WONDERLAND

frank talk, Ai-jen Poo, leader of the National Domestic Workers Alliance

Special Guest, Crystal Echo Hawk, Executive Director of IllumiNative

In this episode, we rewind the clock to 2015, where on the frank stage, Ai-jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance shared her insights and emerging strategy on culture change. Bridgit and Tracy then call IllumiNative’s Crystal Echo Hawk to discuss what resonated with her from Ai-jen...

frank talk, Bridgit Antoinette Evans, Co-host of Wonderland and Executive Directors of Pop Culture Collaborative

Special Guest, Taryn Higashi, Executive Director of Unbound Philanthropy

In this episode, we first hear Bridgit Antoinette Evans’ 2017 achingly beautiful frank talk, where she takes listeners inside her “year of breaking open,” the personal and professional journey she took in order to do the hard and important work of...

frank talks, Shawn Taylor and Tracy Van Slyke 

Special Guest, Jeff Yang

Continuing their exciting conversation from WONDERLAND season 1 on the power of pop culture fandoms and social change, in this episode we listen to excerpts of Pop Culture Collaborative Senior Fellow Shawn Taylor and WONDERLAND co-host’s Tracy Van Slyke’s separate, but deeply intertwined frank talks. They both share personal stories of how and why pop culture...

frank talk, Zahra Noorbakhsh, Comedian and Pop Culture Collaborative Senior Fellow

Special Guest, Joey Clift, comedy writer

 In this episode, we’re talking pipelines and comedy featuring the 2019 frank talk of comedian and Pop Culture Collaborative Senior Fellow Zahra Noorbakhsh, where she shares her personal story and professional analysis about who has the power to decide what’s funny and the broken career pipeline for diverse st...

WONDERLAND is a "master class" in culture change. Podcast hosts Bridgit Antoinette Evans and Tracy Van Slyke apply their experience and perspective from careers spent at the intersection of social justice and entertainment to uncover the truth about the stories we’re telling as a country, on TV, in movies and throughout pop culture mediums. Each episode of WONDERLAND brings together a nationally-recognized social change leader and ...

In our inaugural episode WONDERLAND co-hosts, Bridgit Antoinette Evans and Tracy Van Slyke, introduce WONDERLAND and break down the role and meaning of culture change on our society. And in a foundational conversation with Washington Post culture critic Alyssa Rosenberg, they ​explore the historical and current connection between pop culture and storytelling on race and politics, and question if the entertainment industry is capabl...

Get ready to call on your high school biology class! Because the genesis of any culture change starts with understanding more about the impact of the little known, but critical part of our brain, the limbic system. Cognitive scientist and artist Heidi Boisvert joins labor leader and storyteller Saket Soni for a deep dive into how stories affect the human body and brain. Together, they question if we empathy should be the goal of st...

“Should we keep telling stories?” asks Immigrant Rights Organizer and 2017 MacArthur Genius Cristina Jiménez. Together with narrative consultant ​Ryan Senser, we explore how important stories are in shaping American culture until they become as familiar as the lyrics of an old song. Together, they take us through the process of developing narrative strategies that impact the perceptions and beliefs of mass audiences. And as the imm...

Cultural futurist​ Schuyler Brown​ teams with visionary leader and author A​i-jen Poo to examine how popular brands use motivational research and audience listening to sense, understand and build engagement strategies that tap into the irrational desires and fears of mass audiences. Through this conversation, Brown and Poo model what it’s like to sit in “the in between space” nestled between identifying a problem and creating the s...

Midway through our season, WONDERLAND co-host B​ridgit Antoinette Evans​ sits down with writer, showrunner, and producer, Mahyad Tousi, to discuss the conflicts and connection points between culture change strategy and the creative process. Evans and Tousi share their personal artistic journeys, explore the nature of matching culture change strategy to an artistic practice, and offer insights from their experiences of being values-...

We begin the second half of the season exploring both the inner workings of the entertainment industry and the external forces needed to create long-term shifts through pop culture storytelling. In this episode, television writer and producer Diana Son joins anti-child trafficking advocate and bestselling author Rachel Lloyd to reveal the process of creating a social justice-infused pop story world. From sharing how pop culture has...

From laugh-tracked sitcoms to The Walking Dead, audiences see cliched, and often harmful, characters and storylines. Racial justice sci fi expert N​ayantara Sen​ and TV critic ​Sean T. Collins​ explore these narrative tropes and traps -- from redemptive justice to the heroic protagonist -- that prevent our favorite TV shows and films from being truly transformational. Through their conversation, they guide us to imagine what new st...

This special two-part episode of WONDERLAND begins with co-host T​racy Van Slyke​ talking with fan community leader S​hawn Taylor​ about the future of people-powered storytelling, diving deep into the ways pop culture fandoms are generating new content, pushing the pop storytelling industries into the next generation, and they imagine what it would take to intentionally bring fan communities and social movements together as part of...

Racial justice leader Rashad Robinson wraps up the season with hosts Bridgit Antoinette Evans and Tracy Van Slyke, exploring the question first asked by Alyssa Rosenberg, can the entertainment industry change? Together, they unpack the power structures that shape entertainment, identify the industry rules we need to break, and connect the dots between the LGBT marriage equality culture change strategy of the last decade to the raci...