sustainable media ecosystem is both a necessary tool for liberation and a difficult structure to build. Respair makes it possible for movement mediamakers across the country to have access to the resources and support they need to create without compromise.
For nearly a decade, Respair co-founders Damon A. Williams and Daniel Kisslinger have built humanizing, subject-to-subject media projects in partnership and participation with liberation movements. They are the co-creators of AirGo, a weekly podcast in Chicago that reshapes the culture of the city and beyond for the more Liberatory and creative. Through longform conversations with movement workers, artists, rappers, poets, musicians, organizers, and changemakers, AirGo puts Chicago’s reimaginers in conversation and creates a living dialogue-based archive of our creative communities and social movements. Past guests include Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, adrienne maree brown, Hanif Abdurraqib, Eve L. Ewing, Jamila Woods, and many more. AirGo also has used its emergent frameworks and praxises to help organizations, campaigns, universities, and audiences across the country to create their own media projects and reimagine their communities.
Support the ecosystem of movement media-makers, journalists, storytellers, artists and organizers working to build humanizing projects in service of liberation!