Radio Insistence was a year-long radio show created by Richard Finlay Fletcher in January 2024, inspired by the concept and practice of insistence of the Alutiiq/Sugpiak artist Tanya Lukin Linklater, specifically through a text, written in 2016 called ‘A Glossary of Insistence’. The show spanned the course of 12 months, three seasons, and two classes Finlay Fletcher taught at This* Ohio State University: one on Visual Culture: Representing Diversity and Social Justice (for undergraduate students) in the Spring of 2024 and one called Global Indigenous Arts: Education for Settlers (for both undergraduate and graduate students) in the Fall of 2024. In the Summer, while not teaching, Finlay Fletcher kept Radio Insistence going by reflecting back on season 1 and looking forward to season 2. 

Episodes in the first season had several sections – Music, News, Reviews, Word of the Week and Listener Requests. The News section, for example, Finlay Fletcher introduced students to the ongoing occupation of Palestine by Israel through the artworks of both Palestinian and Israeli artists. During the summer, protests erupted on US campuses, including this one, to bring attention to the violence in Gaza and the West Bank, and the transitional second season tuned into moments of Indigenous solidarity with Palestinians as well as broader voices engaged with critiques of settler colonialism.

The third and final season turned to global Indigenous artists who participated at the 2017 documenta 14 exhibition, split between Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany. Following the first part of Finlay Fletcher’s conversation with Tanya Lukin Linklater, what you are about to hear today is a retrospective collage of all three seasons of Radio Insistence, ordered chronologically, divided by the jarringly insistent sound of static and snippets of voices and music, as we move through the radio dial, which locates each episode, when and where it was recorded and aired, in time and space. This show is just a small sampling of what Radio Insistence was and you can listen to all 32 episodes in the Soundcloud links in the credits.

Richard Finlay Fletcher (he/him) is an associative professor in the Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy at This* Ohio State University. His work asks how centering Indigenous artists' participation within public learning programs at temporary large-scale contemporary art exhibitions can unsettle entranced institutions of higher education within colonial contexts. A former classicist, he created the blog, platform, and persona Minus Plato (2012-2022; 2024-present) to transition from inherited Western canons through a decolonial arts aneducation grounded in a critical approach to settler colonialism and through centering the transforming work of global Indigenous artists. His radio works include Feedback Delayed Fridays (2019), dear fellow settler colonizer, (2021-2022), This Decoloniality? (2022), Desire Lines in the Air (2022), ‘Singing on a Radio in the Rain’ (2023), and Radio Insistence (2024), the latter inspired by the concept and practice of insistence of Alutiiq/Sugpiak artist Tanya Lukin Linklater. All are available on https://soundcloud.com/user-36998074 He tries to live in a first draft world.