Active in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in France, Collectif Sensé is a grassroots feminist collective that runs a space in Marseille to challenge racism, colonialism and patriarchy, systems that disproportionately affect the working class communities they are a part of and work with. By bringing people together in this social hub and this specific neighbourhood of town, this crew facilitates mutual aid and solidarity while building resilience together with those who are systematically affected by oppression – directly building power from below. Their regular activities include legal and administrative support to people in need, free French classes, skill-sharing workshops, self-organised childcare for working moms as well as political campaigning and activism.
In the spirit of evolving the rad work they already do, the collective wants to start a feminist podcast to talk about different political issues that their members face in the city of Marseille. They want to bring to the public poor and migrant peoples’ struggles and mainstream them by talking about the material issues they experience, mainly related to migrant exploitation, feminist self-defence, and the systematic silencing of racialised women. The podcast is meant to rearticulate stereotypes and distorted views around the lives of racialised and working class people, ushering in pluralist perspectives that directly challenge and oppose consolidated racist and sexist narratives.
Two of the members of Collectif Sensé are part of the Alarmphone network, with whom they have been making podcasts about violent border regimes and its consequences. Building on this experience with Alarmphone and the network they have there, Collectif Sensé wants to collaborate on a collective radio-making project to raise awareness about the realities of women on the move, addressing issues like women trafficking, feminist transborder solidarity and political action linking both. This will be an essential building block to create a sustainable transborder radio project with continuity and possibilities to grow, linking cross-border solidarity between geographies and activist networks.
The Guerrilla Redistribution
Marseille is a vibrant, multicultural port city in France with deep leftist roots, but it is also one of the metropoles in France with the most staggering economic inequality. This makes groups like Collectif Sensé, who are doing the important work of closing the inequality gaps by challenging power structures when public services fail, even more important to fund. Ergo, our money was used to resource the needed radio equipment, which we see as seed money to kickstart their feminist podcast, and a logistic budget to organise a two-day working meeting in Marseille with the folks from Alarmphone. Both the podcast and the cross-border collab strengthen ties and expand political horizons by building intersectionality and allyship between racist, migrant and feminist fights. As the collective say: “feminist podcasting is not only an emancipatory tool for the subjects who tell their stories, but a crucial attempt at uniting women and genderqueer people through struggle and solidarity.”